Are you launching a product soon? Well, I am and I’ll be taking you through the product I will be launching and how it will help you in launching new businesses and profit avenues for your existing business. But first, let me take you through some lead generation lessons.

Some time back, I wrote an article about how to generate leads with social media and it is my most read article to date. After seeing the success of that post, I saw the need for an easier and better way of generating leads. So I came up with an idea to develop a product that will make it easy for businesses to generate leads.

Simple Lead Generation:

If you need real simple lead generation ideas, follow these steps:

• Read my post on generating leads with social media
• Get an email marketing/ newsletter software
• Set up a landing page to receive the traffic you generate
• Post a video presentation or screencast to describe what you are about to launch
• Setting up some lead ‘bait’ will do (Just a reminder . This is very important)
  
• Set up a confirmation page for your subscribers
• Continue driving traffic to your landing page to build more leads
• Analyze your traffic to lead conversion ratio and test with new videos and screencasts
  
• Nurture your leads
  
• 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, blast off! Go ahead an launch.
  

Having a high converting landing page will be one of your keys to success. Luckily, I have designed and developed (with some help) a site that will make you convert your traffic to leads without a sweat. It is almost finished and it can be used in many different ways to achieve one result; generate leads.

Before I show you how it will look like, here is what you can use it for:

1. Event invites
2. Webinar invites
3. Beta testing invites
4. Lead generation for product/ service launches
5. Lead generation for blog launches
6. Lead generation for membership site launches
7. and Just any type of lead generation

It will be called the Ultimate Lead Generation Theme. You can see a photo below off what it looks like:

The Ultimate Lead Generation Theme is a site template that will do more than just convert your traffic to leads. It will also help you get more traffic.

Here are the features it will have:

• A video panel; This supports Youtube Videos and Flow Player Videos. Actually, you can replace the video panel with scripts like SlideDeck if you are not into videos.
• Easily Editable subscription form; You can easily put in
• Contact Form (Ajax based); In case your message wasn’t clear, visitors can contact you for more information using this form instead of going away and not subscribing. So this will give you a second chance to try and convince them to subscribe. Also, because it is Ajax based, the page doesn’t load when the enquirer clicks on the “Send” button. This will also enable your visitors to reconsider and subscribe to your newsletter without being taken off the homepage.
• Text section: You can enter a brief information about you or about what you’ll be launching on the site
• Social Sharing Buttons; If you are really interesting, some people might consider sharing your home page by clicking on any of the sharing buttons at the top of the site. If you are lucky, this will make your traffic generation a little easier .

So expect my product to launch soon. It will come in 4 color variations during the first launch. I will be running a competition during the launch so that you can grab it for free. Stay tuned (oh, you can do this by subscribing to the RSS feed) for more. If you have any questions or suggestions, the floor is yours in the comments box.

Are your followers on the social web for real? I ask this because sometimes it seems no one, out of thousands or tens of thousands of followers, is paying attention to anything you say or do. We hear stories of businesses with just a few hundred followers closing sales whiles others with thousands of followers are not able to leverage this and close a single sale.

If your primary aim of using social media is to help and direct people, then you’re qualified to be called a social community leader. That’s the only reason people will pay attention to you; if you lead them.

If you want to direct people to do what you want, take a cue from these 18 tips for social community leaders:

1. Develop synergistic relationships with your community so that they automate your marketing for you. Help them to achieve their goals (solve their problems) and they’ll help you solve yours.

2. Clarify your goals and objectives for each of your social web profiles. If you’re going to sell on one Twitter account and provide support on the other account, say so. Mixing things up is okay but some people find that hard to cope with.

3. Provide feedback to your community. Don’t always take their feedback and testimonials; give them yours. A good way to do this is to share with them the results you’ve got due to their participation in your business. This is a great way to show appreciation to your community and it also shows them that you listen to them.

4. Encourage and participate in discussions by asking questions in your status updates. Discussions often lead to more ideas and better insight of your community.

5. Strive to answer questions thrown @ you in a timely fashion. Huge time lapses reduce the momentum needed for a conversation to start or continue.

6. Don’t be ethnocentric. I don’t know how some people think but I added this one because I saw a terrible example of a status update with ethnic favoritism. Your community might be made up of people from all races so you don’t want to be ethnocentric no matter what you believe.

7. Develop a reward system for people who participate and take action in your social web communities. It doesn’t have to be a scheduled promo. You can give out stuff at random without announcing it. Announce it only after you’ve done it. This will make people start paying attention to you. They may even follow you and put you on a special list if this happened on Twitter so that they can see what you’re up to and take action when you ask them to.

