Writing on the Web from Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Big Mistakes in Content Marketing... 6 Tips on What to Avoid

2009-07-16T07:39:25-05:00

Every month Click Docs asks content marketing experts a key question. I'm always learning something from these experts. Here's the question they ask today: What's the Biggest Mistake to Avoid in B2B Content Marketing?

Be sure to read the post. I'm in good company with Ardath Albee, Brian Carroll, Rebel Brown, Maria Pergolino, and Mac McIntosh.

Here's my tip:

Everyone knows this joke: A celebrity runs into a friend who politely asks, “How are you?” The star takes off on a 5 minute monologue all about his success and his last film. Not completely insensitive, the star stops himself and asks the friend, “Oh, enough about me! How did YOU like my movie?”

It happens in online content marketing when professionals talk too much about themselves, their products, their services and not enough about the problems and challenges of their audience.

In a sense not much has changed in marketing except it’s easier to get your message out to customers. But the message has to be about your readers and their problems. What’s in it for them if they spend time reading your stuff?

First be of service, and don’t waste people’s time. It’s alright to tell a story about yourself or your company, people expect that. But keep the audience first, entertain them and help them.

Nobody cares about you unless you care about them and their challenges. Your job is to inform them and entertain them. If you aren’t doing that well, hire a good journalist who can help with your content marketing.

Recommended reading: The Content Marketing Two-Step Trap

Ardath Albee's B2B Marketing Content Turn Offs

YouTube Video to Watch:

B2B Marketing Fundamentals Don't Change

How to Start a Company Using "How-To" Content

2009-07-13T08:26:10-05:00

An article in the NY Times tells us How to Start a Company (and Kiss Like Angelina). It's well written by Julie Creswell, but it wasn't what I expected.

It's all about a media company called Howcast.com. They have a library of over 10,000 videos on how to do anything - put on suntan lotion, kiss like Angelina, how to survive a bear attack - you name it, they've video cast it.

Big companies place ads or products into these clips that can be posted on YouTube, or all over the Net. This translates into a good media marketing service on many levels. But there's a big lesson here for everyone who wants to do business online.

Here's the content marketing take-away: the number one reason people use the Internet is to get information. Second reason is to be entertained. If you want to start a company, really, figure out what problems you can solve.

Then go onto the Web and produce content everywhere designed to help people. It doesn't matter how you do it, but do it several ways in several places: blog posts, website pages, articles, e-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, AND video clips.

But the first thing to do is discover the need that you can fulfill for your customers. Next would be to brand it, find a clever name that is clear. Then go online to build massive visibility. Become findable.

The biggest item on my to-do list this week is to do 3 video clips explaining how to write content that markets your services and products on the Web. Not how to write copy that sells. How to write copy that helps readers and viewers solve their customers' problems.

What Bugs You About Writing?

2009-07-08T06:57:00-05:00

Barb Sawyer makes a good point. She says this: "Everyone has become a writer, thanks to computers. Often not by choice. Frequently not by training.

"Many people have never been taught how to write with the skill, speed and grace required for the staggering amount of writing they are expected to do.

"Some agonize over choosing the right words. Others become upset when people don’t get what they mean.

"As readers, we get frustrated too, ploughing through long-winded, nonstop emails or scratching our heads in bewilderment."

Barb's doing some research on what bugs you about writing. Please go contribute to her research so she can create a useful ebook to help us all to improve the quality of our content marketing writing. You can post your challenges on her blog post here.

Finding Creativity Juice: Under a cactus in Mexico?

2009-07-07T08:12:51-05:00

Do you love your brain, love searching for a great idea that will grab your readers' attention, and just pull them into reading your blog post or white paper?

Or is the creative writing process like pulling teeth without the novocaine...? For many of the professionals I work with, writing is time consuming, and even painful... like fingernails scratching across a blackboard.

It's hard, slow work giving birth to a piece of content that will solve a problem and entertain at the same time. In a recent Copyblogger piece, The Three Essentials of Breakthrough Content Marketing, Sonia Simone writes:

"High-quality content trains your readers and listeners to keep opening your stuff. It rewards them for doing what you want them to do. That means that every piece of content you write has to either solve a problem your audience cares about or it has to entertain them. Preferably both."

Sheesh. I know what you're thinking. "I'm a consultant, coach, ... expert in xyz, not Hemingway!"

I'm not either, but what I've learned about writing on the web and content marketing isn't rocket science.

I struggle with finding things to write about on this blog. I've written a ton of information here about writing great newsletters and blog posts, as well as white papers and articles to increase your visibility. Sometimes it feels like I've already written as much as I have to say. There's nothing new, it's been done before.

