Choosing a Blogging Platform

There are several platforms you can choose from when it comes to blogging. Most brands, businesses, and bloggers choose WordPress on their own domain. Why? Here are just a few good reasons.

• WordPress is used on 8.4 million websites – this surpasses Blogger, Joomla!, Drupal, and other platforms.
• Because of its wide usage, WordPress has the most support, documentation, tutorials, theme designs, and plugins to extend functionality over other platforms.

Wix is another option, albeit not a free one. Here’s your Wix coupon if you are willing to give it a try.

If that sounds good to you, then WordPress should be your choice as well.

Basic WordPress Setup

Most of the major hosting companies have an option to make the installation of your WordPress blog as easy as a few clicks. 

Once you have WordPress installed on your domain, you will need to do the following right from the start to ensure the best functionality and optimization of your business blog.

Describe Your Blog

Under Settings > General in your WordPress dashboard, you will need to add your site’s name and a short tagline description. Even if you use a separate plugin for SEO, some systems will pull your blog information from this settings page.

Change Your Permalinks

Permalinks are the URL structure for your blog. Under Settings > Permalinks, you will want to tell WordPress to use a URL structure that includes the post name, ie. http://domain.com/blog/your-post-title/ or http://domain.com/blog/2013/02/your-post-title/. This will help your blog posts rank well in search for keyword phrases in your post titles.

Moderate Your Comments

While your blog may not receive many comments in the beginning, you will still want to set your blog to put new comments into moderation before publishing them. This is because even new blogs can fall prey to spammers. Under Settings > Discussion, select Comment author must have a previously approved comment. You can also always approve comments, but it can ease your workload to just automatically approve people you have already vetted.

Find a Theme

There are many themes and theme providers to choose from when you are looking for a design for your WordPress blog. Your best bet is to choose a premium WordPress theme from reliable publishers like StudioPress and have a designer customize the framework to match your main website or have a completely custom design built from scratch.

The key is that you want to make sure your WordPress blog matches your website so that visitors who go from one to another for seamless branding. You don’t want your visitors to get confused about whether your blog actually belongs to your business. And you especially don’t want someone to click a call to action from your blog post to purchase a product or service to leave your website because it looks completely different. Strong branding is a key to conversion.

Install Plugins

As mentioned earlier, plugins extend the functionality of your WordPress blog. Here are some good plugins to start with, based on your needs.

• Akismet – This plugin helps moderate likely spam comments coming to your blog into a spam folder. While it does a great job 90% of the time, you will still want to check your spam folder occasionally to make sure legit comments were not filtered by accident. To enable the plugin, you will need to get an API key from Akismet.
• All in One SEO Pack – This plugin adds additional fields to your dashboard so you can optimize your homepage, posts, and pages for SEO. You don’t need it if you use StudioPress or Thesis, as they come with those options built in. If you need actual suggestions on how to optimize for search engines, you can also go with the premium plugin Scribe SEO, which will assist you with SEO, content discovery, and much more.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin creates a simple sitemap for your website and keeps it updated, notifying search engines of additions and changes to your posts and pages. This will help ensure your blog is indexed properly in search. Be sure to visit the settings for it after installing to create your sitemap for the first time, and it will do the rest!
• G.A.S.P. – This plugin adds a simple checkbox to your comment form to ensure that the commenter is a real person and not an automated spambot to help control the spam coming into your website. Works great alone or in combination with Akismet.
• Social Sharing – There are numerous plugins that will add social sharing buttons. Some popular ones for WordPress include Digg Digg, Share This, Add This, and Sociable.
• WP Super Cache – This plugin optimizes the performance of your WordPress website so your blog does not crash due to an overload of traffic.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This plugin adds links to related posts at the end of each of your articles, keeping your blog visitors on your website longer.
• Neal Schaffer recently wrote a longer list of recommended WordPress plugins that you should check into as well.

While you may be tempted to add a ton of plugins, remember that the more plugins you have, the more problems they could cause, including compatibility issues and slowing down your website. If you know your way around PHP, try to find coding alternatives to plugin features when available, or ask yourself if you really need that particular piece of functionality.

Additional Blog Features

Aside from the WordPress setup itself, here are a few more things you will want for your blog.

Categories

Organize your posts into major categories. An online marketing blog, for example, would have posts in major categories such as SEO, social media, and content marketing.

Tags

For a more specific organization, add tags to your posts. An online marketing blog would further organize posts within its social media category with tags such as Facebook, Twitter, profile design, building engagement, and so forth.

Sidebar Widgets

Assuming that you carry your main website’s header, menu, and footer areas over to your blog for seamless branding, your blog’s sidebar will be the only area you can add information specific to your blog. Widgets let you easily add information to your sidebar and rearrange them as needed.

Important widgets to add to your sidebar includes social connections (links to your social profiles), subscription (links to your RSS feed and an opt-in to your mailing list), a list of categories your blog covers so people can find the posts they are interested in, recent posts so people who enter your blog on a particular post can see other topics you cover, and a call to action banner that leads to your main website’s products or services (free trial offers work great here).

In this article, I’m going to attempt to demonstrate why your blog isn’t a nuisance – in fact, it can be an extremely valuable asset for your freelancing business.

One of the biggest complaints that freelancers have when it comes to blogging is that it can be quite time-consuming, especially considering it’s best to update your blog regularly and be as consistent as possible. And while, sure, that can be a nuisance when there are so many other things to do, the benefits of blogging far outweigh the drawbacks:

Blogging helps improve your search engine ranking

One of the biggest draws of blogging is that it can massively improve and diversify your search engine rankings. This happens because your website then has more pages for search engines to crawl and index, which leads to a better ranking.