8. Perform a social media audit regularly. This will help you improve your social media campaigns.

9. Brainstorm creative ways you can use to power up your community. Maybe offering freebies, tips and discounts sound interesting but how about adding some creativity to these campaigns?

10. Don’t argue. Drop your ego to a certain level. If you start arguing with one person in your community, everyone else sees it and people will begin to take sides. This will break the community you have worked so hard to build.

11.  Continue learning new ways to improve your community. Learn about online trends and facts so you know how consumers are evolving and also where they are spending more time and money.

12. Marketing Automation doesn’t mean using a bot or other tools to reach your community. Rather, it means you’ve gotten to the point where your community does your job for you.

13. Learn more about content marketing. Content sharing is now a big part of social media and smart marketers are producing more content. It is best to learn about different content marketing techniques so you can reach many people with different content formats.

14.  Strive to be indispensable to your followers. In other words, don’t be the average Joe. That’s too common and people are used to ‘common’. Be a resource.

15.  Explore ways other community leaders are building their communities. There are a lot of creative minds and campaigns out there. Borrow their ideas and mix them up with yours.

16.  Track and measure your effectiveness. That way, you know what you’re getting wrong and what needs to be fixed. Maybe the only person who’s paying attention to you is yourself. You’ll only know when you track and measure.

17.  Don’t share your blog post again and again. Don’t share your promotions again and again in one day. This is called spamming. I hate and so do your followers.

18. Only follow people you deem as qualified for helping you achieve your goals. By qualified, I mean targeted or your target audience. Following just anybody will only make your work difficult.

19. This is a bonus point. After harnessing all 18 steps, rinse and repeat . It’s time to get real with your followers. Just do it (borrowed from Nike )!

Here are some other articles you should consider reading. They are a valuable resource to me and will be to you:

On Managing a Community : ChrisBrogan.com

The Role of Leadership in Social Media: ScottMonty.com

The Power of Community – A Social Media Success Story by Hessie Jones: DannyBrown.me

Sometimes, when I see posts that I love (like the ones I’ve shared), I share them to say thank you. Just an idea for you to use if you know what I mean .

Image Source

Yesterday, I went to Digg’s website and saw a beautiful new look. The design however, looks and “feels” like Facebook’s design. I logged in to my account and found also that the features there closely resembled Twitter. All of this is what they call Digg 4.

The service now has a “follow” and “unfollow” feature. I thought that was cool. I also noticed that when you log in to your account, you are taken to a page where you see all the submissions and diggs of the people you follow.

It also has a suggestion page that shows you a list of people and brands to follow. Just like Twitter.

Before I could say “Jack”, this page came up:

Has Twitter bought Digg or Digg is just copying Twitter? If it’s an act of copying, then Digg overdid it. Twitter has a fail whale and now, Digg is flaunting their “broken axle” page.

I’m still checking it out. I think they did too much copying this time. Have you found any features similar to Twitter’s on the new Digg? It’s like the company has Twitter’s blueprint.

Online video marketing is one part of content marketing that needs to be taken seriously if you really want to effectively communicate your brand online. The best advice most experts don’t give about online video marketing is, “learn to use SEO techniques in your online video marketing campaigns”. Video is getting big and some businesses have been able to go viral with videos shared around the web, especially on Youtube. We’re going to look at how to achieve a similar fate using video SEO techniques.

Even though we will be focusing on Youtube, the process can be applied on other popular video sharing sites.

Now, let’s begin.

The Best Video SEO Advice Ever : 

When you start uploading a video on Youtube, you’ll see something like this:

So basically, you’ll type in your title, in the “Title” column, your description in your “Description” column and your tags in your “Tags” column. These are the three most important areas as far as Youtube SEO is concerned.

When a user searches for a video, results are shown with the search’s keywords bolded in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the results. For example, in the screen capture image below, I performed a search using “flat abs” as my key phrase:

You can see that the search’s term (or keywords) was bolded in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the search. Youtube’s search system delivers results based on the relevancy of the titles and descriptions given to videos, in regard to the keywords or phrases used in the search. This is why it is very important to optimize these areas when uploading your videos.

Your titles, descriptions and tags should contain keywords that are both relevant to your content and also relevant for getting viewers via Youtube’s video search system. This will ensure that you reach lots of viewers to watch your videos whiles staying on topic. It’s a tricky thing to achieve. Don’t twist your titles or descriptions just so you could get lots of views for your videos whiles misleading people with a video that is not directly related to your title and description.

