Editorial Calendar Why You Need One

The importance of proper planning is heard everywhere. So why is it so many people don’t plan out their blogging efforts, social media strategy, or email marketing. A lot of that has to do with having the proper tools to plan and track your progress. This is the importance of have a great editorial calendar.

A lot of posts have been done that talks about a blog editorial calendar however, blogging is only one aspect of your overall inbound marketing strategy. What you need is an editorial calendar that helps you plan and track all your inbound marketing efforts.

Reading some of the other posts and looking at our own efforts we have come up with tips for tracking things in your editorial calendar:

Blog Posts

This is the common one; you should plan out in advance what you want to write about. Then you can do so initial research as to the keywords, title ideas, call to action, and follow-up posts. Having a well-planned blog content strategy will provide much greater success in your inbound marketing efforts. This section of content is a must have in your editorial calendar.

Email Marketing

Yes, this should be in your editorial calendar. Email marketing is a way to reach your loyal community with some unique content that they can use. This content should also relate back to your blogging efforts and have a good integrated strategy so your readers can visit your blog for further reading. Having your email marketing plans in your editorial calendar will make sure you are staying on track.

White Papers and Reports

If you are using whitepapers/reports in your inbound marketing for business then this should also be scheduled in your editorial calendar. If are not using whitepapers then you should read our post about best practices for inbound marketing for business. Anyway, have whitepaper planned you can start to build a series of blog posts, and emails to prepare for the launch of the whitepaper. This will help with the success of your whitepapers for your community.

Interviews/Video Posts

Doing interviews is a great way to provide content for your readers and also learn from industry leaders. A good interview post is very valuable to building relationships and a great way to get to know some of the people in your industry. Planning and schedule are very important for interviews because they do take some leg work to get put together.

Social Media

Social media is becoming very important in your overall inbound marketing and SEO efforts.Good social media planning will help your SEO and improve traffic. However, the social media team or person needs to know what is planned so they can make sure the right message is getting out on those channels.

What do you use to track it?

We have tried a number of tools to help with planning all the different content and after all the testing like the blogging editorial calendar the best solution we found is a spreadsheet. This way you can track it and update things as you go. We have built a Google Doc template that you can access here and use for yourself. Just make a copy and customize to your liking. The first sheet is your content at a glance, this sheet is updated automatically from all the other sheets so it gives you a good view of what is upcoming and the status. Use this additional sheets to plan your content that will fit for your readers.

We have also created a Social Media Calendar as well. This tool is great for planning your social media strategy and preparing topics, content, keywords etc.

Want to Learn How We Can Help Your Inbound Marketing?

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1% For The Planet

March 27, 2012 — Damang Media Group joined 1% for the Planet (1%), pledging a portion of its sales to support non-profit organizations focused on sustainability.

Yvon Chouinard and Craig Matthews – Three Dollar Bridge | 1% For the Planet from 1% for the Planet on Vimeo.

A [3min.] portion of our profile on 1% For the Planet, an alliance of businesses that donate at least 1% of their annual revenues to environmental organizations worldwide. Founded by Yvon Chouinard and Craig Matthews, 1% has grown to over 1000 members since it’s launch in 2002 and has donated nearly $42 million to approved environmental non-profits. Music by Neil Halstead & Jack Johnson courtesy of Brushfire Records onepercentfortheplanet.org

What Does 1% Do?

Members of 1% contribute one percent of revenues directly to any of the approved non-profit environmental organizations in 1%’s network.  Non-profits are chosen based on referrals, track record and environmental focus. Over 2,500 non-profits worldwide are included in the 1% program.

“We’ve been averaging at least one new business member a day, and have nearly 1,400 members in 44 countries.  1% members have contributed over $70 million of critically needed funds into the hands of environmental non-profit groups to date,” comments Kellogg.  “We are thrilled by the support we have gained as it proves the environmental ethic is trickling upward to larger corporate entities. The shared belief that you can do well as a business by doing the right thing with respect to the environment is clearly apparent. There’s a paradigm shift happening here and it’s happening organically.”

About 1% for the Planet

Started in 2002 by Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia, and Craig Mathews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, 1% for the Planet is a growing global movement of over 1,350 member companies in 44 countries that donate one percent of their sales to environmental organizations worldwide. Each day, more than one new business joins the 1% for the Planet movement. As a network, the 1% community has become a frontrunner in funding the work of environmental groups around the world. To learn more about 1% go to: www.onepercentfortheplanet.org

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SEO for business depends upon knowing what your keywords are and properly utilizing these keywords in all your marketing optimization campaigns and throughout your online presence. Keywords are terms or phrases that concisely describe your business. Think of a keyword as being a one to five-word definition about what your business does.

