Social Media Marketing is still relatively new and we’re all still learning how best to use it for our businesses.

The Profile Photo Faux Pas

Sam recently wrote a very comprehensive post on the importance of completing your social network profiles. I’d like to add a plea to use a profile photograph (also known as an avatar) that gives the message you really want it to. Cute animals and family groups are fine, but only if you don’t intend to use that profile professionally. And while logo avatars are suitable for company pages, owners of small businesses might be better off using a photo of themselves if they are the recognised ‘face’ of their brand.

I’ve been using the same avatar on all my social media profiles since I set them up back in 2007. While I may not look exactly like that photo any more – people still recognise me from it when I meet them at networking events for the first time. Would they recognise you from your avatar?

The Lack of Consistency Clanger

In order to get good results from social media marketing, stay on message and deliver tweets and updates on topics relevant to your audience. While it’s certainly a good idea to voice your opinion on occasion, try to avoid using your blog as a platform to post too many personal rants. We’ve spoken many times on the need to publish blog posts and email newsletters regularly. This can be made easier if you have a plan and use an editorial calendar, not only for blog posts but for all your social media updates.

Having a plan would result in fewer profiles being hastily set up on the latest networks and promptly abandoned. Or perhaps an initial flurry of activity followed by nothing at all for weeks or even months. If you aren’t ready to use a particular social network, then don’t publicise it on your website or blog. That’s almost worse than not setting up a profile in the first place.

However, it’s important not to become too noisy either. Tweeting or updating every few minutes will annoy your followers. No-one has that much good stuff to share, nor do people have that much time to read it all.

Other Assorted Social Media Clangers

Self promotion and little else becomes a turn-off after a while. For example I find that the links shared by some people always go through to a website home page, sales page, an ‘under-construction’ page, or to an error message. Their links don’t lead to content of value to my followers, so I rarely feel inclined to share them.

Tweets which are too long to retweet won’t be retweeted as often. It takes time to carefully edit them down to be within the required character count. If you want people to be able to retweet you, make it easy for them. Keep the character count down to 110-115 to allow for your RT @name and any link to be included.

Too much automation and not enough conversation. While many social media tools are free, that doesn’t mean everything should be set up to run automatically. You still need to work at social media and chat with people if you want to form any kind of relationships online. Being ‘social’ means sharing, liking and commenting on other people’s stuff too. It’s a two-way street.

A lack of social share buttons on a blog can mean missed opportunities. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to read a really good article, want to share it with my online followers, only to find no social sharing buttons to click. Fortunately I have Buffer and Hootlet (from Hootsuite) installed on my Chrome browser, but even the free WordPress.com and Blogger platforms both provide sharing options, so there is no excuse!

What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen small businesses make using social media? 

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdrumthump/3214172131/

If you’ve only recently started exploring social media marketing tools to promote your business online, the terms ‘Content Marketing’ and ‘Copywriting’ may not mean a lot. They could just be terms you’ve heard of or read about. The aim of today’s post is to define what they are and suggest how to use them both to get better results from your online marketing.

And if you’ve been blogging and networking online for a while, there may be still be tweaks you can apply and benefit from.

Sam and I recently gave a short talk to the Chichester Chamber Breakfast Group where we shared an overview of the importance of Content Marketing, what it is and suggested quite a few different ways to create it.

Our definition of Content Marketing is this: it means moving way beyond having a brochure or other way of offering information about your products & services. It means delivering best practices, case studies, success stories, thought leadership – anything that will help you become a trusted resource for your customers and prospective customers. 

Content marketing will help you build credibility – as someone who knows what they’re talking about; build trust – as you share tips and successes; build your brand reputation – as you’re seen to be a part of the online networks and communicating with other respected persons.

Content marketing will help you generate leads for your business and nurture them until the point of conversion. But only if the content you provide is of high quality and useful to your prospective clients.

So where does Copywriting come in?

My definition of Copywriting is that it’s the way you put together your content in order to encourage the consumer to take the action you want them to. This means that online Copywriting can apply not only to webpages and blog posts, but also to podcasts and videos. After all, you still need to put together the words to record.