If you find this technique daunting, then the best thing for you to do is to do your keyword research. This will help you find the best keywords relevant to your niche, for your video marketing.

How to find the Best Keywords for your Video:

Let’s make some assumptions here. Let’s assume we’re going to promote a video about getting flat abs and see how we’ll go about doing the research for it. With that in mind, let’s begin.

1. We’ll start by listing keywords that relate to getting flat abs in a text editor. So we’ll have keywords like: flat abs, abs workout, six pack abs, sexy abs, abs fitness, workout abs … etc.

2. Open a tab or new window in your browser and go to Youtube.com

3. Open another tab and go to Youtube’s Ads Keywords Tool

4. Select one keyword or phrase (in our case, let’s start with “flat abs”), then, copy and paste it into the Youtube.com search bar and click on search like so:

5. Next, go to the tab where you opened the Ad Keywords Tool. You can change your country and language settings for more insight and if only you want to target a particular country or language. By default, the country is set to “United States”. Put in your keyword, and then click “Get keyword ideas”. This snapshot will help you understand further:

6. Since I didn’t change any of the settings, this is what I got after clicking on “Get keyword ideas”:

7. From the results, you can see that the search term (or keyword/phrase) is searched 6,200 times a month on average. Mind you, this is the search volume for searchers living in the United States.  6,200 is not a huge number but with the right optimization, you can reap great results from this. Now go to your search results from your search on Youtube.com

8. Analyze the competition by looking at the number of results returned (in the top right corner) for the search term and the number of video sharers using the search phrase in their titles and descriptions. Use this snapshot as your guide:

9. Our results show that there is less competition for the search term as only 5,240 results were generated. Some search terms return millions of results so 5,240 is pretty a good sign that there’s a chance to get many viewers. In the result above, we can see that all the videos have been viewed a great number of times in a short period. Also, we can see that not all the results have the exact search term, “flat abs” in their description and title. An example is the second video result which has just the keyword “flat” in its title and description. Considering all the factors mentioned, “flat abs” is a good keyword.

10.  Let’s move on to our next keyword, “abs workout”. A search for the term on the keyword tool gave the following results:

11.  The results show that 156,700 people in the United States alone search for “abs workout” videos every month. Now if we go to Youtube.com and search for “abs workout”, we will get this result:

12.  Notice the number of times each video has been viewed. Video number one has been viewed over 5 million times over 2 years. The other results are equally as massive. Here’s a snapshot of the competition for this search term:

13. The snapshot shows us that there are 303,000 videos competing for the search term “abs workout”. This is also good (but not great) considering that the term is searched 156,700 times every month in the US alone.

If you want to reduce the competition, and reach more viewers, combine keywords.

The Art of Combining Keywords in Your Video’s Title & Description:

Combining keywords in your titles and descriptions will go a long way to help you get more viewers for your videos. That’s just about how the first video result in our “abs workout” search got over 5 million views in two (2) years. Let’s look at it again and start decoding:

Glancing at the title and description, one will notice that the uploader, “passion4profession” has packed in some keyword combinations. Keywords used in this video’s title and description are: “abs” (US monthly search volume: 613,000. Competition: 422,000 videos), “fitness” (US monthly search volume: 246,800. Competition: 777,000 videos) and “workout” (US monthly search volume: 1,652,800.Competition: 439,000 videos).

Taking a further look at it, examples of keywords that will qualify for search phrase combinations are:

“abs fitness” (US monthly search volume: ? (not available). Competition: 263,000 videos) “six pack” (US monthly search volume: 240,000. Competition: 289,000 videos), “six pack abs” (US monthly search volume: 27,800. Competition:93,100 videos), “abs workout”(US monthly search volume: 156,700. Competition: 303,000 videos).

Now go to Youtube.com and let’s do a little more analysis. You’ll see that when we enter the keyword, “abs”, “passion4profession”’s video shows comes up as the third (3^rd) result.

Also, when we search for “fitness”, the video comes up as the first video result.

Search for the other keywords and you’ll see that the video shows up in the first 20 results. Most of the time, it is ranked number 1.

Having a combination of keywords like that helps spread the competition across different high volume search terms.

Final Thoughts:

• Skim through the suggested keywords to find other words that you forgot to add to your keywords list. You can also use the related search suggestions found right below the search results after you perform a search. Most of these suggestions will do good for your video campaign. 