In fact, studies show that websites that have a blog generally have 434% more indexed pages, 97% more indexed links, and just as many inbound links.

The better your search engine ranking is, the more likely it is that you will be getting more traffic, and even better, more targeted traffic.

Blogging helps with lead generation and lead nurturing

Content marketing has been one of the driving forces behind lead generation in the past few years. Why? Simple, because it helps you provide more value to your audiences. Blogging is a big part of a content marketing strategy and something that can help you generate more leads, as well as nurture your existing ones.

It’s estimated that B2B companies that have a blog generate as many as 67% more leads than those that don’t have one.

As an example, one of the ways that you can generate more leads with blogging is by including content downloads, such as PDF versions of your guides or a checklist. These are highly targeted, as you are offering them to people reading very similar content, which means you will be able to get a huge boost in conversions and get more leads.

Use blogging to get more traffic to your website

We’ve already talked about the benefits of using blogging for SEO and how that can lead to more traffic, but that’s not the only way that you can use it to drive more traffic.

For example, blogging and social media go hand in hand in driving traffic. By promoting your blog posts on social media, you are not only driving more traffic to your website than you would by posting sales-y updates with links to your website, but you can also help yourself get more engagement, more shares, and increased brand awareness.

You can also promote your blog in blogging tribes and communities, which can help drive more traffic to your website.

Blogging helps build your authority and influence

Another big benefit to blogging is that it can help you build up the authority and influence you have in your niche, especially if you buy a domain name that is memorable enough.

Many B2B companies, in particular, have achieved great success this way. By posting quality, informative content on a regular basis, they are showing that they know what they’re talking about and that they are experts in their niche, which has helped them grow their online profile.

In my case, as well, it wasn’t just social media that helped achieve social influencer status, but also my different blogs. They’ve allowed me to show my expertise, and they have helped me become a go-to person for questions regarding social media and digital marketing.

Blogging helps build trust among your audience

Blogging also has the advantage of helping you build trust with your audience.

One of the reasons this happens is that by blogging, especially when you add some personal touches here and there, you are humanising your brand and your freelancing business.

Another way to build trust is simply by posting great content that offers value to your readers, consistently. The more you do this, the more your readers will trust you not only as a blogger but also as a business.

Trust is not something to be taken lightly – it’s something that is very difficult to gain and yet, very easy to lose. That’s why, whenever you have the possibility to build trust, you should grab onto it and make the best of it. This is particularly important for freelance businesses, as that is how they get more clients and more leads and, ultimately, that is how they make more sales.

How to optimise your blogging to save time and get results

One of the biggest issues with blogging for business is that there simply isn’t enough time to manage it and always add content to it to keep it up to date. This is why so many freelancers and entrepreneurs find it more of a nuisance than a valuable tool.

But even if your blog is a nuisance, when done right, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. Fortunately, though, there are ways that you can make your blogging a bit easier and, most of all, more effective and productive.

Ideally, you should strategize your blog by planning all of your content in advance. Create a content calendar, and use the opportunity to think of multiple blog post ideas, based on your target audiences’ interests and preferences.

Preferably, you should try to create as many guides, how-to’s and lists as possible. These types of content tend to drive more shares, traffic, and engagement. They are also better for generating leads, as they not only show that you have the knowledge and skills needed to help others, but they also allow you to create content downloads, which is what ultimately generates the most leads.

You should also try to create a system for content amplification, so as to save time and maximise your results. Promoting your blog the right way can be even more time-consuming than creating the content for it, so in order to save time, you need to find a way to make this process shorter and more efficient.

You can do this by using automation to re-publish your content on social media and by keeping a list of relevant blogging communities and tribes handy to make re-posting it easier.

Conclusion

Don’t look at your blog as a nuisance – rather, look at it as the valuable asset that it can be and try to make the most out of it.

Content marketing and blogging are some of the most successful marketing techniques of the past few years, and all signs point towards this remaining true in the future. Do you look at your blog as a nuisance? Or is it an asset? How are you simplifying the blogging process and still getting results?

Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Newsjacking, a term coined by David Meerman Scott, is the art of inserting yourself into a news story. This strategy can be truly effective to help your brand become part of the dialogue by adding your perspective on the issue via social media.

Before the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, PR pros would reach out to reporters covering a story, either by email or phone, in an effort to try to shoehorn their way into the ongoing coverage.

With social media, newsjacking has become so much simpler as there’s no longer the need to work through the media to participate in the conversation.

Where you would have had to compete with other companies to hopefully be an expert source or commentator, you can now simply publish your own response. Your content can have an instant impact, connecting with your target audience as the news is happening.

For newsjacking to be most effective, it should be a well-thought-out part of an overall social media and PR plan. In short, you shouldn’t go into work one day and decide that today is the day you should engage in some newsjacking.

Preparation Meets Opportunity for Newsjacking Success

Newsjacking is a social strategy, so your organization will need to have an established social media platform with strong engagement for it to work. Without an audience that is engaged and already knows, likes, and trusts you, your efforts will fall short.

Consider what social networks are best suited for your organization and how you can possibly leverage them. You want to ensure that your networks are primed for this type of activity and that you are ready to create content native to that platform when the opportunity arises.

As you look at creating a plan for newsjacking, keep in mind that response time is key. Getting stuck in corporate approval cycles means that your newsjacking effort is becoming less and less relevant by the minute.

You may need to go as far as to get sign-off from your VP of marketing or the C-suite so your social media/PR teams can act without approval as required.

