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.

Have you noticed how social media sites are giving slide presentations a new lease of life?

Not so long ago PowerPoint (and its Mac equivalent Keynote) had a bad reputation with many presentations rightfully earning the label: “Death by PowerPoint”. Slides were often too busy, too wordy to read, or just too complex to understand. Even worse were those presenters who used them as auto cues, reading word for word and boring their audience to sleep.

But now it seems that a whole new generation of talented presenters are breathing new life into PowerPoint slideshows. The best ones are creating visually pleasing and attention-grabbing images, making text short & snappy and, most importantly, keeping us interested. No mean feat in this much reduced attention span age!

So in addition to using slide presentations at traditional offline events, such as when giving talks or running training workshops, there are now online opportunities for this frequently overlooked medium.

1. Presentations uploaded to Slideshare.net quickly show up in the search engines so it’s worth taking the time to categorise and tag them properly. A basic account is free to set up and very easy to use. Here are the Savvy Marketers presentations we’ve uploaded.
2. YouTube is already known as the second largest search engine and millions of videos are watched every day around the world. Recording your slide presentation, accompanied by audio, and uploading the result to YouTube means you can then embed the video in your website or blog, and share it with your Facebook fans & friends too. Other free video sharing options worth considering include Vimeo and Viddler.
3. Another good place to share your PowerPoint presentation is on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn Company page. You can either add the Slideshare application or embed the video into a Google Docs presentation.
4. Webinars are becoming an increasingly popular way of sharing information online. Depending on the service used, screen-sharing means including a slide presentation is straightforward and adds that important visual element to help get your message across and keep your audience’s attention.

Creating slide presentations is yet another great way to share that all-important content, and one that doesn’t require too much writing.

What new or different ways have you seen PowerPoint used recently? Please share in the comments below.

When you’ve worked really hard to build your email subscriber list ethically

After you’ve dried your tears, take a look to see whether it is an isolated case or have there been others during the past month or so?

If there are more ‘desertions’ than you’d like, it may be worth asking yourself a few questions about your overall email marketing strategy.

Did you ask permission to send Emails?

As I write this post there are two messages in my inbox from people I’ve met at local networking events and who have added me to their email list. They didn’t ask if I wanted to be added, so technically they are spamming me. It is tempting when starting out on email marketing to go through your business cards just to have some people to send your message to. Tempting but asking for unsubscribes and even a few spam complaints.

Are you providing valuable information?

The reason most people stay subscribed to a list after getting the freebie they originally signed up for is that the information in your emails is useful and valuable to them. Quite often, even though they may not have time to read your message when it arrives, they’ll move it to a folder until they do have time. But they will only go to this trouble if you consistently provide good quality, valuable content.

Is the content relevant to the recipients?

For people to trust you with their email address, they need to be sure that the emails they receive will contain articles, tips, tricks, and resources relevant to their situation or business. Coming up with fresh and interesting content on a regular basis can be challenging (as we both know from personal experience!), but it’s important to always keep in mind the needs and expectations of your reader. If your emails don’t resonate with your list, they’ll leave, and sign up with someone who does meet their needs.

Are you sending out too many emails?

How many is too many? That’s one of those questions which is difficult to answer. I’ve been subscribed to some lists for several years and look forward to receiving emails from the authors. Because their newsletter content is so good (valuable and relevant, as in points 2 & 3 above), I don’t mind receiving quite a few promotion-only emails from them when they launch a new product or service. Everyone’s tolerances are different and some people will unsubscribe as soon as you try promoting anything. So it’s generally a case of trial and error – and keeping a close eye on the unsubscribe notifications!

Is the tone of your message right?

We both started sending out email newsletters in 2003 so have obviously had plenty of opportunity to monitor what works for us, as well as what can cause people to unsubscribe from lists. Assuming the previous questions are answered satisfactorily, then the tone in which the message is written can be a deciding factor in building a loyal and happy list of readers.

Surprisingly, it often isn’t the wonderfully informative articles nor even the excellent resources that keeps the open rate high. But using a more conversational writing tone, as well as including a few details of a more personal nature will have subscribers eagerly awaiting a newsletter. People like to hear about real people whom they can relate to and get to know.

Click here for more tips about Email Marketing.