• Apart from keyword combinations, keyword optimization also works best when you use basic copywriting techniques. This is because your titles and descriptions are just like classified ads and they should sound or look interesting to attract people to view its content.

• Share your website link in your video. Even better, divide the video into two parts: part 1 and 2. Then share part one on Youtube and share the link to part two at the end of your video. This will get people to check out your website, thereby increasing traffic.

• Ask your viewers to subscribe to your channel. This will ensure that you have people ready to view your new videos as you post them.

Conclusion:

Optimizing your video’s titles and descriptions = getting more viewers= getting more subscribers to your Youtube Channel= getting more targeted traffic.  I recommend you start experimenting with your own videos.

If you loved this post, share it and subscribe to our RSS feed.

I’ll love to hear your comments and questions in the comments box below.

There are a number of ways you can reuse your blog and newsletter content. It doesn’t matter how old or new it is. It just needs to be relevant at the time you’ll be reusing it.

Converting your content to various formats allows you to reach many content consumers, thus, boosting your traffic level and conversions. It’s like killing two birds with one stone; in our case, getting more leads with one content.

I’ve divided this article article into three parts:

1. How to Convert your blog and Newsletter articles into PDF;
2. How to Convert Your Blog and Newsletter articles into Audio; and
3. How to Convert Your Blog and Newsletter articles into Video.

By the way, if you need some lead generation and content ideas and haven’t already seen these posts, check them out. They are related to this content marketing related article:

25 Blog or Newsletter Topic Ideas For Company Bloggers

10 Ways to Generate Leads With Social Media

Now let’s look at converting old text content to PDF.

1. How to Convert your blog and Newsletter articles into PDF

PDF documents are popular lead baits for many online marketers. How do you use them in your marketing? If you publish a blog or a newsletter, we’ll be looking at how to convert them into marketable PDFs.

Before we begin, here are tools you’ll need:

• Content
• PDF making software
• Email marketing software
• Retweet buttons
• Graphic design software

Don’t worry if you don’t have any of the tools mentioned above. I’ll show you where to get some.

Converting Blogs to PDF:

There are two ways you can convert your blog into a PDF document:

• The manual way and
• The automated way.

The manual way requires some time to complete but the automated way doesn’t. The manual way is also the best way to convert your old newsletter content into a downloadable PDF document.

We’ll be looking at both methods of PDF creation.

Manual conversion:

Follow the following steps to convert your blog into PDF:

1. Open your text editing software (I use Microsoft Word)
2. Go to your blog and copy some of your best articles and paste them into the text editing software
3. Format your content; text size, alignment, colors, etc. Strategically place the retweet buttons in your content; preferably, on the first page and in the footer of every other page. Save everything.
4. Import your saved document into your PDF making software. If you don’t have any, you can buy the latest version of Foxit Phantom or use Bullzip (free).
5. Design your cover, using your graphic design software. I use Photoshop because you can easily save your finished design as PDF. After designing your cover in Photoshop, save it as a PDF.
6. Insert your cover design into your PDF document just before the first page. If you’re using Foxit Phantom, go to “Organize” and “Insert Pages” on the menu bar.
7. Now you can add links to your retweet buttons. This tutorial from Social Media Examiner will help you do just that: How to Add Retweet Buttons in Your PDF Documents
8. Add other links to your content if you like. Save everything when you’re done.
9. Your PDF is done and ready to be used as lead bait for your newsletter subscribers.

If you think the manual way of converting your content is long and boring, you can use the automated way.

The automated way of repackaging your content to PDF documents works best with blog posts than with newsletter content.

You can use Zinepal to convert your blog posts into PDF. If you want more control over the formatting and design, you’ll need to purchase a premium version of the service.

You can find step-by-step guides on Zinepal to help you in your PDF creation. If you’ve already installed social sharing buttons on your blog, Zinepal shows them in your finished PDF document so you don’t have to go through the struggle of inserting them in your post manually.

You can also use PDF24 if your blog is on WordPress.

Marketing Your PDF

Read this article to get ideas for promoting your PDF: 11 Easy Tips For Better Content Marketing

PART 2: Converting Blog Content to Audio

First of all, you don’t have to convert all your text content to audio. You’ll have to convert your best articles to audio. You can have a schedule for producing audio content. You can record audio content once a week, twice a month, once a month or you can use any schedule that you see fit.

There are two ways of converting text content to audio; the automated way and the manual way.

