Are you a blogger who's trying to have an impact in the world?
Wondering how to stand out in a world where there is so much noise?
In this episode, I lay out a step by step game plan to help you rise above the noise, grow your blog and have an impact.
Show notes coming soon!
The post How to Grow a Blog That Will Have an Impact appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.
Millions of advertising and marketing campaigns solely depend on copywriting. History clearly indicates the power of copywriting and its role in brand positioning. From stories to billboards, to print advertisements, to soap operas, to TV commercials, to web series, to social platforms, crafting a copy for various collaterals has come a long way. Copywriting is exploding in an unprecedented way leading to new metrics. Read this before you write another copy.
Gone are the days, where a bunch of creative and talented folks sat together and broke their heads to flex the muscles of their vocabulary and make their ideas more glamorous. Word gamblers saw huge success through their stylish and more sophisticated works in earlier days. Copywriting was considered an art then. As exponential masters of the language, copywriters had their power. Their works were more formal and got heads turning – ears flapping too.
This culture is slowly turning upside down. ,
Copywriters today are forced to go with the consumers. The scare to get denounced and to be tagged as an obsolete is eating many today. Don’t mistake this to copywriting apocalypse. Getting closer to digital excellence is a task that gets tricky many times. Today, there is a purpose to have a clear vision to tackle the trend and to achieve copywriting excellence. This calls for a refinement in strategies and mastering new skills that can boost your performance.
“The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.”
William Bill Bernbach.
Stop being creative at your risk
Creativity and spontaneity have taken a different approach in this digital age copywriting profession. With the arrival of the internet, social media and search engine optimization, there is more to copywriting than to merely being creative. The ways content are created and shared are different today. Traditional media forms have digital versions now. Media evolution is taking place all over the world. Brands need to hold this thought and act.
So, what are those powerful changes an online copywriter is expected to employ today to interweave with the innovations but still carry out the human touch?
First and foremost, copywriters need to understand that copywriting today demands a different set of skills in terms of creating, optimizing and delivering. You need to learn to deliver personalization today. With thousands of options set before them, customers look for that so called “personalized touch” to give a nod to your brand.
You can understand this better through the journey of a top beverage company in the World – Coca Cola
Coca-Cola Innovates New Spaces Quickly and Boldly
Coca-Cola, the most admired and the best-known brand has been making people associate with the brand generation to generation. The Company continues to make changes by evaluating its progress across the experiences that it has been creating, the process, technologies and above all with the people and data. Right from its launch in 1886 where it came up with a unique style of using Spencerian Script logo, the brand has been creating millions of moments through its marketing campaigns every year and every time it came up with a new promotion.
Whether it is for advertising or another form of marketing campaign, the company has never failed to connect with the audience. The brand has consistently moulded its copywriting strategies to accommodate various forms like prints, hoardings, radio ads, television commercial, blogs, newsletters, emails, white papers, e-books, podcasts, video productions, audio clips, webinars, Power Point presentations, social-media content, webpage content, mobile content and much more to come.
From “Delicious and Refreshing,” tagline of the 1890s to the revolutionary jingle of 1971 that read, “I would like to buy the world a Coke,” the company has stood unique in presenting itself to the public. Its advertising budget surpassed $100,000 back in the 1900s which became a big talk in the market. The company saw yet another ground-breaking response in 2015 when it tipped off the “Drinkable” ad campaign to launch Coke Zero. This campaign removed all barriers. It’s first ever 30-second holiday commercial on television back in 2016 for its, “Taste the Feeling,” campaign made the season special for all its evangelists.
It is a privilege when customers coin a new name to your brand. This happened with Coca-Cola. The name Coke was created by none other than Coca-Cola fans. Coke continues to teach every marketer even after these 130 years. The company is re-inventing big way by generating real-time content all 365 days. This helps in innovating new spaces and going in line with consumer’s taste.
“Taking into account shifting user trends and emerging technologies and tools at our fingertips, we’ve doubled down on visual storytelling—original video content, photo galleries, infographics and more—over the past two years. Now, roughly half of the dozen pieces of content we produce and publish each week include video, said Jay Moye, global editor-in-chief, Coca-Cola Journey.