Remember, the most effective newsjacking efforts are spontaneous and capitalize on opportunities as they arise. Imagine if Oreo’s social media team had been sitting around waiting for approval on the now infamous blackout tweet during the Super Bowl?

In the pre-social media days, we were able to secure media coverage in high-profile media outlets, even as a small player in a big market. The reason? Response time. We were first to the punch thanks to a solid rapid response protocol, where we could contact reporters in mere minutes after a hack or breach was reported.

The same principles apply to newsjacking. You want a low-friction, easy-to-execute plan without the need for approvals.

For any successful piece, consider helping it go even further with social media ads. Here’s a helpful TikTok ads coupon for you to start!

Avoiding a Newsjacking Fail

While newsjacking has become a lot easier, it has also become a lot more complex. Using social media, a simple misstep can quickly become a PR disaster. There are many high-profile examples of newsjacking done with terrible judgment around events such as Hurricane Sandy.

To avoid your organization being a newsjacking fail (or worse yet, disaster), as a team, you will want to get very clear on what areas are suitable for newsjacking. You may choose to focus only on pop culture or positive current events versus controversial or tragic news items.

Consider creating a test for whether a news item is appropriate for newsjacking, including such questions as:

• Are we able to add value or humor to this story?
• Is it a fit with our brand and values? Is it ridiculously self-serving?
• What are the possible downsides of being associated with this story?

In short, an effective newsjacking strategy requires some careful planning, getting buy-in from everyone involved, and the ability to react quickly as opportunities arise. Newsjacking is a fine art, but it can be extremely powerful for building social media reach and engagement.

So chances are you’ve started a blog. The problem is, we’re business owners, not bloggers, and our blog is not always our primary concern.

As a result, it starts to fade. I can attest to the fact that many times I’ve headed over to successful brands’ blogs, only to see an utter ghost town – what a shame!

How can this be prevented?

Let’s look at the indicators that will allow us to identify a failing blog before it hits rock bottom, as well as suggestions on how you can turn it around today.

You Have No Traffic

It’s hard to get going without a critical minimum of traffic. In all likelihood, you’re going to need a least a few thousand visitors a month in order to justify the effort it takes to write content and manage a blog.

If, after a few months, you find that you’re not there, you should ask yourself the following questions:

Is it easy for new visitors to find my blog?

Your business might be attracting visits, but it’s possible they are going mostly to the home page or other pages like pricing.

That may be fine, but you should also consider adding a link in your top navigation menu or at least in your footer to attract more attention to your blog.

Did I announce my blog to my current customer base?

Your customers want to know about new updates happening at the company – that’s why they remain a customer. Be sure to make announcements through email lists and on social media, if you haven’t already.

Am I focusing on SEO?

Organic traffic is one of the easier forms of traffic to get in the earlier days, by nature of Google’s huge audience and the fact that you can write an article and be indexed in just a few days.

Although it’s not advisable to write for search engines. Taking into consideration longtail keywords is a best practice of blogging for business.

You Have No Engagement

While a lot of new bloggers tend to be overly obsessed with traffic, engagement is really the more important metric. Engagement is a measurement of the life of the community, and this activity inherently leads to more promotion, which results in more traffic, and eventually more customers.

We typically measure engagement in two forms:

• Social Sharing – how often are people sharing your posts on social media?
• Comments – how many people are commenting per post?

If you are finding that you lack in either of these areas, it may not be as hard as you think to turn things around. For example, many blogs don’t have social share icons on each and every post, adding unnecessary friction to social sharing. As for comments, sometimes simply ending your post with a question is sufficient to get a reaction.

Being a brand is the most important engagement driver. People engage with those they know. When starting out, keep that in mind. Go through lots of domain name suggestions before you can pick the one that will be easier to brand!

You’re Only Talking About Features

Our natural tendency in blogging is to write about what we know, and in business blogging, that often means a very corporate style. One of the golden tenets of blogging, however, is to write for our audience, or in this case, our target market.

While it’s true that customers want updates on features, it’s important not to solely write about these new releases, for a variety of reasons:

• It will make your blog uninteresting to non-customers who are not using the product. This limits the overall reach of the blog.
• It will limit the frequency you can post since you are only writing when a new update happens, which often is less than once a month.
• It will not garner as much promotion since other bloggers are unlikely to share or link to posts purely about features.

Instead, you should incorporate more articles about the company’s journey, as well as experiment with different style posts, such as round-up posts.

You’re Not Updating Frequently Enough

“How often should I write?”

While there is no standard rule for this question, it is hardly advisable to be writing less than once a month, at a minimum.

And yet quite often we see blogs that are updated only once every few months. From an organic perspective, you are not generating content frequently enough to rank sufficiently in the SERPs.

Above all, however, it sends the message to a new visitor that there is no point in returning anytime soon. After all, there won’t be another post for months. When people don’t return to your website, they fail to get additional impressions of the business and are less likely to convert to a customer.

If you are finding that you are not frequently updating, you should consider taking the following steps:

1. Come up with a list of 20 articles you would like to write about, so you always have fresh content ideas.
2. Set a blogging schedule that you can maintain. Once every week or two is a great start for a new blog.

You’re Not Connecting With Influencers

Even if you’re doing all of the basics right, if you aren’t connecting with influencers on each and every post, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with an audience outside of your current one.

Influencers are bloggers and social media personalities who, by means of their large following, can introduce you to a whole new customer base.

While connecting with them is not always so straightforward as sending them an email, there are quite a lot of creative methods for building relationships with influencers. Additionally, you might find that featuring them in a post is an excellent way to get started. This can be done by:

• Asking them to participate in an expert round-up.
• Soliciting a quote or opinion from them via Twitter
• Simply linking to one of their posts (and then notifying them about it later)

Does your blog pass the test?