Professional Copywriters command very high fees because their copy is so effective. They’re the people who write the sales pages you read on websites – the ones that have you reaching for your credit card – and taking exactly the action they want!

But most content should not be a blatant sales pitch! If it is you will quickly feel the cold draught of people leaving your blog, unsubscribing from your newsletter, unfollowing and defriending you. That’s yet another skill of a great copywriter – their copy is very subtle indeed.

However most of us can’t afford to hire a professional copywriter. So we need to learn how to write (create) the content ourselves, in such a way that we get good results too. Copywriting areas to pay particular attention to include:

Headlines – these are possibly the most important part of copywriting to learn to do well, and we’ll be devoting a new post to this topic very soon.

Structure and readability – you want to guide your reader and present content in a way that is easy for them to understand. Doing this will encourage blog visitors to stay on your site for longer.

Relevant Content – Give your newsletter readers and blog visitors the kind of good quality content they’re looking for and keep them happy!

Rapport Building – Your online articles and updates may be the only way you connect with some prospective clients, so the tone of your copy is an important part of forming a relationship with them.

Call to Action – This is the part of copywriting so many people either forget or get wrong. What do you want your reader or visitor to do next?

If you found this post interesting, don’t forget to register for next week’s free webinar : “How to Write so Your Web Visitors Do What You Want Them To!” 

 Further Reading:

What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Copywriting?

Copywriting vs. Content Writing: What’s the Difference?

I understand because I do it too, or at least I used to before learning that a few extra checks meant more people would read the post, be encouraged to leave a comment, and hopefully hang around to explore the rest of the website. Here are a few of the checks I do.

Readability

• Your post should be structured to make it easy for the reader to follow. If you go off on tangents or start rambling too much, people may not read to the end.
• Take a couple of minutes to read your post out loud. This really is the only way you can find out if it ‘flows’, and you’ll also pick up any previously overlooked spelling and punctuation mistakes.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs short.
• Make use of sub-headings to separate sections, break up blocks of text and allow your reader to get the gist of the post without having to read it all.

Purpose

• What do you want your reader to do after reading the post? Every post should have a Call to Action, but one that isn’t a blatant sales pitch. For example, we often ask people to comment or to share the post with their social media friends if they enjoyed reading it.
• What do you want your reader to take away? Provide helpful tips or how-tos, especially on topics that you know people are searching for (a bit of keyword research is a good idea here).
• Of course you want to promote your products or services too! This can be done in a more subtle way, like the hyper-linked text in the point above.

Attraction Factors

• The heading is the number one way to make people want to read your post. All too often it’s treated as an afterthought, but actually needs more attention than the main article!
• Images are important too. They provide a visual ‘lift’ to blog posts and any block of text. Remember to make use of the SEO opportunity and add a strategic ‘ALT’ tag.

Carrying out the above checks before publishing each post won’t take long, but they will make a lasting difference to the response you get from your blog.

For a more in depth and technical checklist, take a look at this article and free pdf download from blogger David Risley.

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Here are a few of the benefits we’ve discovered and hope will encourage you to set up your own Editorial Calendar.

1. Avoids the “What Shall I Write About Today?” syndrome and helps you stay motivated to sit down and produce new content.
2. Enables you to tie in your blog post and newsletter topics to specific marketing campaigns.
3. See at a glance if you’re focusing too heavily on a particular topic or category, and also if you’ve been neglecting others.
4. Enables you to produce content ahead of publication time to allow for breaks, taking holidays, and any unforeseen circumstances which may get in the way of regular content creation.
5. Planning ahead means you can target special events and holidays, as well as refer to forthcoming product launches and special promotions.
6. Gives you the opportunity to forward plan and schedule tweets and updates to Facebook & LinkedIn and other networks, because you know what to put in advance.

How to Create Your Editorial Calendar

As with most business processes, the simpler it is the more likely you are to use it.

The humble Spreadsheet is ideal for creating and using as an Editorial Calendar. If more than one person is involved in creating content, then consider using a Google Docs spreadsheet that you can share and jointly contribute to (as Sam and I do).