Services that can help you automatically convert your blog’s content to audio are:

• iSpeech

• Odiogo

• Buzzvoice

These services use text to speech converting technology to change all your text content into various formats of audio so that your readers can download your content and upload it on their mp3 players, their PCs or iPod.

If you want to do the conversion manually, it’s pretty simple too.

Tools you’ll need to do a manual text to audio conversion are:

• PC mic
• A Computer
• Content
• Audio editing software (use Audacity. It is free and simple to use).

The process is simple. All you have to do is to install Audacity on your computer, install your mic and then start recording. After recording, save your audio in different audio formats so that you can share it in different ways and on different services.

Marketing Your Audio Content

1. Upload it to iTunes as a podcast

2. Start your own radio show on Blog Talk Radio

3. Create a blog category for your audio content so that your visitors can easily find and download them.

Part 3 Video post:

Videos are among the most powerful promotional tools you can ever use in your marketing. There is no doubt about that since most of the video sites receive tons of traffic and daily views.

There are a number of ways you can convert your text content to video.

1. You could make video screencasts
2. You could choose to just stand in front of a camera and talk to your audience
3. You could make physical product presentation videos.
4. You could also stand in front of a black board to give a lecture on one of your topics

The type of content you have will determine what video you should do for it.

1. Screencasts are mostly used for on-screen tutorials of how to use a product or service or to explain how something works.
2. Videos where you just stand and talk are better for content that carry announcements.
3. Physical product presentation videos are videos you can use to showcase your company’s physical products
4. Videos where you give a lecture using a blackboard as your aid are great for explaining situations and outcomes. They are similar to screen casts but definitely not the same.

If you want to create screencasts, you’ll need these tools:

• Screen casting software: You can use Camtasia (premium) or Screenr(free)
• PC microphone: To record your voice
• Computer

If you want to create any other form of video, you’ll need a video camera and probably a microphone to record everything.

Promoting Your Videos

1. Upload your videos to video sharing sites like Metacafe, Youtube, BlipTV, Vimeo, etc.
2. Copy the embed codes for your videos and place them on your website or blog.
3. Practice video SEO.

Conclusion:

I hope this article gave you some ideas for your content marketing campaign. The next article I’ll be sharing will be on video SEO (video search engine optimization). I’ll walk you through how to get your videos easily found and watched on video sharing sites like Youtube.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when that post is live.

As usual, your comments and points concerning this article are always welcome and appreciated.

Photo Credit

Do you use content to drive traffic and generate leads? Content marketing has become the preferred means of marketing for many businesses. It’s a great strategy for attracting leads to your business. Blogs, whitepapers, online videos, podcasts and other content forms are there to show us the truth behind content marketing.

If your content is not getting you the results you want or even if you are new to content marketing, there is good news. It’s possible to change.

With that setting the stage, here are 11 tips to help you in your content marketing.

1. Have a goal: When you’re planning your content, set a goal for it. What do you want to achieve with your content? Perhaps, you want it to get you more newsletter signups or more sales for your products. The best way to set goals for your content is to categorize them. For example, you can categorize your content like this: drive traffic, generate leads, generate sales, etc. Delving further:

• List posts: Drive traffic. Traffic may convert to leads
• Downloadable Documents: Increase traffic conversions to leads
• Customer reviews/ testimonials/ case studies: Convert traffic and leads to sales

Categorizing and setting goals like this helps you choose the right words to use to achieve your content marketing goals.

2. Produce enlightening content frequently: The two keywords here are “enlightening” and “frequently”. When you produce great content, people will want to share it and subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. Teach people in your industry new ways to do things. If you disagree with an accepted norm in your industry, produce content to debunk it and share it with top players in your industry.

When you produce great content, people talk about you on their blogs. When you produce great content, your business grows. When you produce great content… the goodies goes on and on and on.

3. Analyze and Proofread: After planning and producing your content, take your time and double check for errors. If you’re unsure of any mistakes, work with someone who is better at spelling and grammar to help you out. Also make sure your content is easy to understand and is convincing enough especially when you are using it as a sales tool or to debunk a theory.

 4. Stack up content ideas: Plan your content ahead of time. This reduces the probability of not having any content to share when you want to produce content. I keep a word document with many content ideas so I’m not often faced with writers block. Stacking up content ideas also helps you write great content because you have a mental picture of what you’ll be writing about.

5. Use different content formats: Don’t only rely on text to promote your business. Use graphics, PDFs, audio, and video. People want to be spoiled with choice when it comes to giving them content. They want to watch screen casts of what you are talking about. They want to listen to your content on their mp3 players. They also want your content on their desktops in document format.