Choosing the correct keywords can increase exposure to your business both online and offline.

Properly describing your business in concise terms gives a better picture of your business and what it has to offer.

On the opposite side, choosing inappropriate keywords can leave your web presence floating along the bottom of the website world. How many times have your searched online for something, only to result in a list of websites that do not pertain to what you are searching for? Or, how many times have you listened to a business presentation, only to be left wondering about the purpose of the business? Those businesses had poor keyword optimization campaigns. Many businesses have spent time, money and manpower to develop a marketing campaign and/or website presence centered on improper keywords.

Getting Started in Your Keywords Journey

Describe your business to friends, relatives, business associates and employees. Ask for words that define your business. This can be a great way to get SEO ideas for which keywords will best describe your company. Make a list of these terms, and use it as the starting point for your keyword marketing plan and SEO program.

To gain the best benefits from a keyword, use any number of online keyword popularity tools such as Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker. These tools allow you to type in your chosen keyword or keyword phrase and produce results, letting you know how many Internet users are searching for your particular keyword or phrase during a set time period. Time periods can range from daily to monthly. On many sites, you can set your time period to narrow your search.

What is the Next Step?

Once you receive results from the Internet keyword optimization tool, you can adjust your list of keywords accordingly. You can find out whether more people are possibly searching for a misspelling of your keywords. Or, you may note that there is increased popularity or less competition for another term closely related to your preferred one. Either way, once you determine which keyword or phrase is the most popular, you can incorporate that keyword or phrase into your marketing literature and business publicity campaign.

What You Need to Know When Working With a SEO Firm

To be successful with keyword optimization, and SEO, you must have a thorough understanding about what your business does. Your business must be ultimately responsible for SEO optimization. SEO and keyword utilization for business can be a very detailed and time-consuming task, and some business owners do not consider it worth their time or effort. They simply outsource the services, without having any concern over the subject area. This can be harmful.

Even though many excellent firms exist that specialize in SEO, they may not have a thorough understanding of what your business is about and will need your input. Some experts may suggest using certain keywords without fully knowing how these terms relate to your business. If you do not understand your business, and the terms that properly define it, how can an outside source? Let your outside source come up with keyword terms and work with you to determine which best apply to your business for optimum results.

Choosing the correct keywords can bring new customers or potential customers to your business and add extra life to your operations or break your business success. The decision is up to you.

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Know When to Say Nothing

Email tip – email is not private, I know it seems to most people to be private, guess what it is not! Copies of all the email we send can end up on servers all over the internet. And for most business email, companies archive messages for security and compliance.

So the best practice for this email tip is to not say anything. Trust your common sense approach that you should never send email when you are upset, emotional, stressed, tired, hungry, drunk or otherwise impaired.  Once you send that email there is no taking it back. This becomes written documentation that can be used legally to support a lawsuit or worse dismissal.

Rules To Follow

If you are feeling upset or you think you are going let a rant go here are some email tips that will help make sure you don’t regret what you said.

• Write the email in a document and review later after you have calmed down.
• Read your email out load, this will  help you find the tone that might be interpreted when someone else reads it.
• Don’t write the email. Let it go and move on. If the message gets you upset it might not be worth replying at all.
• If on Gmail us Mail Goggles this lab makes you do a math problem to send the message.
• Avoid Real-Time Email Response, respond later when you can look at it with a fresh perspective.

Sometimes it is the best to just move on. I know a lot of us like to get the last word, believe me that solves nothing.

If you still feel you must say something you might want to use our last email tip and don’t use email and maybe go see the person or call them.

Know when to say nothing!

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Salesforce Head to Head with SugarCRM and ZohoCRM

Does your business have a CRM solution in place? With many offerings like Salesforce, SugarCRM, and ZohoCRM, which one is right for your business? Most businesses have a pieced together sales process through email, spreadsheets, and notebooks. If you are looking for a better solution to get your business sales process firing on all cylinders you should have a CRM solution in place.

So what should I use for a CRM?

There are many offerings in the Customer Relationship Management space and we can not look at them all, this is a review of some of the most common cloud based solutions that we are familiar with. We will review Salesforce, SugarCRM, and ZohoCRM. Each of these solutions offer a cloud based platform and mobile support.

Salesforce

This is probably the most well know crm platform in the cloud. Rightly so as I think the number of Salesforce users is around the 2 million mark. Salesforce is one of the original SaaS companies offering a fully cloud based application for users.

