Your goal as a marketer should be to, over-time, transform your website from a stagnant brochure into an optimized piece of machinery which regularly attracts new visitors (via social media and search engines). Your second goal should be to better convert those visitors into leads for your business.

One of the best ways to attract and convert visitors is to create valuable content in the form of a compelling offer. However, every day I talk to marketers who say they never have enough time to really grow their website’s assets. To help increase turn around time on creating compelling offers for your website, here are some tips on how to accomplish the task of creating and completing your compelling offer in just 1 day.

Brainstorm Your Compelling Offer (1 Hour)

Brainstorming can be the most difficult part of the process of creating a compelling offer because it’s so easy to get derailed. To maximize the outcome of your brainstorming, start the process by examining pathways (keywords) your visitors are currently using to find your website using Google Analytics (refers) or HubSpot (Sources).

Next, make a list of a 5-10 keywords that could be the foundation of a meaningful offer and brainstorm offers based on those keywords. Think: “What are some top-of-the-funnel offers I can create based on these keywords?” For example, using a keyword worksheet I may want to create an offer based on the long tail keyword “easy search engine optimization for small business” since it’s likely that a person using that keyword may be interested in our SEO services.

Select Your Offer (1 hour)

Take a look at the offers you brainstormed and select the offer you believe you have the most available assets for and could easily knock out in a day. Also consider selecting an offer that doesn’t depend on too many external resources or resources that have yet to be created. If you already have a fantastic webinar that you could use to create the content in your offer or a few blog posts on the topic, take that into account. You could save time later if you can repurpose material that already exists. Also take the time to determine the format of your offer. For example, a 3-page check-list or white-paper might be easier to create than a 20-page ebook with multiple contributors. A webinar is a great offer that can be planned for a later date, but you could work on building the slides for the webinar within 24 hours. Once you’ve selected your offer, do not throw out any brainstorming notes. They can be used to kick-start a fresh brainstorming session later!

Draft Your Compelling Offer – (1-2 Hours)

This is the hard part. Carving out 1-3 hours of time to create content can seem really taxing for many people. To make it easier, block out some time in your schedule to spend some time writing out the bones of your compelling offer. In your first draft, don’t focus on how it reads, instead focus on the value of the content. If you’re offer is a webinar or a video, spend your time story boarding out your presentation.

Pro-tip: Set a timer for yourself so you have a set amount of time to spend on the project so it doesn’t end up taking over your entire work day.

Take a Break (1-2 Hours)

You’ve worked hard. Spend some time checking your email and working on other tasks so you can come back to your compelling offer with fresh eyes.

Review Your Compelling Offer and Make Changes. (2 Hours)

Now it’s time to put some meat on the bones of your compelling offer. In the first draft, you should have made a point to push forward without looking back. Now, you can spend more time with your content and bring structure to abstract thoughts and ground the entire document in clarity and reality. In the case of a webinar, perform a few couple of run throughs of your slides, adding in any necessary information or transitions to make the presentation clearer.

-

Congratulations! You’ve just created a compelling offer for your business that you can offer behind a form and collect more leads. You did it in less than a day and if you did it right you can offer this piece of content for quite some time.

featured photo by sheeron on flickr

 Note:  This content is a piece created by me that originally appeared on the PullnotPush blog in 2011.   After the company (and website) closed its doors in 2012, it was reposed to this blog so people may continue to enjoy it. 

Despite the relative new-ness of many of the inbound marketing tools available today, the methods many marketers are using appear surprisingly archaic.

If you’re still sending “email blasts” instead of setting up lead nurturing campaigns, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to engage your lead base.

Get Personal

One way to prevent your lead nurturing efforts from becoming stagnated is to personalize the experience for your leads. Most email software programs have a way to populate the first name into the email using a token which will generate the first name from your contact’s file. If you want, you can also use these built-in personalization tools to help drop other personalizing information into the email (company name, what compelling offer they downloaded, etc) to help make the experience seem more personal.