The evening is probably full of inside jokes, your own vernacular, and a unique language that evolved over years of hanging out and busting chops. If someone new joins you now at night, that person probably feels left out and a little awkward.

I have had the good fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) of being dubbed a “social media guru.” Therefore, I have the opportunity to read and analyze a lot of content. One of the most common mistakes I see is that writers often make assumptions about an audience’s pre-existing knowledge.

When we speak or create content (infographics, blog posts, videos, etc.), we often do it with the assumption that the audience has the same frame of reference we do.

But just like the poor new guy who doesn’t get all the inside jokes at happy hour – our audience will feel alienated if we don’t give them some context and background.

Common Assumptions:

• Here are a few of the things that we often assume our readers or viewers already know:
• History of the company, service, or brand.
• Name and background of members of the leadership team.
• Your products and services. Furthermore, if you have multiple products or subsets and speak to only one, then you are doing the others a disservice.
• The state of the industry as a whole and your position in it. I frequently see content that leaves out pertinent facts or perceptions about a company. You could argue that they are just trying to position their company in the best light. If you’re trying to establish authenticity, however, you must face both the pros and cons of any given situation. Remember, challenges are just opportunities lying in wait. Yes, I’m aware that sounds like a motivational poster.
• Your company, service, or brand usually has its own “brand speak,” or perhaps a lexicon or set of acronyms. That unique language is often the Achilles’ heel of most companies. Make sure you have found a domain name that represents your selling points and brand voice.
• Never skip your key differentiators and assume a new or old customer is already aware of them. Whatever makes you special is buried in those pieces of intellectual property and great thinking. Be sure to share it all.
• For digital services launching new products or versions, ensure that your customers understand why the new product is better than the previous version. Only a few brands have such a strong reputation that people automatically download new versions by default. Therefore, take your moment in the sunshine, stand on a pedestal, and show off your innovation. It may seem like “version control” to you, but these moments can be exciting to your customer base that has been anticipating updates and innovation.
• Price.
• Quality.
• The company’s culture, charitable interests, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. You can say the same for awards, but often I feel that simply harping on certifications and high ratings can create a false positive.
• ANY previously perceived benefits from a product, education, or service. “Well, you know how great we are?” Actually, no, there may very well be a large percentage of new consumers who do not.
• One way to avoid these pitfalls is by taking some cues from the world of instructional design. Instructional design is about creating content that is not only educational but also uses the proper context of the material to ensure success.

Instructional design students usually face a simple challenge in which they have to explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I won’t go into it, but you can learn more here.

The takeaway is that even if you create a multistep process that YOU think is self-explanatory, it may not be to your audience.

So let’s use a checklist:

Create a matrix of content complexity. The more complex, the more you may need to construct a written or visual definition to properly convey the benefits.

Are you speaking to new customers? If so, revise your content to speak at a very foundational level. Details can come later. First, get them past the starting line.

Have you outlined consumer challenges or pain points within your content? Simply talking about how great you are will fall short of the mark if they do not make a connection to the benefits of your product and how it will make their life better.

Is the tone of your content educational or assumptive? Even very complex ideas can be spoon-fed – and in so doing, be seen as brilliant.

Ask yourself how much you know about branding, tone, and voice. What’s your familiarity with content marketing? And so on. If you can’t be all things to all people, then it’s best if you’re pragmatic when it comes to your content and audience. Finding the right balance of clarity, bundled with uniqueness, is a surefire win.

In fact, using emotion to drive your content is often essential to delivering an effective viewpoint or voice to your consumer. However, you can run into problems if you haven’t used your brand as a litmus test to confirm that what you’re saying rings true.

Your brand has a voice. Perhaps it’s James Earl Jones. Or Joan Rivers. The content is rooted in that “character,” if you will. When you deploy a directive, therefore, be sure to check it against that established voice. The caveat is that you can introduce any number of supporting external players.

Think of it as having multiple people in a room advocating the brand. They might each have a different style, but they won’t corrupt the brand as long as your audience understands that each voice comes from a different source.

Imagine you are a sports beverage manufacturer who wants to establish a sense of lifestyle and engagement around the brand name. So you develop social media content that expresses the interplay between your product and the consumer’s exercise and recreation time. You’ve done this by:

• Establishing conversations around a particular sport or recreation
• Developing campaigns with blogger outreach
• Investing in paid advertising on social channels
• Constructed infographics to show benefit

Now you have to prepare for the dreaded end-of-year holiday campaign.

Maybe you could establish a connection by touting the benefits of replenishing electrolytes while shopping for an artificial Christmas tree. Then again – no. That has all the appeal of The Golden Girls in a pole-dancing class.

The better approach is to construct a revised emotion and new voice for your brand to let the holidays play a role in your overall marketing. Think of it like adding another layer. You spent all year building a conversation with your audience, so bombarding them now with holiday-themed calls to action is brand suicide. But constructing a new emotional position can allow you to speak on behalf of multiple directives.

Just as you would craft a persona for a customer-positioning message, think of your brand voice as a particular individual. Does the emotion of the new messaging or call to action seem like it would come from your brand? If not, you have the opportunity to craft a unique voice that remains independent. Be forewarned, however, that introducing multiple voices inside your brand ecosystem can be powerful – or venomous if not treated with respect.

So create a checklist from the perspective of your brand to determine if you require a different voice:

• Does your brand believe in this messaging?
• Is this something your brand would say and support?
• Even if independent from your brand, is this something your audience wants to hear?