Features at a glance:

Even though it is one most popular platforms, I am not a big fan. If you are looking to live in your CRM then Salesforce is a good choice, however if your organization is not currently using any type of crm you might find users will be overwhelmed with the number of options available in Salesforce. Setup can be a bit of a process to get rolling.

I believe Salesforce lends itself to the larger organization. The features are amazing but for small teams this can be daunting and if you are going to implement Salesforce be sure to work with a partner to get you started off with some training to speed up the learning curve.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a unique platform because you have a cloud based solution or a self-hosted solution. Being open source you have access to customize the interface and database in the back-end. This also provides a large community of 3rd party tools and addons in the Sugar Exchange. One of the features I really liked was its easy to use marketing tools for things like setup of newsletters and email marketing campaigns.

Features at a glance:

SugarCRM was quick to get up and running and fairly easy to get your data imported. Good integration with lead capture for your website, however it will take a bit of HTML knowledge to get the forms in place and customized to your liking.

ZohoCRM

ZohoCRM is one that is starting to get some traction in the CRM space. We have personally implemented Zoho as our CRM of choice. It has great support for Google Apps and Gmail. The gadgets make it very easy to access your CRM right from Gmail. You can create leads, potentials, and tasks from within Gmail without having to jump back and forth.

Features at a glance:

The marketing tools are somewhat limited and I think if you are wanting to have a tight integration with your marketing then SugarCRM or Salesforce might be a better choice. However if you are looking for seamless support of Google Apps then ZohoCRM is the choice.

Resources:
¹Customer Relationship Management

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This Weeks Email Tip, Don’t Use Email

Being Valentines Day, I thought a great email tip would be Don’t Use Email. How many of you have read an email and thought, what is this person saying? Not understanding the tone or emotion in email is one of the biggest pitfalls of email communication.

Most times when we read email it is read with tone-deafness. It is hard to understand what emotion the sender is trying to convey. Things like facial expressions, tone of voice are lost in email. This is where things get mis-understood and feelings get hurt, people can get offended, and the message can be taken the wrong way.

Don’t Use Email

Most of us over-estimate the understanding the reader will have when reading our message. So it is important that we understand when not to email. Let’s face it, some things are just to sensitive or complex to be communicated by email.

It is important that you know when the time to pick up the phone,  are go and see the person is appropriate. It may seem to take extra time, but it eliminates the chance of confusion and also you can answer questions as they come up in the conversation.

5 Questions To Help Decide

• Can you clearly communicate your message without emotion?
• Can you say it in 2-3 sentences or no more than a paragraph?
• Will questions come up with your message that will need to be answered right away? (Remember we don’t respond to email in real-time)
• Is the message of an emotional nature or personal?
• Who are you sending the message to? Have you had the experience of them mis-understanding your emails before?

If you answer yes to any or all of these questions, I would suggest you pick up the phone or go for a visit. If your message is taken the wrong way, the time you will waste trying to explain yourself can be saved up front by skipping the email and talking in person.

Flickr Photo by Fawlty128

¹ Emails and Egos!

Be sure to check back for next week’s Email Tip – Don’t Say Anything!

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Really, Do You Have to Look at Your Email Now?

Building on our email tips from a few weeks back, I wanted to start sharing some tips to improve your productivity with email. I know most of  these will sound common sense but let’s be honest, how many of you responded to an email on your mobile while having a conversation with a friend?

Email Tip – Do not respond in real-time!

Seriously, this email tip is a very simple effective way to get the most out of your email communication. I know many people live for the “Ding” or desktop notifier from their email client. This was never designed to condition you to jump when it went off. It is not an experiment in behavioral response, however that is what it has become for many. The “ding” hits them and they jump!

Remember, most of the time the reason someone is sending you an email is because they do not have the time for a conversation anyway. Your responding in real-time sets up an expectation that this will be the way the email communication will continue from that point forward. Now you are not only disrupting your workflow you could also be disrupting someone else!

How do I stop?

So the best method is first, don’t check your email in real-time. This will make you feel like you have to respond in real-time. So set a schedule to check your email 2-3 times per day during business hours. Next, set a response time goal – this will also help with the email that you do not want to respond to. I would suggest 4-6 hours during business hours and if at all possible do not respond to business email on the weekend. If you do business email when your out of the office set the response time goal to 12-24 hours.

What does this do for you?