Segment, then Nurture Your Leads

To go beyond basic personalization tools, you’ll need to start segmenting your leads and creating specific lead nurturing campaigns for each of those lead groups. The first step in creating custom lead nurturing campaigns is to ask a question to your leads on your landing page which would help segment them into lead nurturing groups and qualify them for your business. For example, if you were in the countertop materials business, you might want to ask your prospect if they are a designer, consumer or fabricator since you’d want to nurture each of those leads very differently from the other.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can segment and email your leads easily using HubSpot’s new checklist feature for landing page forms coupled with the List Manager that helps you form lead lists easily based on different criteria. Once you create your list, you can assign it to the corresponding lead nurturing campaign.

Provide Clear Value

Though all email software now requires senders to adhere to the CANSPAM act, you should still do whatever you can to help better ensure that your contact list’s boundaries are respected. The best way to do this is to respect the fact that your lead has given you their email address and the opportunity to continue contacting them.

Remember, these are delicate relationships based on mutual trust, and you should try to keep them from regretting their decision by creating emails with clear value for the customer. If you’re sending email blasts that are more like bragging rights for your company or “news stories” – then stop right there. Instead, try sending your leads content that clearly addresses a key need that they identified at point of contact. For example, if you downloaded a white paper all about lead nurturing best practices, why would I start sending you emails describing web-design packages?

By keeping your lead’s interests in mind and by always asking yourself what need your lead nurturing email will fill, you’ll make sales and not war with your leads.

 Note:  This content is a piece created by me that originally appeared on the PullnotPush blog in 2011.   After the company (and website) closed its doors in 2012, it was reposed to this blog so people may continue to enjoy it. 

When I was contracting at HubSpot back in 2009-2010, I worked with the awesome designer, Mike Worth, to create an infographic called The Birth of the Inbound Marketing Universe: Google to HubSpot. It was a great opportunity for me to utilize my Wikipedia and research skills to develop an interesting piece of content for HubSpot that visually articulated how Inbound Marketing developed from the inception of the internet to today.

While, I had no experience with infographics before my HubSpot days, I was a fast learner. After learning how easy it was to create an infographic, I’m often surprised that more companies don’t invest the time to include them into an existing content creation strategy. I think the assumption for most people is that infographics are time consuming or expensive. However, considering that personal financial software provider Mint churned out a mountain of infographics in just 2010 alone – it seems silly that more companies aren’t doing the same.  Therefore, here a few tips that should assist you when creating your first infographic for your business or blog.

Generating Content

Infographics are built on hard data. So, my recommendation is to start with information that you already have at your fingertips or information you can assemble easily. For example, I used information pulled from HubSpot’s Twitter Grader to put together HubSpot’s Twitter Territory Map. To get started, try to think of a few unique ways to deliver information that you already have at your business in a visual format. Once you’ve put together the data and have a concept, approach your designer to see how they can turn your data into a visual story line.

Selecting a Designer

If you have access to a designer, great. If not, hire someone! I found Mike Worth after doing a Google search for “infographic designer,” but you might be able to find a designer through a service marketplace like Elance or oDesk. Keep in mind, infographics can be on virtually any topic important to your business prospects, but it’s important to work with the right designer to formulate the concept around the information. Ask to see examples of infographics they’ve done or do a search for infographics. In my case, I came to Mike Worth because I enjoyed an infographic he made featuring a beer map. I liked his style and so we worked together later on the infographic below:

Infographics work because great content doesn’t always mean great written content.  We could get all the same information detailed above  from the Word document that I sent to Mike Worth, but why would we want to?

Publishing Your Infographic

Recently, the HubSpot team put together a really great infographic detailing important moments during the entire History of the Marketing Universe. It’s also very effective at delivering a lot of facts while keeping the information visually stimulation. However, one thing I really appreciate is that HubSpot has strengthened their infographic delivery system in a few ways since I worked there.

Take a look HubSpot blog post which contains the infographic. Here’s what they did right:

• They posted the infographic to their blog and hosted the infographic on their site.
• The infographic is the perfect size to fit in almost any blog screen without having to scroll vertically (L or R)
• They included an embed code so people who want to share the infographic can do so easily, but the embed code automatically populates a text link to their website as well as the title of the infographic.
• The blog post with the infographic has a helpful introduction explaining a little context for the information and links to other relevant blog content on similar topics.
• The infographic contains a boilerplate with the source of the infographic as well as the HubSpot logo so even if the infographic is found by someone who didn’t see the original link, the image is still credited to HubSpot

Storytelling is a powerful tool that could supercharge your SEO strategy. Good stories excite us, compel us and stay with us.

