Content Is King but Relevance Is Emperor

No matter how long or short your online content (in terms of blogging) make it relevant to the reader. Readers will put up with a lot—rambling, poor grammar, bad spelling, and the misuse of the possessive “your”—for relevant content that actually teaches them something useful. Short posts don’t seem to cause too many problems either when they are relevant, because short-post blogs that have a targeted audience and purpose can become authority sites, despite their diminutive stature. Here are some blogs to which I subscribe, because they are relevant. Take a look and see if you can learn and apply any of their examples to your own content.

eHub and PicoCool: Short but Sweet

Emily Chang’s site eHub and Chang and Max Kiesler’s site PicoCool are two examples of brief content that is not only interesting, quirky, illuminating, and often entertaining, if not downright useful. On eHub, you can find brief summaries of new web and mobile applications, along with a link to the source site for each application. Summaries tend to be 2 or 3 sentences, at most. PicoCool showcases unique examples of design—web, industrial, human-factors, fashion, you name it. Typically, each post consists of a graphic illustration or photo, and a sidebar of information that ranges anywhere from 30 words or so to 200 words. Both sites are elegant, well-designed, minimalist, and prove the case for not changing your site design every other week.

Mid-Length Is Always In Style

Tim Berry’s Planning Startups Stories blog is one of my favorites. As somebody who has always been interested in small business, I find Tim’s blog to be full of wisdom, humor, insight, and sometimes provocative ideas about small business. Tim writes from his long experience as an entrepreneur and business owner (there IS a difference, IMO) and made a conscious choice, right from the start, to incorporate his own personality into the blog, rather than opt for a more generic corporate tone. Tim’s approach makes reading his blog more like having a chat with a trusted friend than getting advice from a consultant. And that tone makes you want to interact through comments. His blog posts tend to run around 400 words on average.

Long Content: As Long As It Takes

Dosh Dosh is an excellent blog covering online business, internet marketing, and product marketing. Maki, a philosophy student in Toronto, writes all of the content for the site. Maki used to blog more frequently than he does today, but that’s fine because his posts are quite long and detailed. These well-written posts range from 1500 words on up. If long content is appropriate to your interests, your subject matter, your audience, and your style, then go for it.

This post is just over 500 words. For help with your blog, see our list of inbound marketing services.

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• Use important keywords to find relevant feeds.
• Subscribe to as many feeds as you want, because you’ll delete some feeds later.
• Use the list view to quickly scan feed items.
• Bookmark or star the feed items you like.

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Learn to Do Things the Right Way First

Photo by Mark Smallwood

There is always a right way to do things. Usually, the right way is the way that tens of thousands of people before you have figured out how to do something. In photography, that means using rules like the Rule of Thirds or the Sunny 16 rule. You learn that grass is a pretty good neutral tone when you’re trying to work out the best lighting for your shot. In marketing, you may think that the rules have all been broken in the last 10 years. Actually, the basic rules are still the same: focus on the customer’s needs, wants, and desires. Sell something that people want to buy. Garish graphics often sell better than elegant and subtle work. People don’t care about your product, but only what’s in it for them. These are rules that haven’t changed since the dawn of trade. The tools continue to evolve, and people get more savvy about tuning out the noise. But, as in photography, until you have mastered the rules, it’s best not to break them on purpose.

Fail Often

One of the best ways to learn the rules, and later, to discover and nurture innovative ideas, is to try a lot of things and fail often. In photography, this means taking lots of photographs. Digital photography has been a boon to photographers who want to improve their skills. Not only are the results instantaneous, but you can shoot hundreds of photographs in a day and simply delete the ones you don’t want. During a brief trip to the UK a while back, I shot over 1600 photographs, many of the same scene using different settings. Out of that large number of photos, I was left with about two dozen that I really liked, and maybe 6 to 10 were outstanding shots.