If you intend to use emotions such as humor, concern, or fear in your content, position it from the brand and ask yourself if it feels authentic. If it doesn’t, then you need to determine how to woo your audience into falling in love with it.

Understanding that today’s communities are more fickle than ever, it’s important to understand that consistency in messaging is important. The more in touch you are with the emotions your brand extends to the audience, the more powerful your relationship with them will be.

As for a quick recap of why content marketing is so essential to your strategy, think of your social media channels as buckets or holders for your content. Without something compelling in those buckets, you don’t give anyone a reason to dig further and see what lies below the surface. What you put in those buckets speaks volumes about the brand you may or may not be developing.

A lot of marketing professionals refer to themselves a “brand builders” when they are actually “product sellers.” I’m not taking anything away from either one of these professional directives, but they are simply not the same.

What is the difference between selling a multipurpose pocket knife and selling a Swiss Army Knife by Victorinox? Absolutely everything. The Swiss Army Knife conjures up specific positive images and thoughts:

• A story about the way you or someone you know has used it
• A history of quality and product diversification
• The “essence” of feeling more prepared and able because the product is at hand
• An immediately recognizable identity of quality and a good reputation

Next, ask yourself if the content you are creating for your product, education, or service emulates your brand’s core values, benefits, and culture. Think about this long and hard for a minute.

God forbid you have an intern working on your social media right now. But if you do, what is stopping that person from blasting Instagrams of people getting wasted during a networking mixer at the next trade show? Have you and your marketing team developed a comprehensive strategy for the type of content you wish to gather and publish in order to portray the brand in the best light?

Creating Brand Equity

The puritanical definition of brand equity is the value and power of reputation and name recognition that causes a company to generate more sales than competing brands. So the question you might be thinking, 

“If I really have no brand, Justice, then how do I create brand equity?” 

And while there is no simple answer to this question, my immediate response is the thought leadership play. Often, I am associated with startups, growth hacking programs, and the occasional brilliant idea that has no funding.

How do you ramp up immediately and create brand essence around what is basically vaporware or something in an early stage? If you are just starting your brand, ask that question NOW. You need to find a brand name that will reflect your brand essence.

Manufacturer brilliance.

Even if your product hasn’t sold 10,000 units since you clicked on this post a few minutes ago, you can still begin creating the personification that you, as an individual, will create magic. This is not a bait and switch, nor is it necessarily a personal brand forwarding a product brand.

This is the position that Brian Clark (CEO of GMD Studios) refers to as “being the smartest person in the room.” Companies such as Ecko Unlimited, Square (the personal credit card payment product), Basecamp (the project management system), and lesser-known startups like Bad Spade Sunglasses, all have established the equivalent of “vapor brands.” They do it simply by creating a position of perceived intellect and understanding of their product category.

So, how do you develop stunning content out of the gate? A smart question, and not necessarily an easy one. But here’s a quick list:

• Face-to-face networking events. Learn to tell your story effectively in person, and you will get infinitely better at telling it in blog posts, status updates, and 140-character pitches.
• Presentations/ white-papers. Anytime you have an opportunity to develop a presentation, whether or not you’ve even used it in a speaking engagement, I recommend putting it on SlideShare. From there, repurpose the slideshow by pushing it up to your blog. Then, utilize your other social channels to funnel back attention to the original presentation. Depending on the context and relevance, LinkedIn can be a great avenue to establish thought leadership.
• Podcasts and videos. Utilizing a podcast gives you what Lou Mangello refers to as “instant expertise.” So you might consider either developing your own or seeking out opportunities to be invited onto podcasting and video channels with large subscription bases.
• Blog. Go at it like you’re covered in gasoline and a vindictive ex is stalking you with a lighter and a twitchy thumb.

Sharing Brand Equity

Sharing brand equity is an interesting exercise in finding mutually agreeable brands which you can equally exchange equity. For instance, if I did a series of photos of me doing a speaking engagement at the local VFW (taking nothing away from my respect for this organization) and featured them on Facebook, you might perceive it as small and localized. On the flip side, being a sycophantic fanboy trying to show off a photo of you and Guy Kawasaki at a book signing also only plays to your brand’s inadequacy.

That said, let’s put this in perspective with a couple of quick rules regarding developing content on a shared stage:

• Try to play “Switzerland” in everything you do.
• Let the voice of your brand grow in confidence at the same speed as you’re perceived. Nothing will kill a fledgling brand quicker than coming across like an 800-pound gorilla that no one has ever heard of.
• Act as if you are a band and you are on a concert poster for an upcoming show. Tweet, post, blog, and Instagram different types of content that pays respect to the opening acts as much as it does the headliner.
• Don’t be a dick — ever.

Hijacking Brand Equity

Possibly one of my favorite things to do in life is hijack brand equity, mainly because I think it is fun, and most often, no one ever really gets hurt. My favorite example of this type of content in social media is from the hip-hop industry. I love to see videos where rap stars jump in and out of million-dollar cars, driving across town at high rates of speed with complete impunity of the law, racing to the top of parking decks in densely packed cities, only to hop on a helicopter and be swept away to a private island.

Now I’m not saying this can’t happen in real life. But the chances of it happening to most people are somewhere between “lottery winner” and “struck by lightning.”