6. Stay informed: Be attentive online. Subscribe to blogs in your niche. Set up alerts on Social Mention and Google to track news and articles with keywords you’ll be interested in. Learn about new marketing opportunities. Learn about new trends. Use the information you collect to keep your content and strategies up to date.

7. Manage your time: Having a time-table or to-do list is a great way to manage your time as a content marketer. Producing great content can take some time so you need to give yourself enough time when you are producing content. Learn how to manage your time so that you’re ready when you feel the urge to create content.

8. Network Effectively: Do you want influential bloggers to link to you or talk about your product? Then don’t just follow and friend them on social networking sites. Most of them won’t follow or friend you back anyway. You’ll have to prove yourself worthy to be talked about by networking properly with them.

Start by commenting on their blogs and joining in their conversations on social media and networking sites. Leave insightful comments on their status updates. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. You can also contribute an article to their blog.

Another great way to network is to use interviews. Interview opinion leaders about the latest industry trends or get yourself interviewed by bloggers.

Networking gets you noticed. When you get noticed, you’ll be talked about on these blogs and their readers will also notice you and talk about you on their blogs.

 9. Do your research: When you’re not sure of something, do some research online. Never add statements and quotes to your content without finding out whether they’re right or not. If you make a mistake with this, people will question the credibility of the rest of the information you’re giving them.

10. Identify and use content aggregators: Some websites are programmed to aggregate and show content from various sources. I call these sites content outlets. These sites will help you reach a larger audience with your content. Some examples are Social Media Today, The Daily Brainstorm, The Customer Collective, Alltop, etc.

11. Think SEO: If you publish text, audios and videos, you have to always think S.E.O. when producing your content. You’ll have to optimize your titles and use the right key words in your descriptions. It’s the only way you’ll reach more people.

Conclusion:

What strategies do you use in your content marketing? Share them with me.

Next week, I’ll start a series of articles that will show you how to reuse your blog and newsletter ideas to generate more leads. You’ll learn new things including video and audio SEO. Subscribe to the RSS feed in order not to miss this.

Photo Source

Do you sometimes forget the ingredients needed to cook up great sales content? Writing quality content is the only way to convince people to buy your products. If you sell soccer boots and just write, “red soccer boots”, next to a picture, all you’ll be doing is showing bones. And that’s scary.

Give your sales copy some skin. People want details so give it to them. You also need sales so here is a simple list to help you remember how to write your copy.

1. Picture your audience: You need to have a clear mental picture of who your audience is, the problems they have and how you think your solution will help them.

2. Talk to them: Not about yourself. Your “About” page is there to say everything about your business. Your sales content is supposed to have “you” and “your”; directly referring to anybody who reads it (in this case, your target audience).

3. Emotions trigger action: People act on two basic emotional principles:

• They take action on their fears
• They take action on their pleasures

With this knowledge, you can use words that spell out your reader’s fears and couple it with the joy (pleasure) they’ll get after using your product.

4. Spill out the benefits: What benefit does your product offer? People read about products because they want to know what it does so add some detail.

5. Spark imaginations: Make your content memorable by sparking the reader’s imagination. Some people read content with half-dead minds so you need to awaken them by taking them to Wonderland. Use phrases like, “imagine you …”, “think about the benefits.” Etc.

6. Where’s the proof?: Has your product helped many people already? Has it won any awards? Are people saying anything about it? Where’s the proof? Show it. It will help you get more conversions.

7. Any offers or bonuses?: Do you have any bonuses to offer? Do you have any discounts? What are they? This is not a necessity but it helps in conversions.

8. Where’s the call to action? Your content needs an enabler and that is what a call to action is for. After reading your content, people want to know what to do next. Tell them what you want them to do: buy a product, fill out a form, etc.

9. Say your last words: Your post script (P.S.) is a great tool for summing up your content. It’s a way of reminding the reader of what they’ll be getting or why they need to act fast.

10. Go over it: Your letter is not perfect yet. Go over it and see if it sounds right. Does it convince you? You can also show it to your family or friends you trust. Does it convince them? To find out, ask them if they’ll take action if they were to be your audience.

All you have to do now is to save this list somewhere and use it when you write.

Did I leave anything out? What do you use to spice up your sales copy? Let me know.

Photo Source

Do you know that communication can make or break your business? Many people think business communication is easy but it really isn’t. There is more to it than just words.

Communication is an essential tool for building your business and brand online. It actually has a direct relationship with content development and content marketing.