A useful PlugIn, if you use WordPress, is WP Editorial Calendar

For more ideas & further reading:

The Right Content Strategy Tools Create Better Content

How to create a successful Editorial Calendar

No matter how many followers you have on Twitter, friends or fans on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, Email Marketing is still a more direct way to get people’s attention. That isn’t to say you can afford to ignore social networking, because you can’t. But the different media will complement each other and work well together.

There are many ways to build a list of email subscribers, although we would strongly advise against buying a list as we covered in previous posts. Building your own list needs to be a priority objective if you want to take advantage of this very cost effective method of online marketing.

Try different ways to encourage people to subscribe to receive your Email Newsletters and marketing messages

Business Card – Use the reverse of your card to promote the free give-away available when people go to your website and fill out the sign-up form.

Email Signature – Add an invitation to get your free give-away to your standard email signature. This is easy to do both in Microsoft Outlook and if you use a service like WiseStamp (for GMail, Hotmail, etc.) Here’s a screenshot of mine:

Article Marketing – When you submit articles to other sites and to article directories, use the link in your Resource Box to take people to a page that tells them about the benefits of signing up to your list, and has the form there too.

Blog Posts – Within the body of your blog post, occasionally make reference to an article which is only available to subscribers and provide a link to the sign up box. Take care not to overdo this tactic as you don’t want to upset your blog subscribers!

Facebook Page – Don’t forget to provide a sign-up page linked to your Email Service Provider (as we have – see below) for fans to subscribe to receive your email newsletters and messages. If they already like your page, they’ll want to get more of the good stuff you share!

Here are a couple of general points to bear in mind when creating the sign-up forms, that have been proven to increase willingness to subscribe.

Keep your form as short as possible: just email address and first name are really all that’s needed in most cases. If you make the form unnecessarily long with lots of ‘required’ fields, people are less likely to sign up as they may be reluctant to provide too much detailed information about themselves.

Also, reassure them that you will store their contact details securely. State your privacy policy and link to it as well. Here’s a link to ours, feel free to model it.

There are more tips on list building and Email Marketing in our Guide.

A blog is so important to the online success of all small businesses that it can truly be called the real heart

Have we convinced you yet that your blog is important? OK, here’s why it is:

It is the heart or hub of your online presence, and is the bridge between your website and the social networks.

For service business owners especially, a blog is where you can demonstrate your expertise by regularly adding written, audio or video examples of what you do, and provide proof that it works. It also a place to announce new products or services in a non-salesy way.

It’s the place where you can build online relationships with your readers who, if you’ve targeted them correctly, are also prospective clients for your business. Your blog gives them the opportunity to get to ‘know, like & trust’ you much more easily than  short updates of 140 characters.

It’s where you can send social networking connections to learn more about you, somewhere that isn’t just a sales page. It always amazes us when people still do this.

When you publish a new blog post, you instantly create new material to use as informative updates and share on your social networks.

By regularly adding new posts you increase the occasions on which Google & Bing will return to visit your blog. This in turn increases your general online visibility and rankings in the search engines. It’s a vital component of your content marketing strategy as this excellent post by Ardath Albee shows.

If you have chosen a self-hosted blog then your blog is a part of the internet owned by you. Which is more than can be said for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…… even if you do pay for hosting and buy a premium blog theme, setting up a blog is still an extremely cost-effective way to establish a professional presence online for your business. It’s also where you have total control over the content and are free to make as many changes as you wish, as your business develops and grows.

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, here are details of a short guide which may be helpful.

So, how are you treating the real heart of your business online?

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Every day, through the social networks, millions of people are sharing articles, videos, podcasts, in fact all manner of content by tweeting links to their followers, or sharing updates on Facebook or LinkedIn. From motivating quotes and funny cat videos to more serious information, we all like passing on items we think will be of interest to our contacts. Social Media has made this very easy to do and those who do it well are well thought of.

Sifting through many blog posts and websites to eliminate the dross and only sharing the best is being thoughtful. It also helps to establish your reputation as a reliable source of good, timely information. I tend to leave sharing ‘big name’ news to others, and research a little deeper for articles I believe will be helpful to my social media connections. Their feedback tells me they like my links.

Curation Tools to use

As you might imagine there are a growing number of curation tools available to use, depending on your needs. This post and video from Mari Smith provide an excellent introduction to the subject.