Photo by Mark Smallwood

More importantly, I learned a lot about lighting, the camera, composition, and my own shortcomings as a photographer. The tree in the shot to the right wrecks the shot, but it taught me to look at scenes from multiple angles. In marketing, things aren’t much different. The digital tools at your disposal equip you with a number of marketing capabilities that would have been financially out of reach, or not even available 15 years ago. From desktop publishing to video hosting, and everything in-between, you can try scads of marketing tactics, quickly and cheaply. Don’t be afraid to fail.

Get Closer to the Subject

Photo by Mark Smallwood

Most casual snapshots fail from the sin of proximity. Or rather, lack of proximity. Unless you’re shooting a panorama purposely, it’s best to get closer to your subject than you think you should. Forget what your uncle taught you (unless his name was Adams or Weston) and don’t worry so much about leaving a big chunk of space around your subject. The same advice applies to marketing.

Photo by Mark Smallwood

Too often we try to market everything to everybody. Get closer to the subject. Find out what makes them tick. What are their dreams and aspirations, fears and desires? Even B2B marketing is affected by emotion. If you don’t think so, talk to an IT manager who’s worried about losing his job unless he can get more productivity from his staff. The Big Picture is useful, but it’s the close-ups full of drama that move us.

Put a Human Being in the Shot

Like many photographers, I take a lot of photographs of inanimate objects, landscapes, flowers, buildings. One rule that I’ve been working on is to put a human being in my shots. Sometimes it’s a hand holding a flower. Sometimes it’s a couple walking away from me on the other side of the street in a cityscape.

Photo by Mark Smallwood

As human beings, we respond to other human beings. Purchases are not about things, they’re about fulfillment and recognition, reward and expression. Too often, it seems that business people would like nothing better than to have all their work sold anonymously, robotically, snatched from the jaws of a vending machine. People put the social into social media. People are your customers. Put people into your marketing and you’ll have a better shot at making your marketing resonate with people.

Look at Things in Unusual Ways

Like other forms of art, photography is really about seeing. If your photographs are dull, it’s likely that you’re looking at things in a dull way. Try looking at things in an unusual way. Maybe that means getting up on a chair, or lying on the floor and shooting upward. Look for unusual patterns in common items. Unfocus your eyes for a moment and see if there are shadows or roof lines or reflections that can turn a dull photo into something startling and fresh. The same applies to your marketing.

Photo by Mark Smallwood

Are you really going to publish another white paper, when you’ve seen a steady decline in downloads of the last 10 you’ve published? Why don’t you make a music video instead? Or how about a radio talk show with employees as guests? Or ask your customers and employees what they love about your product and what they wish you’d change, then publish those results in a report. Do something wacky. Don’t be dull.

Have Fun

Photo by Mark Smallwood

Most importantly, have fun when you’re marketing or taking photographs, because unless it’s fun, it’s rarely worth doing for long. Sure, there are some things you need to accomplish that might not be fun. Personally, I dislike cleaning my camera, but if I don’t, the fun will be over permanently. In marketing, you’ve got to manage the budget, justify the ROI, and fight for your ideas. All the more reason to make the ideas fun to work on.

When you’re having fun, it shows in your work. People—customers—respond to your passion and your enthusiasm. When they see your company doing things in a fun, fresh, and unusual way, they want to get to know you. People want to be with people who want to be with them.

If you have a hobby you’re passionate about, you’ve probably learned a few things that apply to your business life, also. I’d love to hear what lessons you’ve picked up. Share them in the comments section.

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We’ll be providing several posts and videos about RSS over the next couple of weeks. The first one is just below, and shows you how to get started using Google Reader. There are dozens of other feed readers, and some email programs and browsers actually provide feed aggregation services too. These include Outlook, Thunderbird, Safari, Opera, and others. And there are dozens of free and commercial feed readers, like NewsGator, NetVibes, PageFlakes, and FeedReader.

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No followers! Wah!

A question I heard asked more than once during Kefauver’s presentation was “How do I get people to follow me?”