From tagline to a billboard, Coca Cola has shown its excellence consistently sharpening its saw of copywriting.
Yes, with changing times, copywriting has undergone various changes. Today the focus is on the distribution of creativity, greater connectivity and consumer empowerment.
Re-work with some unconventional ideas
Future of Copywriting is Predictable
The race for an exciting copy will still continue. Today, you have a chance to prove your existence by being SEO and mobile friendly. Tomorrow, there can be another dominating method. Automated content development technologies and automated editors are in the race for future strategies. Such innovations can help in getting a raft of variables; permutations and combinations to one single idea which is slightly not possible with humans given the limitation of time for each project.
Future technological innovations can still have serious ramifications over copywriting. But, there cannot be any hindrance to creativity. With each innovation, copywriting can get stronger. Thinking can get bigger. Harness the innovations and confidently craft your ideas, carpentering words and phrases that suit to this era. Persuade the audience into taking a specific action. You can surely make empathic leaps. Let your creativity evoke emotions.
Original post: Copywriting Then and Now Is Like Chalk and Cheese
What do Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Michael Dubin (the CEO of Dollar Shave Club) all have in common? Two things: they’re all known for quick-witted responses and they all got their start in improv comedy.
For those not familiar, improv is where actors make up the show as they go. There’s no script, the audience provides plot point suggestions, and it’s all about hilarious honesty and occasionally cringe-worthy mistakes. Because it forces participants to think quickly on their feet, there’s a tremendous amount it can teach your sales team about being top performing cold callers.
Now, are we actually advocating that you go sign your entire sales team up for improv classes? Yup. Michaela DiChrio, former Manager of Enterprise Sales Development at Salesforce did just that and she found that “It helped our BDRs think on their feet and understand how to continue leading a conversation even when they were hit with unfamiliar topics, questions, and objections. Without a doubt, it made them more agile on the phones.”
Improv acclimates your sales team to jumping into awkward situations. The action moves fast and improv actors must respond faster than they can filter themselves, so what they blurt out is often painfully honest. With time, your sales team will lose any sense of self-consciousness. They’ll become brazen, bold, fearless about cold calling and able to keep a lively conversation going with a brick wall. That’s when they’ll start to apply these tactics:
Imagine this scene: An improv actor throws an imaginary salmon at her partner and shouts, “Get away, bear!” and the partner just says, “We’re not bears, we’re rabbits.” What happens next? The comedy dies a sudden and painful death. Why? Because the second actor didn’t accept the situation. He said “no” when he should have said “Yes!” Now there’s tension because they can’t agree. If this was a cold call, that first actor would have hung up.
Salespeople say “no” a lot more than they realize and it destroys their chances of building rapport. They do it every time they correct their prospect, repeats themselves, or tells their prospect how to feel. Instead, as a salesperson, you need to say “Yes!” and build a scene with the person on the other end of the phone.
Using “Yes, and…” validates your prospect’s feelings. Is the prospect worried about your product’s reliability? Yes, that’s a valid concern, and here are some other facts to consider. Does the prospect hate salespeople? Yes, that’s common—and me too, if they’re disingenuous. This agreement is the equivalent of catching the metaphorical salmon—it allows salespeople to build trust and then redirect the conversation somewhere more productive.
Many new salespeople think they must play the role of an overly gregarious or aggressive “sales guy/gal.” Similarly, in improv, new actors think they have to be funny, and they try to act like a standup comedian. In both cases, it doesn’t work because audiences can sense a phony. What can improvers and salespeople do? They can drop the act and be completely honest.
Improv is all about tapping into honesty. If another actor tells you that you’re the bridge troll and your reaction is to shout, “Oh, I’m really green with jealousy,” it’ll fall worse than flat. It’s not punny. Instead, hunch over and become the troll. Snarl, grimace, demand your troll toll, and rant about the architectural advantages of cantilevered versus truss bridges.
