I posed a question: Why in the world would I consume YOUR content, implying that in order to earn my attention, you need to provide A LOT of value and be DIFFERENT from other sources of information.

I decided to look into this prediction further to see if I can back it up with the data.

Here’s what I found:

• Growth of internet adoption from 2009 to 2012: 5.2% (Pew Internet)
• Increase in companies which blog, from 2009 to 2011: 35.4% (Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing 2011)
• Budget distribution change of Blogs & Social Media, 2009 to 2012: 133.3% (Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing 2012)
• Marketers who started a new blog or heavily invested in blogging in 2012: 59% (SEOmoz Industry Survey)

 See that? Audience increase of 5%, while there’re at least 7X increase in blogs in the same time frame.

I’ll ask this again: Why in the world would I consume YOUR content?

There’re certainly a lot of benefits to posts with great titles. Not only more people get to read the post, they enjoy a higher click-through rate (CTR) and more social activity, which can positively influence your search rankings. If you ever pay attention to the magazines at your grocery store’s checkout, you’ll see that many of the titles include lists, have something intriguing or surprising, all of which is designed to make you want to buy it. In case of online content, our goal would be clicks, growing audience, and getting some kind of conversion from the reader (e.g., as little as getting their email address to placing an order).

With the clear benefits of catchy headlines, it’s a no-brainer to start using the techniques to make your titles amazing, right? As long as you don’t forget that correlation is not a causation.

As an example, let’s look at the Harvard Business Review’s most popular posts. Six out of 11 are lists. Correlation? Maybe. Causation? Definitely not. List-type posts don’t guarantee that your post will become popular, but given that your content rocks (this is prerequisite!), they might have a better chance.

Our End Goal is Audience’s Commitment

Christopher Penn has recently wrote a post: The Next Big Thing in Digital Marketing. In the post, Christopher writes that we, marketers, should strive not only to become influential (a measure based on the popularity), but to also earn your audiences’ commitment. He writes, “we’d rather have money in the bank rather than exposure.”

I couldn’t agree with this more.

Great titles chase the eye-balls and get more exposure, but my fear is that more and more marketers will abuse this technique. We are not in this profession to become sensationalists — going for the content people can’t resist clicking, but providing very little value inside (we’d lose trust fast!). We’re in marketing for the long haul, to attract and KEEP the audience for years to come, inspiring more brand ambassadors. It’s easier to market when you have engaged audience who’ll consume your content because YOU have published it, not because of the catchy title. Just look at Seth Godin’s posts: they don’t have catchy titles, they aren’t optimized for search, but they GET READ. We’re here for the long haul.

P.S. Just like J.D. Roth made a clever play on “get rich fast” schemes when he created GetRichSlowly.org, I encourage you focus on quality, your audience’s needs, and build your audience slowly!

CONTINUE READING on MarketingProfs.com >

People say “If you build it, they will come.”  Well they did, they came. But once the novelty wore off, what keeps customers from coming again? Coming often?

You do all the right things – great customer service, high quality products/services, friendly environment, decent location… But there are only a handful of customers who would really miss you if you go out of business tomorrow.

How did this happen?

You Need To Standout from Others!

If you haven’t heard of the hotel searching site Oyster.com, you need to check it out. Unlike many other sites in the industry, Oyster does not promote sales. The goal of the site is to help you pick the best hotel for your needs, unbiased by “limited time only” sales or other gimmicks… CONTINUE READING on FirePoleMarketing.com >

There are many tools and frameworks out there to help make your website responsive, but the point of this post is to outline the steps I took to convert my own site, VolinskyConsulting.com, to become responsive.

I Chose “320 and Up” boiletplate as a base for my Responsive Design.

320 and Up defines CSS starting at the smallest device (with width of the screen = 320px, e.g. older iPhones) and works its way up to the bigger screens, adjusting CSS at the following width ‘breakpoints:’

• 480px
• 600px
• 768px
• 992px
• 1382px

The beauty of 320 and Up is its focus on the mobile layout first: background images and elements meant for bigger screens won’t load (would just be hidden), saving some loadtime. (With that said, smartphones/tables will still need to download all of the HTML and CSS code, which isn’t a huge performance hit.)

I defined elements which are NOT essential on the smaller screens.

Left: Full site with "Web Design with Visitors' Experience in Mind" and Right: mobile without it

From the screenshot above (click to zoom in), you can see that the big dark-blue block is hidden on a mobile site. In addition to that, I’m hiding the “Web & Marketing” next to the logo and the descriptive text on the top-right. The rest of the info shows below-the fold on the phone, but my goal was to get green call-to-action buttons at least partially seen.

Luke Wroblewski, in his Mobile First book, pioneered the thought that we all should start with the mobile site to define what REALLY is important for the visitors (i.e. what tasks they came to accomplish). In mobile, we are constrained by the screen size, which forces us to leave only elements which matter. Luke argues that we shouldn’t clutter our Full sites which extra banners and eye-candy, which only distract visitors from their tasks and negatively effect page’s load time.