There is a very heavy caveat here regarding the legalities of doing such. Use your own judgment, but bear in mind that in some cases, representing your brand/product alongside a licensed brand or product can put yours in jeopardy. So, take time developing your product so these associations don’t put you in legal peril.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet of ways you can hijack brands:

• Location, location, location. A beautiful model and a known beautiful location often emulate the brand/type/style of product you intend to portray.
• Celebrity status. Developing content in celebrity-rich environments can, in some cases, elevate your perception as worthy of such environments.
• Product placement perception. For instance, if you intended to do a social activation launch in a live environment at SXSW vs. fashion week in New York City (both exceptional environments), the messaging directive of your content must be in proper alignment in order to create maximum effectiveness.
• Juxtapositions. It’s the classic double-take. In marketing as well as in content development, creating juxtapositions between your product/brand in environments that might be seen as opposite ends of the spectrum often will get the most notice.
• Sex sells. Love it or hate it, in most cases, creating sexual tension drives interest. And let me be clear, I’m not necessarily advocating that you use a pack of scantily clad models licking your package design (pun notwithstanding), but how do you create content that evokes passion?

I have given you a lot to think about here – now run with it and let me know how it goes. I would not use these tips and observations as a checklist, but more as a litmus test for the content you intend to develop. No matter how big or small you might be, it is always good to create an environment in which you can challenge your own thinking. Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Do you know which is which, and why? Do you know why the latter without the former is meaningless? 

I’m going to tell you why.

In the process, I’m probably going to be telling you why you’ve been wasting your time with social media. Up until now.

There is a way you can make all the time you put into social media well worth the effort. You may think you’ve already done this. Mostly, you aren’t. And that’s why I recently exhorted folks in the social benefit sector to make this the year of content marketing.

I know, I know. It’s one of those buzzwords you keep hearing about. It’s a meme du jour. But it’s not nonsense. There’s a reason things become memes. Did you know that the term was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for the discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena?

My hunch is that the digital revolution, which has totally changed the way the world does business, has required exactly this evolution in the manner in which we define and express ourselves. If you’re still defining and expressing yourself as you did in the pre-digital world, you’re going to isolate yourself from the mainstream. I’m betting that’s not something you want to do.

So, what do you need to know about content marketing and social media in order to sustain your nonprofit? I’m going to give you two basic concepts to make this as simple as possible for you to embrace and share with the rest of your nonprofit team:

• Content marketing is the heart and soul of your branding strategy. Your essence.
• Social media is a process for creating awareness and engaging with your peeps (or potential ones); it’s a way for you to express your essence.

One way I’ve talked about this in the past is “message” vs “medium.” But I’ve found this concept twists some folks’ brains into knots (Is the message the medium – or vice-versa?), so I’d like to explore this a bit differently here.

I want you to put the content marketing horse before the social media cart.

Too many of you are doing it ass-backwards. You’re not thinking particularly strategically about your content, and you’re putting more and more eggs into social media. Before you add any more eggs, I want you to STOP a minute and ask: Why?

You can “do” social media well or you can do it poorly. You’ve got a bag of tricks, and the key to your success is choosing the tools that work best for you and learning how to master them. But that’s as far as social media will take you. It’s good. It’s important. But… It’s meaningless without a content marketing strategy.

Remember, I said content marketing is your essence? Well, when’s the last time you thought really hard about what that is?

What I’d like to see you do is put more resources into defining your distinctive, essential mission, and describing it in such a way that people can visualize becoming a part of it.

Yes, this is about writing your story first, then becoming a consummate, engaging storyteller.

Don’t just read the book to folks, then walk away. Engage with your audience. Have them help you write your story. Make it a bit like a “round robin” if you can. Interact. Talk about the obstacles that must be overcome, and see what solutions your constituents might come up with. Connect with folks. Show them how to be the hero who gives your story the happy ending.

Ah… but I’m getting ahead of myself… back to creating your story… back to fully embracing content marketing!

Content marketing rests on a few simple notions:

1. Customers are smart, interesting, and fair.
2. Companies are smart, interesting, and (sometimes) fair.
3. Content is the smart, interesting, and fair way to connect customers with a company’s mission.

When you hone in on content marketing, it forces you to express a smart, interesting, well-formulated, well-supported, well-told story. And great stories are what get your message across; nothing else does the trick quite as well.

As a marketer, honing in on content compels you to ask the hard questions: “Why does our organization (or project) exist, and why would anyone care about it?” Too often, nonprofit marketers simply assume that what they’re selling is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Content marketing forbids operation on the basis of assumption.

The place to begin is not with whatever piece of content you’re given. Don’t assume it’s interesting to anyone. Instead, ask “how can I turn this into a story worth telling?” Once you’ve done that, ask, “How can I turn this story into a sustained, multi-platform experience for people who resonate with our mission?”

Here’s an example:

You work for a human services organization that recently completed a strategic planning process. Your boss asks you to tweet out this accomplishment to the world, linking to a 30-page report sitting on your website. Rather than blasting out “See our new strategic plan” you write up a brief story that takes your reader through the inspiration that was the genesis of the plan.

You help them visualize a waiting room in which there’s a harassed single mother with a small, sickly child; a bedraggled and hungry-looking homeless man; and an unkempt senior in a wheelchair. You ask your reader to imagine which one of the three they would help if they only had an hour to spend.

You might then even tell a single-paragraph story about what led each of these people to your waiting room. Next, you’d spin out a bit of drama, explaining the limitations of your resources and what might happen to each of these folks if you don’t have time to help them today.

Then you introduce the “rescuers” – your board and executive team coming together to make the hard choices and create a plan to acquire the needed resources. You end with your inspiring new vision, also incorporating a way that your reader can be a “rescuer” and help your vision come to fruition.

You write up this story, add a compelling photo or two (or maybe even a brief video), and then make this the link you share with folks via social media. You tweet it. You share it on Facebook and G+. You create a group discussion on LinkedIn about how to prioritize among competing social service needs.