If you have an email list and social media community, you’ll need to know how to communicate with them.

In order to communicate effectively, there are nine questions you’ll need to ask yourself:

1. Who is the message for?
2. What relationship do you have with your target audience?
3. What is the actual message?
4. Will your message be useful to your audience?
5. Is the timing right?
6. What barriers are you likely to encounter?
7. What communication channel will you use?
8. What feedback are you likely to get?
9. How will you work with the feedback?

Basically, there are 4 characters involved in the communication process; the sender, the receiver, the message itself and channels.

Many people assume communication as a system that only has to do with words

The roles of the sender include:

• Developing the appropriate message/content for his audience: I once came across a college Twitter account with an update that said something like, “Get 1,000 followers in not time. Click here” or so. Please don’t do this. I was shocked when I saw it.

• Identifying channels for content distribution. Channels include: e-mail, social media and video sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc., whitepapers, ebooks, etc.

• Identifying barriers that may hinder the purpose of the message. Likely barriers include email filtering (to prevent spam), nature of your list (e.g. demographics, income levels, etc.) and language.

• Analyzing response: The kind of feedback you get will let you know how effective your message was. This is an essential part that is actively being considered by both new and old businesses.

As the sender, you have many tasks on your hand and you should make sure to follow through the above roles if you want to be effective. For example, once you identify appropriate channels for certain types of messages, you’ll not have to worry about what type of message to communicate and how to deliver it.

The receiver’s roles include:

• Consuming message
• Sharing message to other people who may be interested
• Giving Feedback
• Doing any other thing the message asks them to do.

The receiver has the magic wand when it comes to sharing and acting on your content.

Your message could be any of these types:

• Newsy
• Sales pitch
• Survey/feedback request
• Tips/tutorials

Messages can serve the following purposes:

• Inform
• Educate
• Convince

Messages can be converted to the following formats:

• Video
• Audio
• Document files; .PDF, .doc, .txt, etc.
• Graphic; .gif, .jpg, .png, etc.
• Regular text/ undocumented text
• Regular speech

Channels are paths for communication; email, social media, telephone, TV, Radio, etc..

The channels I currently use to communicate Sociatic are Q&A sites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Junta42, Social Media Today, Bizsugar, Delicious, Google Buzz, blogs (via this blog and via guest posting on other blogs) etc.

When you identify and recognize the communication process like this, you can easily convince and convert your leads into sales.

Let me know if I left something out.

Do you have an easy means of reminding yourself of what social media is about? There are so many posts on this subject.

I’ve decided to summarize it so you can easily remember it for your business purposes.

Social media is about L.I.F.E. with your prospects on social sites.

Now, let’s define what L.I.F.E. means in social media. I’ll show you what each letter means; of course, starting with L and ending with E.

• ‘L’ is for Listening: Your prospects are out there. Are you listening to them? You can use these any of these social media listening tools: 10 tools for listening in social media.

• ‘I’ is for Innovating: What’s your unique feature? Have you blended that into your social media strategy? Innovation sparks interest. Here is a resource article for innovation: Using social media to drive business innovation: insights from Guy Kawasaki and Target’s Michael Axelin

• ‘F’ is for Friending: Friending means building relationships. You’ve earned some prospects (fans or followers) so the next thing to do is invest in them. Chris Brogan shared some tips on this: Deepen Your Networks.

• ‘E’ is for Engaging: Start conversations about your brand. Join conversations concerning your brand. Be present wherever your brand is being talked about. Kyle Lacy wrote a great article about how to engage: 20 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media.

In summary, social media is about Listening, Innovating, Friending and Engaging with your prospects.

Next time you want to remember what social media is all about, think, L.I.F.E. The meaning will let you draft a better social media strategy.

All too often, businesses choose celebrities to be ambassadors and evangelists of their products. Celebrity endorsements can mean more sales for you but I think it is a short sighted way of marketing because it has some limitations.

I have two reasons why I think of celebrity endorsements as short sighted marketing.

1. People have their celebrity favorites. If you let celebrity “A” endorse your product, I may not be a fan of him and I won’t be moved to make a purchase because celebrity “A” is not my favorite celebrity and I don’t care what he has to say.

Give me celebrity “B” and I’ll buy your product, period! Can you afford to sign a contract with celebrities “A”, “B”, “C” to “Z”? I guess not.

2. Most people know that celebrities are paid to endorse products regardless if they like the products or not. Most of them do it for the money. You’ll have to use another strategy to convince them. I am this type of customer. Give me some real endorsement and I’ll follow you forever.