When I’m working with a new business on an Integrated SEO Strategy, I use storytelling to excite and attract their prospects. In a world where consumers are able to use TIVO, caller-ID, and CAN-SPAM to block out the stories they don’t want to hear, it’s important that your story is the one that people don’t want to miss.

Once Upon a Blog

Many companies begin blogging as a means to generate organic SEO for their website; it’s a smart tactic as that blogging original content has multiple benefits.

A.) Blogging can increase the number of website visitors you receive from social media. A study by HubSpot determined that small businesses that blog also have 102% more Twitter followers and it makes sense when you think about it. If you liked a book you just read, wouldn’t you rather follow the author on Twitter than the author’s publisher?
B.) Blogging can be used as a means to optimize your website for a keyword for which you’d like to rank. Adding 1 targeted keyword to your blog’s title, content, metadata, meta-keywords and alt text of a photo can produce powerful results, especially if other reputable sites link to your blog, too.
C.) It can generate inbound links to your website. It’s a simple formula really. The more inbound links a single blog post has, the higher the page rank for that post on Google. The trick is getting people to link to your posts – and that’s where great story telling comes in. After all, why would a HuffingtonPost, Gizmodo, Techcrunch or Mashable link to a page unless it contains a valuable story for their readers?

Table of SEO

To tell a story that captivates, you shouldn’t just be limited to the content that’s on your blog page. You also want to consider how people will find and discover your content and write a successful story there, too.

For example, every business should put a little creative juice into creating SEO elements for your blog posts and website pages. As a rule there are a few important elements you need to add to every page of your website before publishing it.

1. Descriptive Title - Exciting, less than 70 characters and containing 1 major keyword if possible.
2. Permalinks (URLS) based on Blog or Page Title - Hopefully you’ve set your blog to generate a title that is based on the title of your blog post rather than a random number! If not, here’s how to add dynamic permalinks on WordPress.
3. Enticing Meta Description - Less than 170 characters. This is important because this is what “sells” your blog post to others on Google, Facebook, etc.  Don’t slack on this one.
4. 2-3 Meta Keywords - These indicate what keyword is most important in your blog post. Consider it a one-word summary on what your blog post is about
5. Alt Text on Photos - This illuminates what the photos of your blog post represents, especially important when people use Google image search to discover photos. Can give serious SEO juice because too often people forget this element!

Now, before you go and start jamming multiple keywords into your meta-description, imagine you’re a “prospect” searching for information to solve a problem such as a leaky faucet. You type in “How to easily fix a leaky faucet” and discover multiple topics. What makes you select one post over the other? A compelling story!

See below as some of the SEO elements you include upon publication will work to tell (and sell) your story to your prospect.

Publishing on Social Media

Once you’ve written and published some compelling content on your blog, you’re ready to share that story with a larger audience on social media.

Remember, with social media, you’re not just limited to reaching your own followers or you fans. Your followers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn also have a network they can share content with, your goal is to inspire them to share your content to the people you currently can’t reach. While a fan or follower might not share every piece of content you publish, they will share the stories that they find the most compelling to their fans and followers. That’s why it’s so important to make it easy for them to share and forward on content using social media buttons and other tools that make sharing a simple, uncomplicated process.

Remember, a captivating photo or vivid description might just catch your prospect’s eye on these social sites. On sites like Facebook, Digg, and LinkedIn, the information about your content is populated from your meta description, photos, and title that you share upon publication. So, don’t forget to make your story compelling when filling out these SEO elements. You never know who’s eyeballs might spy your content on someone else’s feed.

featured photo by BiblioArchives 

Wanna know a secret?

When digital cameras came into vogue, I was absolutely terrified of them.

I remember being home from college in 2001. It was December in Jacksonville, FL and everyone was showing off the Canon Powershot they’d just received for Christmas. The bar my friends were partying at had an outdoor patio; there were about a thousand empty Rolling Rocks on the ground. I had recently bleached out my hair into a revolting orange color, so when I’d see a camera edging out of a tight jean pocket, I’d hide…or worse.

Sometimes I’d cover my face with my hands like a mole person being showered with natural light.