What makes you hit the ‘unsubscribe’ link? Please share in the comments below.

When we spring-cleaned this website/blog recently

A ‘Start Here’ page is a good idea if the first place new visitors see is either your latest blog post, or a slightly overwhelming Home Page.

While the Home Page is where you summarise what your business is about and what people can expect to find on the site, there isn’t enough space to really give brand new visitors a true flavour of what you do, and still keep it clear and concise. A Start Here Page can fill that need and provide a step by step guide of how they can get the best from the rest of your website.

Creating a ‘Start Here’ page will act as a warm, personal welcome, and enable you to showcase some of the useful content you’ve hopefully been putting together as part of your content marketing strategy. For example, you could include:

• An introduction video
• A collection of articles to download
• Links to a selection of blog posts
• A slideshow Presentation (with or without audio)
• Links to other pages on your website

and, of course, don’t forget to include a reminder of your primary Call to Action .

One example of a great and informative ‘Start Here’ page, which provided inspiration for our own, can be seen on smartpassiveincome.com. The owner of the site, Pat Flynn, is one of the ‘good’ guys in internet marketing and he generously shares his online experiences for his readers to learn from.

Do you have a ‘Start Here’ page? If so, what do you recommend including for new visitors to read?

Facebook Insights are free and available to Page Admins once you have 30 ‘likes’.  They provide data that is easy to read and useful without being overwhelming.

What sort of data might be useful?

There are many questions that the Insights reports can answer about your Facebook Page, here is a small selection we hope you find helpful:

Q.  Where do new ‘likers’ come from? 

2 new ‘likers’ came to our Facebook Page via the ‘Like’ box on the website in September.

Q. How do they find your page? 

This table shows the Page tabs that people have clicked on and the different sites from which visitors arrived on the page.

Q. Which type of media do ‘fans’ prefer?

Knowing whether your ‘fans’ like video, photos or audio means you can provide what they want to encourage them to return to visit the page.

Q. What are the visitor demographics?

It’s always interesting to know who your Page is attracting

Q. How active are they with your page?

This also shows the different ways people interact with your page.

Q. How interesting do they find your content?

At a glance feedback!

Download the reports

You can download Insights data about your Facebook Page, for whatever time period you specify, as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. Also, as Page Admin, you will automatically receive a weekly email summary update:

Facebook is always changing, or so it seems lately, and a new metric for Pages, called ‘People Talking About This’, is being introduced this week. We’ll let you know what we think about it once the dust has settled, but here’s a link to an article so you can read about it now: http://searchengineland.com/facebook-launches-people-talking-about-this-metric-premium-ad-unit-more-95342

Do you find Facebook Insights useful? Have they influenced what you post on your Page? Please share in the comments!

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.

Now you’re probably wondering where on earth are you going to find the time to start creating great, useful content amongst the zillions of other things you have to do, while still trying to have a life outside work!

A bit of rummaging around in files on your PC or in your desk drawers may reveal that you’ve already created quite a lot of content in the past that can be reused and repurposed. So here’s a few ideas showing how you could re-use old content giving it a very different look and format.

1. Articles
Most business owners have written articles on their specialist area and even if it was a few years ago, it doesn’t mean the article has go to waste. Often all they need are a bit of editing and updating so they can be re-used. Articles are perfect as blog posts as they can be broken down into shorter pieces and more often than not, you could get two or three posts out of them.

2. Blog Posts
I recently did some major updates to our Savvy Marketers site, which I’ll be writing about soon, and was surprised that in the three years we’ve been blogging, we now have over 300 posts between us. That’s an awful lot of information! Blog posts can be re-used in few ways: updated and re-posted to make them more current, put a few together as a longer article, or even turned into a guide or white paper if you have lots of posts around the same subject.

3. Videos
If you’ve written how-tos in the past, particularly with some screenshots or something like that, why not record it as a video how-to? Video sharing is huge and YouTube is one of the biggest social networks on the web, so don’t let your written word go to waste – change the format and get new use out of it!

