By Steve Shaw|2016-08-03T10:04:25+00:00July 30th, 2014|
This is the second in my series of three free reports (download the first here), helping you to achieve online visibility and build your brand within your respective marketplace.
My first report examined the challenges facing small businesses to build online visibility, given the significant resources it can take to gain traction on social media and to take advantage of content marketing, and the often limited resources available.
If it’s a struggle to keep on top of just one social network, let alone trying to connect with your potential prospects on the others as well, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
By Steve Shaw|2017-09-08T12:32:08+00:00March 12th, 2014|
LinkedIn isn’t just for your resume. If your business is B2B, LinkedIn can be a primary source of quality traffic and leads. It’s another very effective channel through which to spread your brand and your message through content marketing.
In terms of numbers, LinkedIn currently has 277 million users, and 40% (111 million users) check in daily (source). And these are all predominantly professional, business-oriented users. The potential is obviously significant.
In fact, for B2B business owners, it makes for more sense to concentrate resources on LinkedIn rather than Facebook.
Think about how you use Facebook. Facebook tends to be where people go to socialize, catch up with family and friends, and generally switch off from work-related information. As a result, Facebook users can be far more resistant to business-oriented messages. It’s a bit like talking shop at a dinner party – they’ll go talk to someone else.
In contrast, LinkedIn users log on to work. It’s an active, often daily, part of their professional life. They are there to find nuggets of information of value to their work and their business, to build up a professional network, to look for new opportunities. The contrast is a significant and important one.
By Steve Shaw|2016-08-03T09:25:54+00:00March 4th, 2014|
Did you know there’s an easy way to get more visibility on Twitter and increase your Twitter traffic every time someone tweets your content? This simple method potentially increases click-throughs to your site and raises the profile of your business.
So how does it work?
Twitter has a system called Twitter Cards, which allows site owners to take advantage of expanded, media rich tweets whenever someone tweets their content.
By using Twitter Cards for your blog, any tweets linking to your blog posts contain media rich information, and as such are more visually prominent and appealing. This gives you the benefit of increased visibility, more potential re-tweets, and in general helps promote your content and attract more traffic from Twitter.
By Steve Shaw|2018-09-28T04:36:16+00:00February 25th, 2014|
It sounds almost magical. Create content for your business and you create profit for your business. The more content you create – presuming it’s good quality of course and targeted to the interests of your market – the more customers you reach and attract.
Think about how you come across businesses you end up purchasing from. Content on blogs, content on social media, content on YouTube, content via email, and so on.
This is the root of content marketing. You market your business through the active creation of content.
And that content continues to work for you often long after its initial creation. People find it via search engines or via other online links or recommendations. They read it, view it or otherwise partake in it, and this begins a relationship you have with them.
This relationship is further fuelled and strengthened by more content. At some point in that relationship, they may part with their cash and become a customer.
Ongoing communications – yet more content – encourage follow-on purchases. Did you know it can cost between five and ten times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one? It pays to keep in touch.
The issue of course is in how to create all that content to keep your marketing machine all fired up.
The good news is that you don’t have to create it all from scratch.
Presuming you have some content already – and most businesses do – you can reuse and repurpose it in creative ways. As well as opening up new audiences for your business and creating new lead acquisition channels, it also means your original investment in content creation is able to bring even more reward.
Here are five ways in which you can attract new leads for your business using old, tired content.
By Steve Shaw|2016-08-03T09:27:12+00:00February 18th, 2014|
You might be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders, sighing, and ignoring Google+ as “yet another social network”.
Facebook and Twitter are the big boys in town, and you’re already part of that crowd – who needs that new kid skulking in the corner, Google+?
After all, you’ve heard it’s “like a ghost town” over there. (But look deeper, and you realize the only people saying that are usually those no actual experience of using Google Plus themselves.)
So what are the actual figures? In truth, there are now a billion Google+-enabled accounts with 360 million active users, the +1 button is pressed 5 billion times a day, and they’re growing at over 30% per annum. Hardly ‘ghost town’ figures for a network less than three years old.
Yet, it’s still in infancy, and the best rewards in social networks are nearly always reserved for the early adopters. For business, and with Google Plus gaining momentum on an upward trajectory, it’s a wide open opportunity available right now for you to gain a strong foothold before your competitors even realize they were left behind looking the wrong way.
By ignoring Google+, or seeing it as an annoying sidekick not worthy of attention …
Could You Be In Danger of Making a Catastrophic Misjudgement?
Wait until you’re one of the last out the starting gates, and you may find your competitors in virtually unassailable positions, and find you missed the boat in terms of maximizing the advantages for your own business. And, unless you’re in any doubt, there are significant advantages available …
By Steve Shaw|2016-08-03T12:18:54+00:00February 11th, 2014|
The more content you can share that’s relevant to your industry and speaks to the audience you want to attract, the more you’ll boost your influence and authority within your niche.
Why?
The more content you’re sharing, the more visible you become, the more frequently people start to recognize you and your content, the more credibility you attain, the more followers you attract, and so your influence and authority grows.
The problem lies in the constraints on the amount of content you can create, whether financial, time, or other factors. Producing all the content yourself that you need to gain traction on social media and to maintain the consistency required to keep audiences sustained is neither practical nor sustainable.
Fortunately there is an alternative that offers greater benefit … and that’s content curation, which rather than distracting from your own content, serves to enhance, supplement, and add credibility to it. […]
By Steve Shaw|2016-08-03T12:23:34+00:00February 4th, 2014|
Let me take a wild guess. You need more visitors to your site. Or rather, you’d like more visitors who actually want to buy from you. If only you could attract more of the right sort of traffic to your site, you know your business would do a whole lot better.
Am I right? Thought so. Truth is, the vast majority of website owners are in the same boat.
Unfortunately many website owners focus solely on SEO, to the exclusion of all else that would build their traffic in a more solid way for the long term. They then end up completely reliant on their ranking as to whether they’re still in business next week or not.
Not the best position to be in, and a dangerous one too with Google’s continual updates to their ranking algorithms.
The good news is that there are several powerful strategies you can use right now that not only drive more traffic to your site, but drive the right kind of traffic (visitors more likely to purchase). Furthermore, they continue to drive it over the long term.
And, unsurprisingly, content marketing lies at the heart of them.
So, rather than putting yourself at the mercy of SEO, by investing your time and effort in these strategies now, they’re likely to still be driving traffic to your site years from now.
By Steve Shaw|2018-03-26T14:02:32+00:00January 28th, 2014|
I read a post on Google+ recently that mocked another post talking about keyword research, stating it was an old, outdated strategy from 2008 with no relevance to today’s online landscape. While I disagreed with such a quick dismissal of keyword research, it got me thinking.
What actually is the case for keyword research? Is it really still as relevant as it was? What part should it play in today’s content marketing?
By Steve Shaw|2018-03-26T14:53:43+00:00January 21st, 2014|
If only there was a secret formula for making every blog post you write go viral. Of course, if such a formula existed, we’d all be at it, wouldn’t we? Viral would be the new norm and wouldn’t be so great any more (super-viral anyone?)
But there are ways to increase your chances. Even if it doesn’t go viral, you’re still getting your content in front of as many eyes as possible.
The most important factor of course is to have great content in the first place. You need content that gives value in bucketfuls, content that informs, educates, amuses, and entertains. In brief, you need content that screams share me now!