I looked ridiculous. You don’t have to. Here are some tips on how to take better photos, build your photo confidence and keep your face on camera and out of your hands.

Take More Photos of Yourself

Though I wasn’t very cool in the first place, it was even less cool to lack self-confidence. To get over my fear of being photographed, I started photographing myself daily with my webcam. Though the shots were grainy, I eventually got used to the way I looked on camera. It’s not that I thought I looked good, either. I just knew what to expect.

Over time, I graduated from a webcam to my own digital camera. Though I’ve been known to take several slimming, forehead-first MySpace shots in my day, I also was more confident when I wasn’t in control of the image someone was taking. Instead of covering my face with my hands, I’d face the camera with confidence and fucking smile.

Remember Your Photo Math: 20% Looks, 80% Confidence

Not to sound like a hip cat on an infomercial whose “figured it all out,” but I wasn’t always this photogenic. I also don’t want to sound like one of those culty people who buy books called The Secret, either. I don’t always take great photos, but I would say that I’m happier than most people with the photos that are taken of me. I find this impressive because I’m a heavy person and heavy persons, according to society, aren’t supposed to ever like the way they look.

In fact, I think the last time I checked Marie Claire they were advising people like us to not even cross the room so we’re out of the eye-line of the skinny folk. I obviously call bullshit.

Despite these “flaws” to my physical appearance, I really like the way I look! More often than not people (who are far prettier than me) tell me, “Shannon, you look so photogenic!”  or “Shannon, you take such great photos. [insert dramatic girl sigh] I always look awful in photos.” When these poor distressed people look at me with their dramatic doe eyes, I look at them straight in the eye and tell them it’s all their fault.

It is their fault because taking great photos is 20% looks and 80% confidence. I’ve seen gorgeous girls who look like crap in photos or who cover their face when I pull out my (understandably intimidating) camera. They will always look like crap because they don’t care enough about themselves to try to be poised and happy with themselves.

Ladies and gentleman, you will never be more beautiful than you are at this exact moment. You’ve never been smarter or better or happier than you can be right now if you just loved yourself. Time is forever going forward. Your body is aging. In 10 years you’re gonna wanna remember this moment. So, just fucking smile.

Go Eye Level and Smile

One time I was at a coffee shop when my friend spotted a guy she thought was pretty cute. Admittedly, the guy was an A++++  attractive indie type with a C.S. Lewis book and the easy-going looks of John Hamm. She begged me to be her envoy and send him a message of her affections. She was too embarrassed to be in the room with us when I asked, so I made some eye contact with the guy and when he smiled back, I made my way over to him.

We talked about books for a bit and about drinking blazing hot coffee during the summer and eating cold things in winter. I asked him for his number to give to my friend. He laughed and said, “I’ll give you my number, but it’s for you, not her. After all, you’re the one who seems to be the friendliest of the pair.”

I think of this story when I take photos. I think, “How can I look like the friendliest of the pair?

To look friendly, the important thing is to go eye level with the camera lens and look directly at it (almost as if it was a person).  If you’re a female and have bangs, I recommend turning your bang side toward the camera. This prevents having a big nasty triangle of sweaty forehead botching up the person’s photograph.

Think of something or someone you like. Your eyes will light up in the most amazing way.

Height-Check Your Photographer

Also, check out your photographer. Are they short? I’m a tall person and short photographers take the worst photos of me. I’m a chubby girl with a lot of neck. When someone who is 5’2 takes a photo of me, I almost always look like a breast-covered Sasquatch monster. Not cool.

So, when faced with a photographer who is shorter than me, I always try to adjust myself so that I’m eye level with the camera. This might take a little shlumping on my part. Therefore, I lean forward with my legs spread wide (I usually hide that spare leg behind the clueless drunk person next to me )

-
What are your tips to taking great photos? I’d love to hear them!

When my friend Aaron suggested a group of us get together and mass exodus to the Pacific Northwest for the Sasquatch Music Festival, an Indie Rock festival held in the middle of nowheresville, Washington State, I was dubious. I’m 27 years old and not well-known among my friends as an outdoor enthusiast.

It’s not that I hate the outdoors. I like walking outside. I like eating in the sunlight. I really enjoy a time on the beach. However, my times outside are always book-ended by a shower and a nice warm & soft bed.