But then I remember that people forget and new people come to visit all the time. How can I keep my blog posts fresh and interesting?

The whole point is not to become a Pulitzer-prize winning writer. It's to excel in your niche, doing what you love. You can't do that without clients and finding clients online is done through quality content.

Attract with content, build a list with content, sell an information product, and eventually sell your big-ticket services or products.

So what are the best ways to get going, to find an idea and craft quality content? I share with you here what I went through this morning.

I've been up for an hour and a half and it took me an hour of web surfing to come up with inspiration for this post. I'll spare you some of the details, like trying to get out of bed without waking the kitty, pouring a hot cup of Cafe de Olla, squinting out at the bright sun coming up over Lake Chapala ... I digress.

Find out what others are talking about. Open up the Internet and go to an aggregation site where you can get the latest news. Choices: any news site, Twitter, any social site, or your news feed reader to look at your favorite blogs. I use Alltop.com, and in particular my own Alltop page where I can aggregate my favorite blogs on a variety of topics.
Look outside your field. You may find something inspiring in your field of expertise. But I often find an inspiration in an outside topic, then find a creative way to apply it to a niche.
Find relevancy to your audience. After spending some time reading other people's blog posts, come up with your own unique spin, and write it on your own blog post. Save as a draft and re-read it and edit it after letting it rest for a while.
Edit twice, for relevancy plus entertainment value. Re-write your post with fresh eyes, usually later in the day. This will ensure that your writing is sharper, removing excess words, adding brilliant metaphors, or new material to make it more relevant to your readers.

The creative writing process is a mix of right and left brain activities. That's where the problem solving and entertaining parts are developed. And that's why I use two different writing times. One for creativity, and one for checking problem-solving relevancy. It's hard to do both of these tasks in the same writing session.

Actually there are three important writing phases:

The web-searching for inspirational ideas
The first draft writing for getting the ideas down
The second draft editing for relevancy and entertainment value

You can also edit once for entertainment value, and come back later for problem-solving relevancy editing.

Let me add here, just for entertainment value, the following story about living in a foreign country (Mexico). It turns out that people who live abroad are better at problem-solving and creativity!

This is the article that inspired me to write this post. It no longer seems that relevant to what I've said here, but my point is this:

When you are inspired because of a news article, that inspiration may not actually fit into your content piece. But there are universal principles that apply to any niche, any field. Find out what those nuggets are and write about them.

Here's the Scientific American article that triggered this post:

For the recently graduated or retired—or those who have some unexpected free time thanks to the recession—consider the benefits of an extended trip abroad.

A study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found evidence that living abroad enhances creative thinking.

Researchers tested the creativity of business students. Students were given a candle, box of tacks and matches, and were told to construct a way to attach the candle to the wall, so that wax would not drip on the floor.

And it turns out that the length of time spent living abroad is a significant predictor of coming up with the most creative solution.

But, it was only living abroad that rewarded students with increased creativity. Two weeks of hostel hopping don’t count.

And it’s not that creative people are more likely to live abroad. Access to different culture and novel ideas increases both new ways of problem solving, as well as the willingness to actually apply novel solutions. Such as emptying the box of tacks, hot waxing the candle to the box and then tacking the box to the wall.

So here’s to science for bolstering the argument for living in Costa Rica until the recession is over!
—Christie Nicholson

Change that from Costa Rica to Ajijic, Mexico! The next time you wake up and your head feels like the desert, look for the hidden fruit under the prickly spines. Find your juice.

White Papers: A Key Piece of Your Content Marketing, Especially Offline

2009-07-02T07:14:45-05:00

I'm working on a white paper for one of my long term clients. I had a flash back: it reminded me of my first journalism assignment when I was a cub reporter for the San Diego Union Tribune. That was 50 years ago! I feel like I've come full circle back to my first job and first love: writing about people.

If you don't have a white paper you can use for your marketing, think about doing this. My client has plenty of web pages up and does a superb e-newsletter (I know this because I help him with his!)

But as he says, "My clients are CEOs and high-level directors of companies. They don't spend much time online. I need something tangible, printed, that I can leave behind after a meeting, or send to them before."

He's an executive coach who needs to impress the top leaders who give the go-ahead to corporate coaching programs.

Maybe you're in a field where the smart people are doing research online, but could be if they hire or buy your programs, there will be a face-to-face meeting. This is why it's essential to have something printed like a white paper to leave behind, that can get passed around to other influential stakeholders.

A couple of years ago I did a teleseminar on how to write a white paper. (In a minute, I'll give you the link to download the transcript). There's a lot to it. It's like a combination of interviews, background research in your industry, and persuasive stories and is a key piece of your content marketing.