Kefauver had one especially good tip: follow other people who are in your business or area of interest. The thing is, when you follow somebody, they may follow you back. Or not. But, their followers may notice you and follow you as a result. I’ve picked up some great followers who first noticed me after I followed a mutual Twitter friend.

Twitter Follower Discovery Tools

After the meeting, I spoke with Karen briefly and mentioned Mr. Tweet, a tool I’ve used for finding people with similar interests. Ben Parr, in his excellent post Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs, turned me on to another great tool called Listorious.

Listorious is another great way to filter Twitter users by type or tag. A tag, in case you don’t know, is a word or phrase that people use to identify a particular person or item on the Web. The more people tag your profile, say, as a dog lover, the more likely you’ll be identified on Listorious (and other services) as a dog lover.

But the cool thing about Listorious is that it picks up on the new Twitter lists feature. For example, in Ben’s post, he was talking about finding other entrepreneurs. When I went to Listorious following his link, I found the following page.

Listorious.com

Notice the lists on the left side of the page. Not only can you find entrepreneurs, but you can find social entrepreneurs, founders, and many other segments that may be more useful to you than the general set of entrepreneurs on Twitter. Of course, these are lists created by other Twitter users to help categorize their followers, so they may not be completely pure—meaning they may contain Twits who don’t belong in that category, if the person who made the list wasn’t as picky a list-maker as s/he could have been. But, for the most part, it works really well.

I found a list curated (created and maintained) by Vitor Lourenco, who is a product designer for Twitter. On his list, I scrolled down and found Dharmesh Shah, a co-founder of HubSpot, who I happen to admire.

Listorious.com

Turns out I wasn’t yet following Dharmesh Shah, so I clicked the FOLLOW link. Like many applications that can perform actions on your behalf inside of Twitter (saving you the trouble of constantly popping over to another tab or window to perform an action), Listorious will prompt you the first time for permission to update your follower list.

Listorious.com

I clicked the Allow button and Listorious added Mr. Shah to my following list. From now on, when I use Listorious to find other people to follow, I won’t be prompted for permission, because I’ve now allowed Listorious to update my list for me.

Listorious is a great tool for anybody to use to find like-minded people on Twitter. If you’re just getting started, it can be an invaluable tool.

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A marketing plan can be as simple as a list of to-do items on a legal pad. We’ve all made those and seen plenty more. Our early to-do lists typically contain items that sound something like Steve Martin bits: “First, get a million dollars.” Yeah, you know what we’re talking about. Those non-committal, broad-stroke, out-there goals over which you have absolutely no control. That’s what usually ends up on the yellow legal pad.

The most important consideration is your customer, who s/he is, what they want, which media they use. But for most small businesses, it helps to start off by figuring out just how much traffic you need as a baseline. Because most small business owners have a deep psychological need for a silver bullet, it can be useful to figure out a baseline amount of money and traffic that you need each month. Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can move on to a real customer-centric marketing plan, which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Start Planning from Your Goals

You know the old saying, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Or maybe you heard “If you had tubes, you’d be a radio.” Hm, yeah, maybe something like, “If wishes were clicks, you’d be a gazillionaire.” Start with goals like your basic overhead requirements, add in some profit, then pad it a bit more and start from there.

Do the Math

Assume you have $5000 a month in overhead, including your salary. First, what’s your average gross revenue from your projects? If you’re just starting out, you’ll have to guess. But if you’ve done a few jobs and you’re confident that you can get the same kind of money, on average, for your upcoming projects, then use that number. For the sake of the example, assume you have been getting about $1200 per project, on average.

Divide your overhead by the average gross revenue:

5000 / 1200 = 4.1666

Right off the bat, you can see that you’re going to need at least 4 projects just to cover your overhead. Again, for the sake of the example, let’s say you’d like to be pulling in more like $7500 gross. That gives you a little extra you can save, after taxes, and maybe a little extra spending money.

7500 / 1200 = 6.25

You’re going to have to pull in 6 or 7 projects. Or you’ll need to raise your prices, but that’s another post for another day.