4. Audio Interviews
Louise did a regular Blog Talk Radio show for a whole year back in 2009 (you can listen to archives here) and interviewed a different expert each week on a particular topic. Rather than let this great content go to waste, these expert interviews could be turned into articles, blog posts (with a link to the original interview), how to guides or white papers. It would take more time to do this than repurposing other content, but nevertheless, it would get more mileage out of the interviews as long as the content is still current. Another use of audio would be to take some previous blog posts or tips articles and make a series of short audios using a service such as Audioboo, or using your own digital recorder.

5. Webinars
Moving on from the monthly teleseminars that we’ve been doing, we’re now doing monthly webinars (and you can find out about our next one here), which means we’re producing information on slides in Powerpoint each month. Afterwards, we’re sharing the slides on Slideshare for those who couldn’t attend the live webinars, and along with our notes and the recorded audio from it, are able to produce how-to guides for our community.

This is just the start, there’s plenty more that you could do with existing content, whether it be written, audio, video or photo. Depending on what type of information your target market is looking for, and which format is appropriate for them, all you need is a bit of imagination to make your existing content go that much further.

What have you done to update or repurpose old content for your audience?

Image: Recycle Logo From Recycling Bin by chrissatchwell, on Flickr

Content Marketing is wonderful!

Our post explaining what content marketing is gives you some easy steps to get started with your own campaign. It’s so important that you do.

But we don’t want you to think this is a fast route to riches, or a shortcut to attracting more business. It’s actually quite hard work – just like all the other more traditional marketing you do.

However this can actually be an advantage

When people are searching for helpful information, they’re only really interested in the best, most up to date and accurate information to read, listen to or watch and learn from. Not so long ago they had to sift through a lot of poor content to find the occasional nuggets of good stuff (until Google’s famous panda update in March 2011). This update was bad news for for all the article spinners and ‘me-too’ scammers who were only interested in making a fast buck.

However, the update was great news for bloggers and creators of high quality original content – like you and me! Because the search results are now leading with better content, we have a better chance of being noticed for our areas of expertise and rewarded for our hard work with more leads. No longer are blatant promotions considered good content, whereas informative how-to articles and well-reasoned opinions are.

Good quality content brings other rewards worth having too

When you publish good quality content, the people who read/listen to/watch it will want to share it with their social networking contacts. They will also be more likely to write a comment (on your blog or Facebook page) so you’ll know who is interested in what you do. And of course, the more different platforms you publish on, the wider your reach will be, and the greater number of people will be likely to find out about you and share with their social networking contacts …..

Content marketing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, so settle in for the long haul. You can watch the wimps and the fly by nights fall by the wayside!

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In its most basic form, it means that you need to create and promote useful, quality content, get it out online to attract visitors to your site. But isn’t that what you’re doing when you promote your site? ‘I’m already sharing my blog posts in the social networks’ I hear you say!

So what exactly is content marketing?

Yes, it is about distributing and sharing your content in the social networks and search engines, whether it be written, video or audio content. But it’s also a lot more than that. It’s about having a proper strategy to creating relevant content for your audience, not just a random approach – writing a blog post when you have the time, sending a newsletter every so often.

By planning what type of content to create for your audience, when to create it and where to distribute it, your ‘content marketing’ activities will have much more impact and attract the right type of prospect interested in your products or services.

For example, our Savvy Marketers content marketing plan includes writing regular blog posts 2-3 times per week, sending out newsletters each month, hosting a webinar each month and sharing the slides on Slideshare afterwards. There’s plenty more we could do, but we do these things regularly and consistently.

Perhaps you sell a product, whether it be a business or consumer product. A good example is a company I worked with a few years ago who sell wet umbrella wrappers called ‘brollymacs’. They have images of the product on their website, but wouldn’t it be so much better if they videoed how the product worked, distributed those videos on YouTube, and included them in a blog, which could be shared on the social networks? (I did suggest this to them at the time!).

If you sell fashion items, don’t just limit images to your site. Add them to a Flickr photostream, make sure they’re updated on a Facebook page and shared across the social networks. Don’t forget to optimise them for image results in search.

Once you’re clear about the type of content your audience is looking for and where they’re looking for it, you can create a plan as to how you will distribute your content, regularly and consistently. This will result in many more sales and leads than just a random approach to content distribution.

What’s your content marketing strategy and what’s worked well for you? Please share your experiences in the comments!

Image: Vegetable stall in a Market, Beijing by DPerstin, on Flickr