You “pin” the stories of the different folks in the waiting room onto one of your Pinterest boards; then link to the sections in your report where you discuss these populations in greater depth. You also pin photos of some of your board members, with links to mini-video addresses from them on your website about why they think your mission is essential. Of course, register a domain name that reflects your mission and purpose.

Do you see the difference a content marketing strategy makes?

I’m now going to leave you with one additional suggestion. Make your blog the heart of your content marketing strategy. I’ve found it to be the easiest way to organize your thoughts and bring discipline to your content marketing. It’s a great place to house your stories; then you can drip bits and pieces out to the world using social media. If you don’t have a blog yet, I’d love to help you with it. If you do have one, I’d love to help you amp it up! You’ll find that once you begin blogging, everything else will start to naturally flow.

Okay… now go forth and concentrate on your heart and soul.

One of the things that plagues content is that we tend to look at a medium and pigeonhole it into a “thing.” Let’s take for instance me recommending that you should use photography.

What a client might hear when I say “photography:”

• Create an album of photographs and place it on my Facebook page
• Make sure my blog post also includes some type of visual
• Create or utilize proper photography to support a Tweet

Are these correct? You bet – each and every one. But let’s break down the versatility of photographs and how they could possibly be interpreted within your social graph.

Hears what I often mean when I say “photography.”

• Everything outlined above
• Creating photography for alternative applications such as Instagram

… but let’s stop right there.

The devil is in the details

I’ve created a photo for Instagram. Now the next question you need to ask yourself is, within that image have I @handled people within the photo that have another Instagram account? Have I #hashtagged the event, the venue, the key takeaway (e.g. #Superbowl50), and the ancillary topics that might sit left and right of the primary visual?

So you took your photo at the convention in Manhattan and created something relatable to the event worth searching for: “Having an amazing time with @tenacioustoys at the American International Toy Fair! #productname #purpose #etc.”

Although your event is at the Javits Center, some people might find your photo interesting and relatable if you hashtag #HellsKitchen #Manhattan #NewYorkCity #NYC #Convention. Now, what you’ve done is construct multiple opportunities for people to find your content. One visual has now become a sea of content.

Many pieces of string connect the hub

Have you ever watched the New World adaptation of Sherlock Holmes called “Elementary?” One of the countless things that I love about this program, besides it’s well-rounded acting and impeccable dialog, are the moments where you get to see the Sherlock Holmes character thinking. This is the moment usually in his brownstone where he placed hundreds of bits of paper and connected various lines to different suspects in order to solve the crime.

Get to the point Justice. We’ve seen to show.

Think of your social media in the same way. In the center is the content you created. And the center of your content is your site. If you don’t have one yet, get it now. You can get cheap domain names now that reflect your niche and are easy to brand.

In this case, we’ll go back to the example of our convention in New York City. Now it turns into something that sounds a little bit like a fourth-grade math question: “I have 50 photos I want to share + my consumers’ primary communication channels + the marketing directive of the content = X.”

The X, in this case, leads me to my next point …

Work smarter, not harder

In some cases, this means you spend your whole day banging out one photo at a time, dropping them on a half-dozen social networks. I don’t know how many times I have seen social media professionals take one photo and literally crop, filter, title, post, and then be bound to the engagement that ensues. Whereas, if you placed 50 photos on a particular “hub” and then went to your associated social connections and placed one key photo to pull them in to see the rest, then you saved an exorbitant amount of time. Think of it as “micro marketing” within your content.

In some cases, this simply does not work because of the nature of a brand. Examples: Procter & Gamble, Ford, and AT&T, are so polished that in most cases they visually and contextually touch everything that they represent. For the rest of us that are not playing with billion-dollar budgets, we don’t have to have these as primary concerns.

No Matter What Your Size, Have a Mission Control Center

If you are in the inbound marketing space and still trying to control your social channels as separate silos without tools such as HootSuite, Sprout Social, HubSpot or Sprinklr (for those of you who have a sugar daddy), then you are doomed to fall slowly behind your competitors that are using the right tools. It’s not simply just about creating a sea of content, but about monitoring, engaging and optimizing against that content.

This mission control center should have:

• Associated trained team members that understand your content calendar
• A standard operating procedure as to how your ambassadors, influencers, and employees utilize social media
• An inbound marketing crisis management plan
• A testing and optimization protocol

While I realize the last bullet points might look slightly off topic, I think the more you understand how one simple piece of content can interact in so many ways to so many different types of consumers, the better you will be able to maintain a semblance of control.

Becoming pitch perfect for your CTA

One last thing to take into consideration when developing content. The idea of diversifying your visual portfolio is always something to consider. But you can also diversify your voice to specific audiences. Therefore, you can give one piece of visual content a longer lifespan if you position it uniquely for each audience on different channels.

Examples of simplified positioning are as follows:

• Discovery channels — “Have you ever heard of XX?”
• Influencers and Bloggers — “You’ve got to see what XX is doing now with participating hoteliers!”
• Affinity groups and communities — “XX is going to be having another amazing event coming this Friday, be sure you’re there.”
• Consumer reviews — “ You know an easy way to help XX is by simply going online and giving them a great review!”
• Mobile consumers — “Don’t forget one way that you can always help XX is by submitting a donation online!”

Now what I’ve done effectively is channel one piece of content and created a sea of messaging. I recommend that you try to leverage the content that you have and make it more than you ever imagined.

However, there is good news. Even if life does not present itself in the traditional manner, there is an equal playing ground on which all people can play. That is, the internet.

What is the cornerstone or building block of that same internet? You guessed it. It is the website.