Do More Math

In our example, you need to increase your sales by more than 30%. Unless you’re already turning away work, you will need to come up with specific plans for how to draw that many more prospects to your site. And that brings us to another bit of math. Do you already know how many proposals or presentations you have to make before you land a new client?

If you’re just starting out, you may not know that yet, but if you’ve been in business for a while, you should be able to figure it out. How many inquiries did you get that you followed up on and how many of those resulted in business? Let’s say you responded to 12 inquiries for every job you landed. For your 6.25 projects, you’ll need to respond to about 75 inquiries.

Just how many site visitors do you need to generate 50-75 inquiries?

Again, just guesstimating here, but if you’ve done a great job of creating compelling content and have done all you can to optimize your on-page and off-page elements, you might be able to get highly-qualified visitors to your site. So, let’s say that for every 30 visitors, one inquires about your services. So far, this is where we stand:

12 inquiries = 1 project
30 visitors = 1 inquiry
360 visitors = 12 inquiries
2250 visitors = 75 inquiries = 6.25 projects

You need to attract at least 2,250 visitors to your site to generate 75 inquiries, which should result in 6.25 projects.

Use a System

Now finally, we get to the plan. Your plan should include all of the inbound marketing tasks that you can honestly and reasonably claim that you will do over the next quarter, half-year, or year. You should expect to perform at least one small task every day. It doesn’t have to be the same task, but it should be a task that helps complete one of the elements in your plan.

Assume that you’ve decided you’re going to create the following content for your website:

• 12 video tutorials
• 3 reports
• 100 blog posts
• 3 webinars

The first thing to do is map it out in a table or on a calendar. Putting your ideas down on paper will help you grasp how much work is ahead of you. You may decide it’s not enough. Or, you may realize that you need to outsource some of the work. Try a simple table like the one below.

In this table, we list the content product we plan to produce, followed by our projected publish or presentation date. The third column indicates whether the content will be produced in-house or will be outsourced. The fourth column contains the names of people or organizations that will work on the content, and the fifth column contains how you plan to promote the content, whether it’s by social media, such as bookmarking, or Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn notifications, by email to your list, or by running PPC ads with a link back to your content.

Content	Publish Date	In/Out	Resource	Promotion
Video: Researching your market online	January 30, 2010	In	Me	Social Media
Video: How to create a marketing calendar	February 15, 2010	In	John	Social Media
Video: How to set up a landing page	March 15, 2010	In	Me, Ellen	Social Media
Video: How to set up an AdWords account	April 18, 2010	In	Bob	Social Media
Video: How to search for relevant keywords	May 16, 2010	In	John, Ellen	Social Media
Video: How to A/B test PPC ads	June 15, 2010	In	Me, Bob	Social Media
Video: How to set up an email service account	July 15, 2010	In	Ellen	Social Media
Video: How to create an autoresponder series	August 15, 2010	In	Ellen, Heidi	Social Media
Video: How to create a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation video	September 15, 2010	In	Me	Social Media
Video: How to post presentation to SlideShare	October 15, 2010	In	Bob	Social Media
Video: How to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts	November 15, 2010	In	John, Bob	Social Media
Video: How to shorten URLs when posting to Twitter and Facebook	December 15, 2010	In	Me	Social Media
Webinar: Planning a year of blog posts based on your marketing plan	April 25, 2010	In	John, Ellen	Social Media, PPC
Webinar: Creating a partner assessment tool	July 30, 2010	In	Bob, Heidi	Social Media, PPC
Webinar: Positioning your product	November 12, 2010	In	Me	Social Media, PPC
Report: 12 ways to promote your local service business	June 20, 2010	Out	eLance, oDesk	PPC, Email, Social Media
Report: Why nobody wants your Open Source application and how to turn that around	August 20, 2010	Out	eLance, oDesk	PPC, Email, Social Media
Report: 9 ways to find, evaluate, and engage partners who can help your business	December 12, 2010	Out	eLance, oDesk	PPC, Email, Social Media
Blog Posts: TBD	3 per week	In/Out	Me, eLance	Social Media

Next, you’ll want to create a detailed project plan of the tasks required for each of your content products. That’s too much detail to go into here, but we’ll deal with it in an eBook or a report soon. With the information in this post, you should be able to get started putting together a real marketing plan for the year, not just a wish list.