Before content curation became more well known, my favourite sharing tool was delicious – which was simple and effective (but I stopped using it after reading it was to be abandoned by Yahoo! just over a year ago).

I briefly dallied with paper.li as a way to automatically curate by choosing and publishing each day using feeds from my various subscriptions, but I found the stories it included were far too random and so discontinued it.

Alltop is a great source of latest blog posts and top stories that you can personalise for the topics in which you are most interested.

How curation can help your blog

Do you find it a struggle to know what to blog about? I know I do at times. I worry about finding something new and interesting to write about after over 4 years of regular weekly blogging. But somehow a new post is created and shared each week. One of the things I do that helps is to regularly read other people’s blogs, and get inspiration from them. For example, because I knew I’d be writing about content curation this week (from our Blogging Calendar), I had been on the lookout for articles about it and collected several (using Evernote) in readiness. In effect I curated that content.

Content curation can also help you to produce blog posts by using content that isn’t yours! But before you rush off and collect articles & videos with cheerful abandon, there are a few etiquette points to be aware of.

• You will still need to create your own, original content if you want people to take notice of your thoughts & ideas.
• Make sure to give full attribution to the original source.
• Don’t just copy and paste whole blog posts or articles – that’s just lazy and will annoy people.
• Don’t publish posts full of links to influential websites in an attempt to increase your SEO rankings – Google won’t take any notice.

Do you curate content? If so, what sort of content and using which tools? Please share in the comments below.

This post is long overdue as I’ve been using Buffer for several months now

You’ll already know that between us, Sam and I read an awful lot of blog posts and visit many websites during the course of each day. When we come across articles or websites we think will be of interest to our Twitter followers, we like to share with them.

Now, we could use the sharing buttons already on the website, the Feedly ‘mini’ button or the ‘Hootlet’ bookmarking tool from Hootsuite, but here’s why we sometimes prefer to use Buffer.

If you’re anything like us, you probably do most of your online reading in the morning or perhaps wait until the evening. Tweeting out everything you want to share means that your followers will see lots of tweets sent out very close together, followed by a long gap with none.

Fortunately Buffer changes all that

Within your account settings you can specify exactly when you want the next tweet you place in your buffer to go out. Let’s say you want a buffer tweet to be sent out every hour, you can preschedule the exact time for each one (provided you have something saved in your buffer of course!).

You can arrange your settings to reflect the appropriate time zone and also select which days you want to tweet. I prefer not to send out buffer tweets over the weekend (a purely personal choice).

How do you add tweets to your buffer?

You simply install a little ‘add on’ icon in your browser bookmark toolbar (from the ‘Goodies’ page). Then, when you come across something you want to share, just click on the icon and Buffer will write the tweet for you (usually article title, website name plus a trackable link). Each tweet is fully customisable. I like to prefix mine with ‘Reading:’ ‘Great Post:’, ‘Interesting:’, or something similar. When you’re happy with the wording, click ‘Add to Buffer’ and that’s all there is to it! If you want to rearrange the schedule, it’s a simple case of dragging & dropping the relevant tweets to your liking.

Once you sign up for your own free Buffer account you automatically have 10 tweets you can place in your buffer. By referring friends to also sign up (using the special link Buffer gives you, like this one: http://bufferapp.com/r/8b44f ), you can ‘earn’ an extra tweet for each person who does.

Not only have I been impressed by the functionality of Buffer, the customer service has been excellent too. Soon after I first signed up for my free account, I had a few problems getting it to work properly. The automated welcome email invited me to contact co-founder @JoelGasgoigne with any feedback, so I hit reply and let him know about the problem. The speed of response and resolution of my query were a customer service delight! In fact, I think I was probably more impressed than if Buffer had worked perfectly first time

Do you use Buffer? If so, what’s your favourite feature? Please share!

Do you share what you find online?

We realise that we can’t know it all: the marketing possibilities for businesses keep changing as the internet continues to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. We don’t pretend to be ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’ (how I loathe those terms!). Instead we share what has already been written or recorded by specialists on topics that we hope will be of interest to you, and help you develop your business online.