A Website as an Investment

A successful website is one of the best investments that any individual, small business, or company can make. Whether your business is based on the internet, necessitating that website, or your business is offline, the website is as essential as the four walls of the building that houses your office. It is important to buy a domain name that reflects your brand name, of course, as you should be easily findable online.

A viable, well-functioning website is literally one of the best investments that any company or business owner can make. And, reaching the level of definition of “well functioning” can be something that is attainable by the masses. A little concentration here, a little strategy there, and you have that website that is needed.

You can build it yourself. You can hire it to be done for you. You could meet somewhere in the middle with a starter site that morphs into the professional site that it deserves to be, as you increase your profit margin.

Much like the 1989 Kevin Costner movie hit, “Field of Dreams,” you build it and they will come. But, that does require some effort on your part and that of your team. Fortunately, with some ingenuity and that know-how, you too can be a success.

The Challenges that Face the Internet Moguls

With all of the changes in search engine optimization (SEO) logic, presenting us with varying algorithms from competing major search engines, it is sometimes difficult to keep up with the website and what one is supposed to do to keep it at the top of the rankings.

Some companies created a website five or ten years ago and have not updated it since then. Others find that they may be continuously tweaking their website.

There is a balance between the two. We have found that updating your website on a regular basis is essential to staying relevant within the industry. With that in mind, here are some of the best tips for recreating your website. This doesn’t mean that it has to be from scratch. It also doesn’t mean that we have to hit an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) level of tweaking, but a good goal is to ensure that we are driving quality traffic to your site.

The Consideration that Leads the Pack

Before we even get into the three strategies for today’s website improvements, let’s talk about one of the most important things to keep in mind. That is the foundation of your website house. That is your hosting!

Without a good foundation, and selecting a host that will serve you, as well as your site, well, your house is going to crumble. In other words, there is no site. So, before we improve your site, let’s make sure that that hosting provider has some of the basics, like:

• exceptional customer service;
• exceptional “uptime” like 99.999%;
• the knowledge to comprehend what needs to be done on the server;
• high-quality system administrators;
• creative hosting packages (i.e. a WordPress hosting package);
• SSL (definitely needed these days, with Google’s requirements);
• And more…

When you have ensured that you have performed a thorough domain name search and chosen a good, solid web hosting company, it is time to make your own website or in some cases, improve on the site that you have, which is what we are discussing in these three strategies.

Strategy 1: Add Images and Videos

Many people today want to look at images or watch videos while on your website. They may not want to leave the site and visit places like YouTube or Vimeo to view the videos there.

This is actually good for you because you want to keep those visitors on your site!

If you lack these sources of entertainment, you should consider adding them. Fortunately, it is not very difficult to do so.

Take YouTube as an example. If you find a video that you want to feature, preferably one of your own, all you need to do is use the Share > Embed feature to place that video within a post on a WordPress site. And, in some cases, simply typing the YouTube url/link will produce the video. It doesn’t get much easier than that and it is certainly easier than it used to be years ago.

According to the experts, it is vital to start adding these engagement components as soon as you can, along with other types of website content necessary for any modern website. And, don’t limit yourself to just the images and videos. Think to a wider capacity. Include podcasts. Include SlideShare presentations and include infographics, to name a few.

Many people are excited about all of the new options for adding engaging content to their sites. If you feel like it is too technical for you, there are plenty of tutorials, how-to articles, and informational videos online on how to easily execute this. Fortunately, all you need is the ability to search on Google.

Another example is adding your own tutorial to your own site. You could choose to demonstrate to your readers how they can implement some new features on their website. Or, maybe your niche includes a particular product or service, in which case you could turn that into a video demonstration or how-to article.

Not only will this type of content interest your readers, but it is sure to drive traffic to your site, but you will be helping those who visit your site, as well. This helps to establish yourself as an authority while building up your loyal fan base, as well.

Becoming an authority on a subject is a great way to build that loyal audience and it will certainly contribute to your success over time.

Strategy 2: Generate Quality Content

Without a doubt, a vital aspect of a successful website is having quality content on your site. We have already suggested some of this type of content in our last strategy idea.

Over time, quality content will improve the search rank of your website more than anything else. Although things like keywords are important when generating content, it is much more important that the content is something that people want to read. Why? It is more likely to gather links that way. Your readers enjoy it and authors will want to link to these high-quality articles in THEIR articles.

In addition to the exposure and branding (including linking) benefits, many of the search engines track how long readers stay on your website. The longer visitors stay on your site, the more your site improves in the SERPs for various keywords and terms.

Think outside the box and include different types of blog posts.

In some cases, website owners have too little content on their site. In other cases, they may have content that is old and the search engines are recognizing that fact. In either of these cases or similar cases, the fastest way to improve one’s search ranking is to rectify the situation with newer, relevant content.

It may take a while. It may take hiring bloggers. But, it is worth it in the long run. Isn’t your site worth it?

Strategy 3: Use Blog Sponsorship Wisely (Reduce Ads and Distractions)

Sometimes website owners feel like ads are a good way to make money. However, unless you have millions of unique visitors per month, the money made off of ad revenue is not necessarily enough to pay the bills. This isn’t always true, as properly planned blog sponsorships do succeed in launching the site into a realm of success.

This needs to be handled with care.

Too many advertisements and those that are not relevant to the site could cheapen the site and cause that length of time on the site to adversely affect your statistics (as in too low). Instead, find advertisements; affiliate programs, and related programs that complement the content of your site. In that way, you are adding value to your site while earning a few bucks on the side, with blog sponsorship.

In Conclusion

Overall, a website is a great tool to help your business stand out from others and advertise that you are the place to be for your niche. So, let’s start now. Let’s make it the best that it can be, and watch as our success surpasses our objectives into the next year.