You see most of the people who go to the Sasquatch Music Festival are a special breed of hyperactive, crunchy hipsters mostly found in the Pacific Northwest. I’m a southern transplant in New England who believes in air-conditioning.

I’d love to be the type of girl who could just throw on a t-shirt, take a sponge bath and forget all my cares and worries in a pair of skinny jeans and day-glow colored shirt. However, I’m not like that and my friends who were like that aren’t like that anymore.

That’s why we rented a gorgeous rental house right on the Columbia River in Vantage Washington.  While thousands of Spokane kids were rocking the shanty camp towns and rocking the Honey Bucket, my friends were sleeping comfortably in our real beds, cooking Pancakes every morning and soaking in the Hot Tub every night while watching the stars.

After several nights of this posh and cushy festival experience, I soon realized that my relative comfort wasn’t the only reason I felt that Sasquatch was the festival for people like me (read: Old Indie Rockers). While the Sasquatch Festival has its fair share of younglings who threw massive costume parties in honor of Passion Pit and MGMT, I felt quite at home there, too. You see, old indie rockers like me… we still like to kick back and slum it with the kiddos every now and then, too! Sure our insides don’t take the PBR like the used to and we don’t always throw ourselves into the pit and stay there dancing for hours, but we know our fucking music. Fortunately, the perks of Sasquatch don’t just stop with the killer line up.

1.) The Gorge – You may read a hundred blogs before your first Sasquatch experience, but none of them can praise the location of this venue enough. After watching a few shows on the Main stage, I was almost tempted to stay there all weekend just so I could spend more time enjoying the view.

2.) Sandwiches for all! Unlike other Music festivals like Coachella (where sneaking in packs of Beef Jerky is like the Underground Railroad), at Sasquatch all you have to do is pack yourself a wonderful lunch in a clear plastic bag. Every morning our team of Sasquatchers would wake up and make a lunch feast that would last us through 12 hours of music. A gallon size plastic bags will store a lot of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, power bars and cookies. We avoided the $9 dollar chicken strips for all three days and judging from the nastiness you can’t avoid in the Honey Buckets, our insides weren’t as wrecked as those unfortunate Sasquatchers who weren’t packing their own lunches. There are some things you can’t unsee, people.

3.) People in the Pacific Northwest are Happy – It takes a flinty New England to make a blanket statement like that, but people in the Pacific Northwest are just happier than anywhere else in the country. Following my blanket statement, I’m going to make an uninformed assumption and guess that people in the Pacific Northwest are happier because they aren’t afraid to fill their landscape with wind farms. They also have the most delicious cherries I’ve ever tasted. Their farmers markets are better. They aren’t always cold.

4.) A smaller festival means it’s easy to hop from Gig to Gig -  The stages were absurdly close together which meant that it was incredibly easy to bounce from band to band. I heard a lot of rumors that there was a lot of bleeding/sound issues at Sasquatch. Yes, there were some sound problems (Public Enemy’s set got the brunt of the sound fail) but I didn’t have any issues with stages causing sound to bleed.

5.) Proximity to Seattle & Portland & Vancouver. If you’re looking to get to know the Pacific Northwest, it’s easy to plan a nearly perfect vacation with Sasquatch on the itinerary. If you haven’t been to Seattle or Portland, they’re easily two of my most favorite cities with some of the best food, culture, and art opportunities.  If you need an excuse to finally get to see what that area of the country is all about, Sasquatch is the perfect reason to do it.

6.) Chance to see quality indie acts without having to foot the bill for Jay-Z or Muse or some other crap band that needs a lot of money.

Big names cost big money. However, I often feel that by the time a band or musician has “made it big” the quality of their music has seriously deteriorated. At Sasquatch, I didn’t feel like there were any acts just “doing the festival circuit”; many of the bands (with the exception of Steven Malkumus who decided to have a hissy fit during Pavement’s set) were seriously happy to be at the Gorge. I remember one point during Broken Social Scene’s set, Kevin Drew shouted to the crowd of very happy concert-goers, “LOOK AT WHERE YOU ARE! YOU ARE SO LUCKY TO BE HERE.”

….and that’s pretty much why I’m a Sasquatch loyalist now. I can’t wait to go next year because something tells me that this won’t be the last year with a killer line up.