The key is to find a good writer to do the work, preferably one with experience and knowledge in your industry. Fortunately, I was working as an executive coach at one point in my career and my background in psychology helps.

The first thing I did was to do a Google search for white papers about executive coaching. Find out what others have written about the field. In this field, there are a lot of published papers already, many of them seriously covering the topic from soup to nuts. Very few of them were easy to read, or written in a way that was interesting. This inspired me to not write like that.

The problem with writing a paper designed to persuade is that you don't have specific knowledge of who your reading audience is, just a vague assumption that they're in the field and are very busy professionals. Using that assumption, you must make your writing concise and to the point. Don't waste anybody's time.

Most white papers about executive coaching have been written by academics: they're full of research and references to the "literature." They go way into the background, the who, what and why the coaching field has developed. While they may be full of facts, there is little to appeal to emotions.

Busy executives want the bottom line. They don't care about the research literature as much as they care about stories from real people who experience coaching and companies who get bottom line profitable results.

I followed this outline:

Grab the readers' attention using a negative story of a typical problem
Stimulate desire using positive stories of really good results
Reinforce with reasons: facts, statistics, and logic
Close with an appeal to heart as well as head

I used stories from my client's own experiences to illustrate clearly what it is they do, and what kinds of results they get. There are plenty of quotes from their clients. I wrote it in a neutral tone, much like a newspaper interview so that it does not read like marketing hype.

In white papers I've read in other fields there is often too much "marketing speak," too much that is complimentary, which destroys credibility. There's not enough appeal to "what's in it for the reader," and nothing to address possible objections that readers' will be thinking.

Maybe companies should hire more journalists to write their white papers, rather than give the task to their marketing people.

What do you think? Do you see a white paper as being an important content marketing piece to have? What do you send or leave behind?

Want to know more about writing white papers? Read these posts...

A while back when I was doing teleseminars as The Blog Squad, I interviewed Michael Stelzner, who wrote the book on how to write white papers. You can get the transcript here:

Download WhitePaperTranscript

Download Freelance-white-papers MP3

How Chip Scholz Gets Content Marketing Right (even if it hurts...)

2009-06-30T06:59:00-05:00

On a recent post about leveraging what you know to help other people online, one of my favorite clients, Chip Scholz, commented:

Great post, Patsi. Thanks for reminding me of the power of writing, and of delivering great content. I find writing extremely time consuming and almost painful! How can I find ways of making it easier and less time consuming? Do you have any suggestions on resources (other than you of course!)

Time consuming and painful, ah, yes. And the pain is where, exactly? I'm a doctor, but help me out here, Chip. I'm a doctor of psychology, so if the pain is anywhere in your body, you've come to the wrong place.

Chip's off speaking, consulting and coaching somewhere, earning big bucks doing what he does best, so I'll have to work with what's showing on his web pages. I'm going to answer his question based on his content marketing.

What I'm seeing for Chip's online visibility is content marketing on the following pages:

Website: ScholzandAssociates.com
Blog: Leader Snips
Book landing page: Selling for Geniuses
Twitter: ChipScholz

Chip has 20-30 web pages with content about leadership development, strategy, executive coaching, group coaching, assessments and his keynote speaking availability. All pages are content rich.

He includes written text, video clips and photos of him in dynamic poses that are fun. All in all, his web image is dynamic, interesting, and credible.

For example, Chip writes about the business books he's reading here: What's Chip Reading. These are informative and interesting book reviews. What kind of results does he get for all this writing? I'm sure he gets traffic from web searches. I'm sure he impresses readers with his knowledge and credibility.

Time consuming? You bet it is. My challenge for Chip, is how can he make this less time consuming and still get the results he wants. Especially since Chip says this is somewhat painful for him to do...

A key for all writers, reluctant or not, is to write in fewest words possible. Get the key points across, but don't info-dump. Not that Chip does that. But we all have a tendency to brain dump when we're interested in a topic.

If you spend too much time writing, and you don't enjoy it, there are two solutions:

Hire someone to do it for you
Learn to do it quickly and/or in an abbreviated fashion

How do you learn to do this in less time? Study someone in your field who has good content online that is brief but effective. And learn something about keywords and keyword targeting.

This will help you focus your pages on a limited number of keyword phrases for better search results.

But don't stop there. Since many visitors come through Twitter and other sites, bypassing the search engines, you'll need to make sure you have your blog posts fed into Twitter and Facebook, at a minimum. But you can also frequently update your social networking sites using keyword phrases and link back to your book or assessment pages, whatever you are promoting the most at the time.