I defined CSS for the smallest screen size.

I opened Firefox with the Web Developer add-on, checked “Display window size in Title,” selected “Edit CSS,” set my browser to 320px wide, and started editing…

Header, main content area with the column, and then the footer. Everything has to scale down to 320px. I’ve hidden non-essential elements right off the bat and had to put most elements to “width:100%” (keep in mind padding and margins).

As I worked in CSS and saw results in Firefox real-time (btw, don’t forget to periodically save the code), I setup width area indicators. In case of 320 and Up, they are widths between 320 and 480, 480 and 600, 600 and 768, 768 and 992, and finally, 992 1382 pixels. An indicator simply changes the color of the background (or any other element) as I resized browser’s window. It’s very simple to setup, but turned out to be a lot of help as you works thru multiple sizes!

You don’t need to define CSS for 320px with the @media query [@media only screen and (min-width: 320px)]. Instead, you treat that default screen size is 320px.

[Note: if you're looking at my source code, you will notice my minimum width is 220px -- I made a mistake here, it really should be 320px]

I worked my way up to the Full site (992px or 1382px in 320 and Up boilerplate).

Starting at 480 px width, phone/table/desktop browsers will render the CSS defined for them, and this is where you overwrite previously defined styles.

For example, for devices with a browser’s width between 320 and 599px, you might have only had one column. Starting at 600px, you can have two columns, and so on.

You’ve already defined fonts, colors, etc. in the default CSS, where you assumed screen size between 320 and 480px, so there’s no need to repeat it again for other screen sizes: you only define values which have changed.

With the increased screen size, I added back “Web & Marketing,” and other elements, proportionally sized for the given device.

I finished the homepage, and went on to the other pages.

My site is pretty simple and I don’t have many different page types. After finishing the homepage, it took way less time to adjust CSS for the secondary pages.

Besides the general layout areas, I had to adjust:

• image widths (defined actual width for 1003px & up; percentage width with height:auto for the rest - see example & resize browser window)
• form fields (simply making them smaller and dropping input field under the text on smaller resolution – see example)
• WordPress blog (inserted same header/footer as the rest of the site, and then edited some WordPress-specific classes in a separate CSS file)

The whole process didn’t take long — couple of nights for the site, and probably two more for the WordPress blog.

I hope that this quick explanation is enough to get you started. Please ask any questions in the comments or on twitter: @svolinsky!

A tool, which I recommend bookmarking, will quickly generate a Regular Expression (RegExp) for use in Google Analytics to analyze your branded/nonbranded traffic.

Let me know if you have any feedback!

Thanks, Slavik Volinsky

I’m sure there’re add-ons to the browser out there, but the more add-ons/extensions you use, the slower Chrome gets.

Solution: quick hack to setup Twitter as search engine within Chrome.

1. Right-click on the address/search bar in Chrome, click on “Edit search engines…”

2. Scroll all the way down, and type in Twitter for search engine; “tweet” for keyword; and the following URL for the third field:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=%s

3. Close the ‘Options – Search Engines’ tab and try it out!

Simply type in “tweet [your tweet here]” in the address bar to compose a tweet!

This “search” redirect to the following page where you can edit/submit the tweet:

Hope this was helpful!

Follow me on twitter by clicking “follow @svolinsky” button below.

While publishing a guest post on a more popular site doesn’t automatically make it successful, your post gets a bigger audience.

How can you truly engage the audience and make them share it? Have you written blog posts which barely get any tweets or comments?

I haven’t written much, but I did learn something important worth sharing.

Know Who You’re Writing For.

When creating any type of content, e.g. a blog post, marketing copy, subject line or presentation, have a clear customer persona in mind. This ‘persona’ might be imaginary, but she/he will be consuming your content, so clearly address her/his needs. Does your content addresses her/his problems and adds value?

My most popular post to date, “Four Easy Tactics for Becoming a Must-Follow Account on Twitter” (published on MarketingProfs.com), didn’t start as a guest post. I wrote it for my friend, Juan, who provides tennis lessons for kids in New York. My goal was to show Juan (@TennisInnovator) how he can leverage Twitter. That’s all.

It resonated with the MarketingProfs audience and got over 600 shares because many readers do this every day: explain Twitter to those they work with. With a more detailed post available, they now can send it to their clients/coworkers who are just starting with Twitter.

From Vanessa Fox's presentation. Click image to view.

Below are some great resources to get you started in developing customer personas:

• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO by Vanessa Fox
• Why Personas are Critical for Content Strategy by Kristina Mausser
• How to Easily Create Remarkable Content With Marketing Personas by Kirsten Knipp
• Persona-based marketing: Powerful tools for connecting with prospects and customers by By M. H. “Mac” McIntosh

With much more people spending their time online, tradition media trends don’t look great. Who likes to be interrupted by TV/radio commercials, direct mail pieces, or cold calls from telemarketers? Hardly anyone. For some fascinating trends in marketing, see my infographic called “Inbound Marketing Ecosystem.”