This is honest to the situation and it works the same in cold calls: be yourself. If the prospect gives you a phony excuse like that they’re in a meeting, reply with genuine surprise. “You picked up your phone in a meeting?” If they tell you that they don’t have any budget, express genuine concern. “Oh wow, that sounds serious. Our product and me being a salesperson aside, what are you going to do?” You will see that prospects find this pure, guileless honesty so disarming that they’re forced to sheepishly drop their own act as well. Together you’ll have a more productive conversation.
Finally, improv is as much about giving as it is getting. New improv actors mostly sit around on stage waiting for something to react to and ask each other boring questions like “Who are you supposed to be?” Those questions put the onus on their teammates to come up with the scene and it’s tiring to carry this weight. The same is true of cold calling: new salespeople who only ask boring questions of their prospect like, “What does your business do?” put all the weight on their prospect and are annoying. The answer? Learn to give offerings.
In improv, offerings are about taking action, describing the scene, and offering a role to your partner. For example, shouting, “What a wonderful realm this is, is that not so my good steed?” This gives your partner something substantial to work with—something they can say “yes, and…” to. In cold calling, your offerings will be interesting tips, quotes, facts, and statistics that spark discussion, such as, “Did you know that according to Gartner, 90 percent of companies collect data but only 5 percent use it wisely? What’s your reaction to that?” You’ll find that with offerings, prospecting conversations morph into real conversations and you get a lot further.
Great cold callers are like Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Michael Dubin: they think quickly on their feet. By exposing your sales team to improv, you’ll make them masters of the cold call, help them close more deals, and honestly, it just might make your office a funnier place.
The post 4 Cold Calling Tactics you can Only Learn from Improv Comedy appeared first on Vidyard.
One of the most important, highly valued and high return activity in the SEO field, keyword research begins by just entering a word in the search query box. Essential to a website’s success, keyword research can prove to be a boon if implemented correctly and can lead your site to higher ranking success.
In this article, we will be quickly covering 3 different ways to go about doing keyword research. So, let’s get started:
1. The Usual Way of Keyword Research
It’s now extremely easy to find out the right targeted keywords for your website using Mondovo’s Keyword Research Tool . You can retrieve search volumes, suggestions, and generate combinations quickly.
You can narrow down based on the global results or on the basis of countries. In fact, you can even retrieve the search volume for every keyword in a particular city or country.
Once the results are generated, you will see the full list of keywords along with the related terms, Google & Amazon auto suggestions, Facebook, Quora and Twitter search for that particular keyword as well as the latest Google trends. You can even export these keywords in CSV or XLS format.
There’s also a difficulty checker in the tool which can help you gauge the approximate difficulty for a certain keyword. Apart from that, you can also view a breakdown of the strongest and weakest sites competing for that keyword.
And lastly, you can optimize your keywords better through smarter targeting. There are inbuilt user intent parameters – terms that are commercial, e-commerce related, questions, positive or negative in sentiment.
2. Keyword Research by Finding Out Competitor’s Keywords
Another smarter way to approach keyword research is by finding out the keywords your competitors’ are ranking for. This is made easy using Mondovo’s Competitor Keywords.
To get started, you only need to enter the website URL, select exact page or across the domain, select the country and click on Search.
Once the report is generated, you will see the number of organic keywords the site or a certain page is ranking for.
Using the filters available, you can then filter the keywords based on current position, previous position, search volume, CPC and traffic.
You can also see the adwords keywords, if any, along with the ad copies.
Using all this data, you can then optimize your own website, your own content, blog articles etc. to rank for some of the most competitive terms and beat your competitors at their own game.
3. Keyword Research Through Search Volume
We all are familiar with Google Keyword Planner wherein we can get search volume data for a set of keywords. However, the problem lies with Keyword Planner showing the data in ranges wherein as a search marketer, the ideal solution would be to have the exact search volume data.
This problem is resolved by the Bulk Search Volume tool. You can now get to find the exact monthly search volume as well as the CPC cost.
Apart from that, you can also get the exact search volume for keywords for any language and in any country. There’s also the difficulty score that can tell you how easy/difficult it is to target a particular keyword. And lastly, you can also get to know the related keywords for a particular keyword entered by you.