Chip Scholz has great content and he is doing great content marketing: web pages, blog pages, he's got a great book just published. He uses my Content for Coaches services for content for his newsletters. Now he needs to focus his use of keywords and get traffic through focused content.

Chip could hire a professional writer or editor to help him with his content marketing, but barring that investment, he could be sure to focus his writing on certain words according to the traffic he wants to attract.

For example, right now, with the newly published book Selling for Geniuses, he needs to write more posts focused on that topic. Should be easy to do given there's plenty of content in the book to pull from.

Furthermore, since this book has multiple authors, there are ways to get them to post and link back and forth and between each other's sites, further building 'link love' which Google loves. That should help page rankings and search results. Commenting on other blogs is also a good way to reach out and get found.

When's the virtual book tour for Selling for Geniuses? Can hardly wait for that, it will surely generate interest, traffic, leads.

Chip's comment on this blog piqued my interest in what he's doing with his content marketing, and led to this post. I know all this is time consuming unless you're lucky enough to find a brilliant virtual assistant with smarts who can do some social networking posting and commenting for you...

Any V.A.'s out there? Opportunities abound for the right people at the right price...

4 Ways to Keep Your Brain Healthy: Think Heart, Eat Happy

2009-06-29T07:08:48-05:00

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Lake Chapala Society about "4 Ways to Keep Your Brain Healthy." As a former psychologist, I have a passion for sharing what neuroscientists are discovering about the brain.

The four areas you need to pay attention to for your brain are mental challenges, cardio exercise, healthy diet, and happiness. I call this the "Think-Heart-Eat-Happy" brain program.

The most important thing to do for your brain, at any age, is to get regular physical exercise that raises your heart rate to around 60-70% of maximum. This will elevate levels of BDNF: Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor, a protein that is crucial for the growth of neurons and their communication networks. It's called "Miracle Gro" for the brain, it's that important.

Studies show that excercising as little as 3 times a week for an hour over a six month time frame will increase brain volume. You'll learn better and faster. So get out there and get your BDNF levels up!

But you can't ignore the 3 other areas of brain health: a healthy Mediterranean diet, mental challenges, and being happy. Lower your levels of stress and anxiety. Increase your levels of happiness.

Harvard Business Publishing has a series of blogs on their site with good information about all sorts of things. Here's a recent post on 7 Ways to be Happier at Work by Jeff Stibel, Harvard Business Publishing Conversation Starter blog.

Smile
Stop worrying
Take a break
Do things differently
Stop managing and start leading
Delegate
Have fun

I'm all for that. Gotta go play tennis right now, catch ya later!

Do You Understand the Archimedes Effect?

2009-06-25T07:33:43-05:00

I love my job. My boss lets me play tennis everyday, as long as I get my work done. I'm joking, of course, since I'm self-employed. I really do have a dream life. So how can you do the same thing, leverage what you know, teach it to others, and make money working from home doing what you love?

Today I read about the Archimedes Effect from Chris Brogan, who's new book is called Trust Agent:

The Archimedes Effect

Understanding leverage is what separates the hobbyists from the professionals. Do you understand how to take what you’re doing in one instance and extend it out into something bigger or better elsewhere? This is what brought Madonna from just another singer into being a worldwide brand.

Leverage is behind all the most powerful people in the world, but it all starts somewhere. Gary Vaynerchuk leveraged his wine store into his video project and took that into his media project and his book deal. Gary bleeds leverage.

Do you understand the Archimedes Effect?

Got to get the book to know more about this. Chris is a genius of a nice guy who's generous about sharing what he knows to help people make money doing what they love.

What Do You Know that Could Help Others?

How can you make people's lives better? What do you know that would save them time, energy or money? What have you been doing and learning your whole life that you could now turn around and show others how to do?

I've been writing most of my life. I am a nonfiction business leadership content writer with a specialty in psychology. I write newsletter and blog content for executive coaches, organizational developers, and leadership consultants.

It doesn't matter what field you're an expert in. It can be nuclear physics or dog grooming. Everywhere there are people working in fields who could use some help. They all want better work lives, more fun, more time, more money. What do you know that could help them?

How can you leverage your knowledge? Several ways, actually. You can help people one-on-one, or one to many. Or you can help the helpers who are helping them one-on-one and one to many.

By far, the most leverage comes from helping the helpers.

By that I mean, you can take your knowledge, write content, and sell it to the people who need content for their newsletters and blogs. That's how I do it. That's how others are making money online writing for a living. It works best when you leverage your writing by selling it many times over.