TiVo alone is not the killer of a live TV — it is the abundance of set-top boxes, apps, or services connecting our TVs to the internet:

• Roku Box: allows you to watch certain channels / video podcasts, pulled from the internet
• Netflix: gives you ability to watch a movie / TV shows using your game console, laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.
• Hulu: gives an access to TV shows

Podcasts (delivered to your phone) or Pandora (streamed with your phone’s internet connection) are replacing the radio during our commute. Internet and blogs like Huffington Post have replaced many newspapers.

People seem to like that “pull” thing.

According to Nielsen, people in US spend 2.7 times more time on blogs & social media than email. And as “internet generation” grows up, more and more of content will be consumed on a pull-basis. Value for value — we’ll pay for the content we want to support. Directly to the producers — without middle men nor forced packages. For example, a popular podcast “No Agenda” is 100% donation-based. Hosts haven’t became the millionaires, but they do get by.

Leo Laporte, a guy behind TWiT with dozens of different video podcasts, has an option to “tip” him on a website. He gets his yearly salary of $100K from the tips, reinvesting the balance into the business.

There is no reason I should pay for the cable companies’ “packages” of channels I will never watch. I want to go directly to the source!

How to lead in the pull-based market?

The answer is pretty simple: produce amazing content. Customers will find you whenever they realize a need for your products/services/content.

Recently, a comedian Louis CK went direct-to-consumers and topped $1 million in sales while charging $5 per download. He did not care about the piracy and files did not contain any restrictions. Granted, Louis CK had a lot of fans to begin with, but producing really good stuff will get you noticed. It won’t make you a $1 million overnight, but in the long run — it might.

Think of it as “pay-per-like” model

As I understand, with the cable packages, content producers get paid even if you never watch certain channels. With Netflix or Pandora, royalties are distributed per view/listen.

I think, we all should put our best effort every time — like we are getting paid by number of “Likes”, tweets, shares, inbound links, etc.

Imagine if artists wouldn’t get their royalty if a person listening to the song skips or “thumbs down” it?

Imagine if royalties were distributed after you watch a movie. Let’s say you pay $8 per month for Netflix and watched 8 movies ($1 per movie). At the end of the month, you can give a “bonus” to the movies you liked by taking  some royalties away from the movies you did not enjoy.

Adopt this mindset today!

This model would force production of the best content and Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with just a great trailer — movie would have to meet expectations set by it.

If more talented people start following Louis CK, we might see this model in action, but even today, would it hurt to put out the best content in the world?

I took it to the dealer-recommended garage, where they took care of everything in less than 30 minutes, charging me $100, mostly labor (“part” was a piece of metal). My first thought was “since it took so little, can you charge me less,” but I kept quiet. These guys were real pros and had lots of experience fixing similar problems.

If an amateur mechanic was fixing a car and it took him 2 hours, I would think that a hundred dollar charge is a steal. Perception is not the reality!

So, who are these experts?

Experts, by definition, are GREAT at what they do. They truly deliver VALUE. They are worth the money and won’t waste your time (costing you more) on unnecessary things.

There are also fake experts, who are the opposite. They will take your money and will do everything possible to make you think that it was worth it. (Just like an amateur mechanic spending 2 hours on a repair, instead of 30 minutes, would make you perceive he worked “harder,” even though he wasted 1.5 more hours of your time.)

Fake experts will spend their time on writing a 30-page report on what you can improve regarding your website, instead of focusing on getting 2-3 things done which can really move the needle.

Real expert will admit that you’re doing a lot of things right to prevent any further time waste.

Fake experts will never admit that you’re doing things right, and will waste even more of your time.

Experts help you get something improved

Experts get hired to help you with something. If you want to convert more people on your site, a document which tells you exactly how to do it is worthless without an action. Experts will work with you on getting things done, because when implemented, your site will convert more people and you will be so much happier with your investment.

Tom Critchlow of Distilled (SEO consulting) presented about “Getting Things Done” on a seminar in Boston with the primary message: “When dealing with clients, key deliverable is change.” What did Distilled do to address that? They reduced length of documents (not many clients were reading them) and focused on things which drive change: pre-delivering everything, improving processes, training, writing specs, and improving communication.

Their advice is valuable, but when it is acted on, it becomes priceless — making sure you’ll come back for more. Great consultants know that and reinforce the value they deliver.

One thing to remember: what’s the opportunity cost?

In economics, an opportunity cost is the cost of not pursuing the next best alternative with your limited resources (in our case, your time or money). Take value of your time in account when assessing your investments!

Coming back to the car repair example.

If my time is worth $100 per hour:

• Scenario 1: expert who repairs a car in 1/2 hour for $100. In reality, I spent $150
• Scenario 2: amateur repairs a car in 2 hours for $100. In reality, I spent $300. Even if this mechanic charged me only $50, I’d still be better off going to the expert.

How do your investments look like when you account for the hidden costs?