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My advice for the winners on this list?

• Directly engage with the TripAdvisor community.
• Acknowledge the problems.
• Clean up your properties.
• Take and publish before and after pictures or videos. And you really DO need to make those fixes.
• Finally, make an offer to every one of those people who complained. A free night or weekend stay might make a heck of an impression, even if they don’t choose to take you up on the offer.

For the rest of you small businesses, time to engage with your community and embrace the reality that from now on, it’s not just a slogan, it really IS all about the customer.

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The inbound marketing assessment is a comprehensive review of your current marketing program, your website, outbound and inbound marketing tools, and your in-house or contract talent. By talent, we mean your employees, friends, freelancers, or anybody who can help you create and promote content.

The inbound marketing assessment can take anywhere from half a day to a week, depending on how far along you are in your marketing efforts, business development, and website implementation. Through a combination of surveys, interviews, and physical reviews of content, we create a snapshot of your company’s marketing profile. We then use this snapshot to develop a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, using your strengths and filling in the gaps where needed.

When complete, the inbound marketing assessment and the inbound marketing plan provide you with the tools you need to understand just what it will take to implement a strong inbound marketing program for your company. We include recommendations for the types of content we think will be most appropriate for your target market, and how and when you should deploy these content products. With the assessment alone, you could conceivably develop and implement your own program.

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It seems that everybody is talking about inbound marketing these days. You might be wondering, “How is this different from what I’m doing now?” The answer is, it depends.

Attracting or Chasing?

Are you currently using a combination of content strategies, list building, link building, and social media to attract your target customers? Or are you continuing to spend the majority of your marketing budget on direct mail, cold calling, and other outbound marketing techniques? For most companies, particularly software startups and online businesses, the reality lies somewhere in-between: employing occasional email blasts to keep in touch with the customers who have signed up for your e-newsletter or downloaded a trial, while attending expensive trade shows and coming home with little to show for it but a bag full of competitors’ data sheets.

Inbound vs. Outbound

Inbound marketing is an umbrella term that refers to the tools and techniques involved in attracting interested prospects to your website, and then converting those prospects into qualified leads without the scattershot approach employed by most outbound marketing methods. Outbound marketing tools rely on big budgets for printing and postage, airfare, shipping, booth setup labor, and interruption techniques that continue to be ignored and reviled by the public.

Put the Prospect in Charge

Inbound marketers use meaningful, entertaining, and educational content like videos, white papers, tutorials, press releases, online apps, and webinars to attract visitors who are truly interested in the content. The inbound marketing approach lets the prospect control the conversation about what they want and where they will get it. Less pressure. Less friction.

Content Matters More than Ever

By now, you’ve probably figured out that inbound marketing tends to be about content creation and deployment. But, it’s not just about blanketing your prospects with content. The best approach to inbound marketing is to assess your current marketing efforts, your existing content, and your in-house talent. Then, match your findings with the content your target market is seeking, using the specific keywords that will resonate with them.

Plans and Processes

Strategic inbound marketing includes putting processes into place for analyzing your market and locating the most effective keywords for that market, creating and deploying content, tracking and analyzing the resulting traffic, and implementing tactics, including advanced content and landing pages, to convert visitors into prospects, prospects into leads, and leads into customers.

Earn Trust and Authority

Essentially, your goal is to create a repository of relevant content that will help your visitors learn more about your industry, improve their skills and knowledge, and use to make critical decisions about the things that are important to them. Becoming a trusted resource has a multiplier effect on your business, by raising your visibility as a thought leader, increasing your authority, and providing you a consistent stream of traffic.

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