Using this email tip will help you be more productive at other important tasks and you will find within a week or two of practice you will really start getting stuff done! Second, when you give it time to respond you will be able to provide a more detailed response. Let’s face it, email communication is hard to convey emotion, tone etc. so the better thought out your response the less chance of confusion from the reader.

Flickr Photo by Steve 2.0

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Want Website Video? Host it On DropBox

Dropbox is a powerful cloud storage platform offering many ways to share and collaborate with your files. One nice feature is the public folder, it offers you an easy to use option to share videos and embed them on your website. Similar to using Amazon s3 it provides a great way to host videos on your website without having the streaming take away the bandwidth from your site.

In this quick tutorial I will show you a quick way to host your videos on Dropbox and embed them on your WordPress website. This can also adapted to work on any website with some tweaks in the steps to meet your platform.

What you will need

So to make this work very well for WordPress we will be using the following:

• Dropbox Account
• JW Player Plugin
• A Video that you want to embed

It is important to note that you can use other video plugins to accomplish this, or just use LongTail Video wizard to get the player setup. For the sake of this tutorial I sharing a what I think is the easiest way to get your video online quickly by using Dropbox and JW Player plugin for WordPress.

Here is a Sample of a Video Streaming from Dropbox

 Here is the Tutorial

For those of you liking step by step instructions see below.

Step 1: You will need to put the video you want to stream in your Dropbox Public folder. This allows the proper permissions so that the video can be streamed on your website.

Step 2: You will now need to browse to your file to Copy Public Link to use for embedding the video on your website with the JW Player plugin.

Step 3: Now that you have the link you need to embed into your WordPress post with the JW Player plugin.  You can access this by clicking the Add Media button in your WordPress post, then click the External Media option in the Add Media Panel. Now you will see a place to paste the URL for the media you want to stream.

Step 4: Now click the Add Media button and that will bring up the screen to set the parameters for your JW Player display. Customize these setting to your liking and click the Insert JW Player button.

Step 5: Save your post and test to make sure it works!

That is it, if all went well you should have a video that is posted on your WordPress website and streaming from your Dropbox account. This is a great way to get started hosting your own videos without putting extra pressure on your website bandwidth.

Video – Oops, I dropped My Whoop by Allisonclark.me

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How to get your Social Media Strategy Going

Getting started with social media is fun and exciting so here is a quick guide to help jump in.

So what is this hype about social media? Why is it something that everyone is talking about but no on is really telling you how to use?

Social media is the fastest-growing marketing channel in the world. Spend on social media marketing in the U.S. will grow annually at a 34% compound rate through 2014, according to independent research firm, Forrester research, Inc. By then, social media market­ing will amount to a $3.1 billion industry, surpassing email marketing in terms of spending, Forrester said in a 2009 report.¹

Social Media is really taking something that we do everyday and expanding it. Now we are able to use various social media channels to share and learn.

Remember when you met with a friend or family member and you asked something like,” hey what movie should I go to”, or I need a new car where should I go”, you would happily respond, “I saw this movie the other night, or I use the dealership and the guy I work with is named John”.

This is the social in social media. Now we can do this on a bigger scale. Not with just close friends or family but with communities of people looking to learn and share.

And it is a two-way communication channel, meaning you can share your knowledge and you can learn from someone else.

What Social Media Channels Should I Use?

Getting started with a social media can be a daunting task when you look at all the social media channels that are available. Here are some examples of social media channels that are available for you to use right now:

This is just a few of the many. Now it comes to the question how to do you manage all this. You don’t

Just like you don’t go to every pub or restaurant you have to find a few that you are willing to participate in. For the sake of today I will make it easy for you and keep our discussion around the following:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+

These are the main social networking sites out there right now. What that means is roughly about 85% of all the users on social media are using one our all of these channels.

To decide what channels work best for you, then decide on what you are using it for. If it is for business where are your clients? What is the demographic of those potential clients or contacts? This will give you a great insight on where to spend your time. This is important because if you are not focused in your usage, social media can be a huge time suck and that is not the point.

Best Practices of Getting Your Profile Setup

You will want to make sure that when you setup your social media profiles that you do it right. This includes a completed profile and a picture of yourself.

Things you will want to do to create a great profile:

• A picture of yourself
• Your real name (We will discuss some notes on twitter later)
• A detailed description of who you are and what you do.
• Services you offer
• Education
• Interests

How Often Do You Participate?

Level of Participation varies, depending on what you hope to accomplish. Social media is not just telling everyone what you are doing it is also finding out what others are doing. Some recent research on effectiveness of social media has been done and from that and our own results here are some guidelines.