Write a non-exclusive, in-depth article in a niche
Sell it to several other experts for their newsletters and blogs
Repeat

Does it work? You bet. I've been making money online since 1999 doing it. I will celebrate the 10 year anniversary of my company Content for Coaches and Consultants in September.

If you're interested in learning how to do this, send me an email. I could easily put together a teleseminar to explain how to do this, if enough people were interested.

[If you enjoyed this post, leave me a comment, and be sure to subscribe in the upper right hand corner to get email updates of new posts.]

Don't Forget Facebook: Here's a Big Source of Readers

2009-06-23T08:56:58-05:00

I'm really upset at the recent article about Facebook over on Copyblogger. Here I've been spending valuable and scarce free time over on Twitter, ignoring Facebook. Now I've just found out I might be missing a crucial traffic builder.

I'm not completely missing the boat, I do have some presence over there at Facebook, just not visiting it daily. My blog posts and twitter updates are automatically fed into my Facebook page. It's a good thing, too. Turns out there's a huge pool of potential readers on Facebook and we need to be nurturing them too.

Go read this article and make up your own mind about where to spend your marketing minutes...

How Facebook is Gunning for Google (And Killing SEO) by Mike Wasylik

(And for those of you who care why I've been so absent on blogs and emails lately, I've been in an intensive Spanish course for the past two weeks. It's beginning to cramp my work and play time, and anyone who knows me will understand that my time on the tennis courts is sacred. You can shorten my work day, but don't you dare try to shorten my tennis time. Something has to go, and it's my time spent blogging, tweeting and surfing other sites ... Pero hablo bien Espanol ahora!)

Best Tip for Using Twitter?

2009-06-18T12:32:11-05:00

What is your one tip on how B2B marketers should leverage social media? This is what I was asked by ClickDocs, a great source of information on content marketing. You can read other insights from other experts here. Here's my answer:

Small business professionals who want to attract people for their products and services through Twitter often start off on the wrong foot. They look at it and answer the question, “What are you doing?” Who cares?

Start off by doing a search for keywords in your field. Use the search button at the bottom of the page and type in “Need help with …XYZ” and see what comes up.

On any day, people are asking for help with things on Twitter. You can answer their questions, refer them to your blog, and offer to help. Be sure to follow them when you do.

The next thing you need to do is set up alerts for keywords in your field. I use TweetLater.com. Every time someone is tweeting about my area of expertise, say content marketing, or leadership and executive coaching, I get an email alert.

That way I can respond to their tweets and be helpful. I can also stay informed of the latest buzz.

Small business professionals who want to attract people for their products and services by using Twitter should use two important features:

1. Use the search feature on Twitter. You can use the words your prospects might be using. Go ahead and try it. You’ll be amazed at how many opportunities there are for helping other people.

2. Set up alerts for key words in your field. That way you get email updates each time someone talks about your area of expertise. You can find people in your field or prospects and then follow them. You can use a Twitter alert service through TweetLater.

Twitter is only as good as you make it. Don’t tweet like this:

• “I do executive coaching in Podunk, CA.”
• “I write web copy for you.”
• “Best real estate property in the state.”

Be Helpful

Focus on others, what you can do to help them. Act like you’re a new arrival in a cocktail party. Don’t try to draw attention to yourself and your business. But be sure to be helpful by sharing where they can get helpful information to help solve their problems.

I’ve got my blog posts set up to feed automatically into Twitter by using Twitterfeed.com. I blog most days, or at least every other day. People see my tweets on Twitter, and click to read my blog posts. It’s a major source of traffic to my blogs. People from Twitter are more likely to leave comments on a blog.

Since this is done automatically, I don’t spend any time on this. Apart from that, I read my TweetLater alerts in my inbox. I go over to Twitter when I see an alert and I can respond or re-tweet something helpful.

Sometimes strangers will see one of my blog posts they like and re-tweet the headline with the link. Be sure to thank them and follow them, since they are a great source for you getting known. Be sure to re-tweet other people’s good blog posts too.

Ask for Help

When I was about to write this tip, I used Twitter to ask others for their best tip. Here are two responses I got:

• @xposure (Nigel Lamb)@Patsiblogsquad: Use the search for keywords. Answer questions that are your area of expertise. Recommend others, so they return the favor.

• @leeodden (Lee Odden) @Patsiblogsquad: Search twitter using queries that describe prospects in a state of need & be helpful to them.

On Twitter, I asked people how they would answer the question “What is your one tip on how B2B marketers should leverage social media?”

Just imagine how you could create content for articles, blog posts, and white papers. The next time somebody says, “Twitter? Who’s got time for that?” you’ll know why it’s smart to use social media sites for growing your business.

Patsi's on Twitter, click here and follow me!

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