The best way around these two problems is to use your real customers and regular users of your products as ambassadors and endorsers of your product.

Here are 4 reasons why you owe your customers the ambassadorial right:

1. They give you their money. That’s how your business keeps growing remember?

2. They do your marketing for you by referring their friends to buy your products. Yes, you got that right; it’s called word of mouth marketing.

3. They help you improve because they give you their feedback. The awards for “quality”, “best product”, et cetera, was made possible because of them.

4. They use your product. They bought from you because they trusted you. You also owe them some trust and need to appreciate them. Fair right?

Why do you think Facebook is asking us to share our Facebook stories? Most of us have been evangelists for them and even continue to be. Sharing stories on Facebook means bringing back memories. Memories carry emotions along with them. Emotions sell. It means you’ll be promoting Facebook even more.

I read some people’s stories on Facebook and I thought to myself, “This site is really changing the world in other areas too, apart from business”. I think Facebook made their stories application public (you don’t even need to sign-in or sign-up to read people’s stories) in order to make us all see how they are changing the world and also encourage others to join. That sets our emotions in because they are not things Facebook is saying, it’s what ‘we’ (the users) are saying about what Facebook did for us.

My point with Facebook is that, they have created a category for their loyal fans (or evangelists) to share their stories. This has gotten blogs and other news media to talk about their (Facebook’s) new innovation and more people will jump on board to see what people have discovered/achieved through Facebook. It will also increase loyalty among current users.

Planning Your Company’s own stories:

So how do you choose ambassadors from your customers? Use the people who have already bought from you as your brand ambassador. Contact them and tell them you want 1, 3, or maybe 5 of them to be ambassadors of your brand. Tell them about the benefits and exactly what you want them to do to be considered. Whatever you do, don’t tell them to send an application in.

Tip: Instead of telling them to send in an application with a resume attached, you can organize a short quiz of say 10 questions and ask them to head towards there and answer the questions. Don’t forget to collect their names; email or phone numbers after the quiz so that you know who answered what.  This whole process will let you assess the strengths of your ambassadors-to-be before you choose them.

Things to be considered as useful strengths for brand ambassadors are:

1. Good communication skills; language, grammar, etc.
2. Knowledge about your products
3. A little time to spare after their day job or on weekends.
4. Feedback givers or readers of your blog

After choosing your ambassador, send a message to your other customers and prospects and let them know the criteria you used in making the decision.

Get your brand ambassador(s) a blog on your domain to share experiences with your product and interact with other customers.

Do any of these to allow customer interaction:

1. Allow comments on the blog,

2. Get a Twitter account for ambassadors only,

3. Get a number for them where other customers can reach your ambassador. If your ambassadors are extremely busy during weekdays and can’t take the phone, allow calls only on weekends.

Just get creative. Play with ideas (gosh, I like saying this a lot ).

Treat your ambassadors like celebrities and let them show on their special blog. Put your product ambassador’s picture on your home page and link to their blog from there. Other customers will definitely like to be treated that way. This will increase customer loyalty.

Let your brand ambassador(s) work with your marketing team. They should report to the marketing manager or whoever you deem fit.

Some brand ambassador responsibilities include:

• Gather feedback: let your ambassador(s) help you gather feedback
• Organize meetups with other customers to talk about your product or show off their versions or models of your product. Note that this works best with physical goods
• Report on product updates based on the feedback he or she delivered
• Share their own thoughts and experiences with your products
• Tell other customers what they are enjoying as ambassadors to your product.

Your brand ambassadors should be paid for all their work.

You can pay them back by:

1. Giving them the biggest discounts on your products
2. Giving them some cash benefits
3. Giving them some of your products for free
4. Letting them choose a cause they will like you to donate some of your products or cash to.

Try a combination of these payment methods or add your own.

Five benefits of using real customer(s) as brand ambassador(s) are:

Okay, let’s slow down for a bit. The four reasons I stated for why you owe your customers the ambassadorial rights are the first four benefits you will get from your customers if you make them brand ambassadors.

The only difference is that, there will be more of it; more money in your bank (sales), more referrals, more feedback and more trust. So the last benefit will be:

5. It creates new buzz for your business. People will talk about what you are doing regardless of them being customers or not. Just like what is happening with Facebook stories right now.

Even though you have all these ideas to try out, make sure your brand ambassadors approve of what is included in the contract.

Do you already have a customer strategy? What would you like to add or subtract?

Image Source