So, if you’re running an advertising campaign or if you’re looking for the right set of terms for your website or for a blog article, using the bulk search volume tool is indeed the right choice for you.
Original post: 3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research
As website owners, we all want to create quality content that not only is interesting and engaging to our audiences but often, also serves to promote and ideally sell our affiliates products. Your website can be big business and mean big bucks if you know how to use it.
Ok, so now you might be wondering, is there a way that it is possible to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to ranking on Google? Ranking on search engines is important; when was the last time you visited the second page of a search engine query?
Well, the folks over at Content Refined, a content marketing service seem to think so. Is creating content feeling like a shot in the dark? Are you frustrated with wasting time and money on having articles written that just don’t produce results in terms of ranking in search engines? Below, we share some of Content Refined’s tried and tested strategies on how to increase the chance your content will rank well in Google.
1. Targeted and Relevant Keyword Research, Which Creates Interesting and Engaging Article Titles
Content Refined is a start to finish content marketing service. This means that they will do your keyword research, create titles, write your articles and then edit and publish your articles to optimize them for your website.
Content Refined utilizes a keyword research tool call SECockpit to complete keyword research for their clients. The way Content Refined is different when selecting keywords for your article is that they filter keywords to fit specific sets of data. For Content Refined, that metric is a keyword that is searched at least 500 times per month but has less than a 30% competition score.
The fun doesn’t stop there however. Content Refined will also analyze what other sites are ranking for a given keyword. Even if a keyword is statistically right for use on your site, the team looks at what other sites are ranking for the keyword. This way, they ensure that they aren’t pitting their clients against massive, domain authority sites that they will realistically never be able to outrank.
2. Already Strong Writing Enriched Using MarketMuse To Ensure In-Depth Coverage of A Given Topic
Content Refined only uses native English speaking writers to create their articles. This is a good first step to ensure proper flow and grammar for an article. However, Content Refined goes the extra mile to ensure that not only are the articles interesting with good readability but also that they cover topics in depth. The best way to ensure in-depth coverage of a topic? There is a tool called MarketMuse that Content Refined uses. Users can plug an article title into the program and get back a variety of relevant information about the selected keyword. Not only will MarketMuse produce a list of relevant keywords that should be mentioned or touched upon in the article, but it will also yield the current content score of an article along with the average content scores of competing articles and the overall best content score for a selected keyword from the competition. In addition, MarketMuse will supply its customers with a list of competing articles, so that you can scope out the competition.
Data analysis has shown a moderate to strong correlation between a high MarketMuse score and a good ranking in search engine results.
3. A Statistically Driven Standard That All Articles Ideally Meet
Ideally, Content Refined articles meet a specific benchmark in terms of data and their team believes that articles that fit this criterion are likely to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
For Content Refined, that standard is a competition score under 30% and a MarketMuse score of over 40. In a real life scenario, this should result in a quality, well-rounded and in-depth article that features an interesting topic with a keyword that isn’t dominated by big, established domain authorities. Content Refined has uncovered that articles that meet this metric have between 80-90% chance of ranking on the first page of a search engine. Combine this with the fact that the service also only uses keywords that are searched at least 500 times a month and you have the opportunity to create some really fantastic, relevant and useful content.
The Content Refined process is based in finding out what people are looking for that isn’t necessarily being extensively or properly covered on the web. The method is to create useful content that is backed up by researched data, instead of using what we call the “spray-and-pray” method, which involves peppering your sites with heaps of articles, some of which may interest your audience and much that may not. The problem with the “spray-and-pray” is that you can end up losing readership if you post too much content that is useless or irrelevant to your audience and “spraying-and-praying” can also end up being very expensive.
To conclude, we all want to make money off our websites; that’s why we have them. However, it can be difficult, time consuming and costly to work out the exact metric for your site. If you are tired of creating content that doesn’t provide predictable results, the tips and tricks of the trade mentioned in this article may be able to help you rank on Google with a higher degree of certainty. Content Refined openly shares their process because they believe knowledge is power and that nobody should be deprived of the ability to create an awesome niche website.