However, there is a difference between sharing random links to the latest viral cat (or dog!) video on YouTube and engaging in what is known as ‘Content Curation’.

It establishes you as an authority in your field

Once you decide what specialist area you will focus on, looking out for relevant material becomes much easier. As you share the timely and useful content you find, your online followers will hopefully begin to realise that they need to read/watch/listen to what you’re sharing in order to be kept up to date.

It is a generous thing to do

Most of the people you meet online are incredibly generous in sharing not only their own stuff, but other people’s material too. Just as with traditional networking, the ‘givers gain’ philosophy (from BNI’s founder Ivan Misner) also holds true on the internet. The more you share, the more other people will feel inclined to share your material in return. If you share without expecting any reciprocation, it’s a nice surprise when they do.

It means you don’t have to always think up new material yourself

For some of us, it can be difficult to keep coming up with new ideas to ‘feed’ the blog and our other online sites. Content curation, if done regularly and systematically, will make it easier. You’ll be able to see what topics are ‘trending’ in your specialist area, offer the latest news and add your opinion too.

Content Curation can be done in several ways, using some of the variety of online tools available. Rather than list them all here, take a look at the following posts that we believe explain the details of curating your own content very well.

8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content

Robert Scoble on Online Curation (video)

Social Media Gold Lies in the Inner Circle 

Are you a content curator? If so, let us know how you do it – and share which specialist area you cover – in the comments below.

We never liked the .html at the end of the links and also wanted to get rid of the dates in the links too. The reason we kept the old format when we moved was so we didn’t lose any initial rankings we had, but looking back, it would have been a lot easier to change the permalinks back then as there were far less posts and we might as well have changed everything at the same time (e.g gone the whole hog with moving the site). As an aside, don’t change the urls on your site for the sake of it, only if you have good reason for doing so (although you could argue that perhaps we could have lived with our old permalinks!).

We decided to tackle this once and for all, but there is a right way of going about making these changes to make sure you minimise any loss to rankings in the search engines. It was very laborious, but now the work is done, we’re glad we did it. These are the steps I took in case you decide to do a similar thing with your website. If you have a webmaster, it would be best to ask them to do this for you:

1. Copy and paste the urls (permalinks) of each of your blog posts onto a spreadsheet. We have over 300 posts so this took quite a bit of time.

2. Back up your WordPress database! This is important as you don’t want to lose any work in case things go wrong. We use the WP-DB Backup plugin.

3. Install 301 redirect and broken link plugins. We used the ‘Redirection‘ plugin and the ‘Broken Link Checker‘ plugin.

4. Disable any plugins which link to posts. I disabled a couple of plugins we use called LinkWithin which links to selected posts at the bottom of each blog post and Tweet Old Post, which automatically tweets out old blog posts.

5. Decide which format you would like your posts to take, we went from the format of year/month/post-title.html to category/post-title/. Make this change in the permalinks section under ‘Settings’, making sure you format the links correctly. The correct format of our new permalinks is:
/%category%/%postname%/

6. Record all the new permalinks of each blog post onto the spreadsheet you created earlier. It’s important to put the new urls in a second column against the old urls. This will take as long as it took in the first instance. I don’t know any shortcuts, but let me know if you do!

7. Using your new 301 redirect plugin, redirect each old url to the new url. This is very time consuming, but very important! It has to be done so that you don’t lose any rankings in the search engines and so that any links to posts in the old permalink format redirect to the new urls. Visitors clicking on a link in the old format will be automatically redirected to the blog post in its new format. Once done, do a few random checks to make sure the redirects are working.

8. Back up your site again.

9. Check the broken link checker for broken links and fix them (this doesn’t have to be done specifically for this exercise, but it’s good practice to check your site for broken links and fix them).

Now you can see why I put off doing this for a while! I would advise making any major changes to your site like this to a time when you’re a bit quieter with work. Don’t tackle it when you’re busy or during important trading times, e.g for retailers, during the run up to Christmas in case anything goes wrong and it affects rankings.

Although this is specifically for WordPress sites, you need to follow similar steps for any website if you plan to change the urls for any reason. The most important thing is to make sure the redirects are put into place properly. Your webmaster should be able to advise the best way of tackling it for your website.