Twitter: To clarify on some jargon about twitter. It is what is called a micro-blogging platform. Meaning it is about saying something in 140 characters or less. And when you make a post to Twitter it is called a Tweet!

So the usage level will vary by user but a good guideline is:

• 20+ tweets a day with no more than 2-3 tweets of your own content.This means that you have to participate in the community you are hoping to influence and share other related content.
• 5-10 Retweet’s, this is retweeting someone’s tweet to your followers. This is great way to find and share good content and increase your following base.

Facebook – LinkedIn – Google+: These platforms are a little different because you can post more than 140 characters and you can also include rich media like photos, videos etc.

• Connect with at least 5 current or former business associates each week
• Search and find groups related to your topic and join them and become part of that community.
• Start or Participate in 2-3 discussions each week (LinkedIn)
• Participate in the Answers section of LinkedIn and answer questions related to your topic. Try to answer 2 questions per week.

Tools To Do The Work

A number of tools are available to help with this process because at this point you are probably thinking that you could never do all this work. However, with the right tools you can improve the efficiency of what you are doing and keep the workload to a minimum. It will take some time to get everything setup but once done, you can keep your workload to 10-15 mins/day.

Suggested Tools: 

There are a number of tools available to use for managing your social media. To learn more you can read our review of Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Also, we did an interview with the CEO of Sprout Social so if you would like to learn what is in-store for them it is worth the read. We currently use both the tools listed below and like them both.

• Hootsuite (Affiliate Link)
• SproutSocial (Affiliate Link)

Is This Worth it

Yes, if you did not think so then you would not be here right? Like anything it is an unknown to start, so with some proper planning and focusing in on Social Media as a communication tool you can and will find a Return on investment.

So once you get setup, be sure to connect with us and we will be happy to follow you back. You can also post your social media links in the comments below so people can join you.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+

Reference: 1 Forrester research, inc. “U.S. interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014,” July 2009.

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Website Conversion Only Comes With Planning Your Website Goals

To really maximize your website conversion rates you need to have a strong set of website goals to work from. No defined website goals, then trying to figure out our conversion ratio will not tell us anything. We need to know where we are, and where we plan go to analyze how well we are doing.

To plan for website conversion we need to define what we want visitors to our website to do. This is our first step in creating website goals. With this information we can then start to develop a strategy to help visitors make the decision to complete the desired action.

These actions can be things like:

• Subscribe to Your Email Newsletter
• Subscribe to Your Blog
• Fill In a Lead Capture Form
• Buy Something etc.

These are just some of the desired outcomes we might have when a visitor is at our website. Now that we have isolated our website goals how can we improve our website conversion for these goals?

Here are some tips to get you started

1.

Get Found Online

Now that we have our goals, we can start to develop your strategy to get found online.

Some areas that will help with getting found online are:

• Build Inbound Links
• On-Page SEO Strategy
• Your Title Tag and Meta Data
• Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps
• 301 Redirects

These are some of the areas that we will need to focus on to improve chances of getting found online. The more people who find our website the better chance we will have of a website conversion.

2.

Design & Usability

Now just getting found does not lead to website conversion, once a visitor comes to our website we will need to provide a place for them to want to complete the desired action.

Here are some tips to think about when working on design and usability:

• What is the First Impression
• Maintain A Consistent Look Throughout the Site
• Use Good Images
• Simple to Follow Navigation
• Accessibility

3.

Content

So we have a visitor to our shiny new website now how do we get website conversions?  This is where we need to develop a strong content strategy to be able to provide our visitors value while they are on the website.

Good content will help them learn more about us and our company and why they can trust what we do.

• What is Your Messaging
• Offer Content of Value and Education
• Good Quality
• Simple Language avoid Corporate Speak
• Be Clear
• Blog Regularly
• Allow Content To be Social and Shareable

4.

Website Conversion

Now we have clear website goals, we are getting found online, and we are producing great content; now we need website conversions. It is not a bad thing to ask for business, make it easy and comfortable for visitors to become a subscriber, a lead, a customer. Be clear on what we are offering as well so visitors know what they are signing up for.

• Effective Call-To-Actions – Make it Easy for Your visitors
• Great Positioning of your Call-To-Actions
• Landing Pages
• Simple and Clear Forms
• Newsletters

These are just some of the tips and strategies to implement to improve our website conversion ratio. Once we start this process it becomes something that we will have to continue to do.

Based on our website goals we will need to look at our website conversion and analyze how we are doing. Then optimize and improve and repeat the process!

What tips can you share to help with website conversion?

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