If you don’t have the time to manage all these different tools on top of your singular or multiple websites, you can also take advantage of Content Refined’s start-to-finish content creation process by checking out one of the many available packages here: http://ift.tt/2vJJCeg. With a variety of packages available, you are bound to find something that suits your specific needs.
Original post: How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google
Are you familiar with the acronym TLDR? It stands for ‘too long, didn’t read’ and began as internet slang to say ‘you have written too much.’ It has evolved over time, however, and has taken on a different meaning: People everywhere now add it as a disclaimer on the headers of long emails and articles to say, “I have written too much.” The irony is, of course, thicker than molasses.
Why are we writing things to each other that we know we won’t read? Because we have a lot to say and no good way to communicate it. The world isn’t just complicated anymore, it’s complex, and we’re limited by the information throughput of text, a centuries-old technology. But there’s a simple answer: video.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth 1.8 million. No really, that’s what Forrester concluded. Video is ideal for breaking down complex topics because it has far higher information throughput—it includes simultaneous visuals, audio, and text, but it also offers so much more. Video connects with people on an emotional level. If text is a straw, video is a firehose, and there is a plethora of good uses for it.
Here are 4 types of messages you must replace with video:
The average American spends 13 hours each week on email according to Fast Company. That’s a tremulous amount of time and much of it is spent editing, correcting, and re-formatting—bolding headers, adding bullets, and highlighting. Yet all of this can be done better on video.
With a quick-capture video tool, you can use your webcam to simply talk things through. All the incorrect grammar and colloquial language that you’re afraid to put into print do just fine when spoken and you can ramble on tangents and still get your point across. Audiences will comprehend more just from your body language. We’ve experimented with this extensively and an email that normally might take 45 minutes to write and edit can be explained in a 3-minute video. It’s faster for both the viewer and the recorder, so everyone wins. Any time you find yourself writing an email that drags on, close it, and tell it to your computer camera instead.
Raise your hand if somewhere in your company employee portal there are novel-length PDFs full of screenshots and text on how to get set up in a new system. (Now put your hand down, people are probably looking.) These screenshot walk-throughs are the epitome of inefficiency because they still leave big gaps. Anyone who has used them has wondered how figure A led to figure B and why they’re not seeing figure C. It’s like trying to interpret the movie Casablanca from just a handful of stills.
Use videos for your walkthroughs. There’s a reason that ‘how to’ is still the top growing category of video on YouTube: watching is easier. With tools like ViewedIt, you can capture both your screen and your webcam and you can talk new users through logging into new systems, filling out expense reports, and properly closing sales deals.
Perhaps the best way on Earth to spread information is to tell someone that it’s secret. We’ve all known this since grade-school. So how can we expect our partners and affiliates not to spread product, pricing, and upcoming feature releases if we share them by emails that are just begging to be forwarded? We can’t, and that’s why there’s secure video.
With a securely hosted video platform, you can control the flow of information. You get to both harness the explanatory power of video and you get to lock it down so that only certain parties can access it. Whenever you’re communicating sensitive information to partners, help them do the right thing: make it a secure video.
We envision a world where nearly all human resources communications come via video. It’s only fitting, as email drains the ‘human’ away and often leaves us with long, dry, difficult-to-follow resources: for example, first-day welcome emails, explanations of benefits, how to set up a 401k, and a list of IT contact information. What might all this clutter look like if we applied video?
Everything would become more personal. Imagine having quick, custom, ‘Welcome to the company!’ videos from executives and human resources folk and pre-recorded videos to explain benefits and paperwork in a simple way. Or what about a video from the IT department saying hello, explaining how things work, and how best to reach them? Or a quick video tour of the grounds or facilities to show you the office gym, bike park, and good spots for lunch? You’d create a personal touch in a way that supplements human interaction and makes them feel more at home.
If you apply video to your communications, you don’t just become more efficient: you make everyone more efficient. You can stop writing your novel-grade emails and people can stop finding them TLDR!
The post 4 Types of Messages you Must Replace with Video appeared first on Vidyard.
Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler shared his own knowledge with Uberflip’s Randy Frisch about video marketing, and how a new focus on video is changing the face of modern marketing. Check out the full podcast:
Here’s a few of our favourite moments:
It’s definitely a growing trend that we’re seeing. It’s not just because I’m biased with respect to my role in the industry but it genuinely is happening. I test these ideas with friends and peers in the market as well as with our customers. We’re absolutely seeing more and more content production and particularly video production coming in-house and organizations. It’s been exciting to see a lot more people with journalism backgrounds coming in-house into content marketing roles, seeing writers and folks from a traditional writing background coming in to do these things. But, yeah, we are seeing it follow suit with video now.
There is a recognition that having the ability to create and publish video content no different from how you create and publish a blog post is becoming important for businesses and will be critical over the next few years. What’s been happening alongside that and the reason that we’re seeing it be successful is that, well, A, there’s this younger generation of folks who’ve grown up on this. They’re creating videos and publishing them on YouTube. They’re sharing videos everyday on Snapchat and other channels. And, they recognize that not every video has to be a big Hollywood production. It’s just as good to say, “Hey. We’ve got a great idea here. Let’s get somebody on camera in front of a whiteboard talking about this as a way to explore or peel back a how-to topic.” Or, “Let’s do a quick motion graphic video.”
The team here I’ve got, I mentioned we have three folks, and what they can do in a matter of a couple of days still blows my mind, and it’s really incredible to see. I think the accessibility of video is now there and the people who can really churn amazing content out quickly are out there. And, the cost for this is not merely what it was and also, of course, production equipment and those things have all come down. It’s definitely happening and more and more companies we’re working with are bringing in-house production talent to the table, and it’s helping them go from delivering one or two videos a month to one or two videos a week. And, it really is changing the perspective.
Tyler: Yeah. I think a lot of the debate really just stems from where we’ve come from. The traditional approach for businesses was if you’re creating a video asset to just stand alone as a promotional piece or to be a part of some other campaign or program, the default was we’ll upload it to YouTube as a place to host that video because it’s free and it’s easy. We would then potentially also link to that video using an embed code on our website, or landing page, or the different place that that video would be embedded.
The video would live in both places. It would be on your YouTube channel, but it would also be on your website. But, the version embedded on your website is basically just that YouTube version streaming over. In a lot of cases, that’s a good start to what you’re doing and obviously it’s nice that it’s free and very simple to manage as an organization. But, one of the challenges now we’re facing is as video is becoming a more integrated part of these different programs that we’re doing, it’s not a one-off kind of brand thing. It’s now we’re doing customer stories on video. We’re doing product demos and explainers. It’s just becoming another piece of our content toolkit for the programs we’re running. Using YouTube as a way to host the videos that are going to play back on your own landing pages and your own websites comes with a number of challenges.
Simple things like, well, at the end of the video is YouTube going to recommend one of your competitors’ videos? You lack that brand control over what that playback experience looks like. But, you’re also missing a lot of the potential capabilities of what you get with video. For example, can you understand when somebody is watching that video just like you might track if they interact with or download a PDF from your website? If they come to watch that customer story video, do you know who watched it and how long they engaged? YouTube is not going to give you that. You’re just going to know there’s another tick on the view counter.
There’s a number of things that as we evolve as content marketers we’re being thoughtful about as video becomes a more integrated part of what we do. And so, that’s where new more premium video platforms are coming into play that align with how traditional B2B marketers really work. And so, it’s the notion of being able to host and distribute those videos in a way on your website that you can brand the experience, that you could create interactive content that would ask them questions or have calls to action to do something next but also in a way that enables you to track and know who’s actually watching what content and using that data back as part of your organization.
That’s what we’re starting to see as a trend. I’d say YouTube is still very important as a distribution channel so we encourage everybody to still post their videos to YouTube because people may find you there. But, when you’re posting those videos on your own sites and your own campaigns, that’s where using a video platform makes a lot more sense because of the incremental value you can get.
If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!
The post Content Pros: How Cheaper Video is Improving Content Quality with Tyler Lessard appeared first on Vidyard.
