Currently viewing the category:
"Online Content Creation"
If content is king, how do you become a king maker? It’s a simple question that unfortunately comes with a whole lot of “it depends” attached.
While it is rare that there is ever any one simple answer to complex online marketing questions, there are thankfully a few handy guidelines that we use to focus [...]
If content is king, how do you become a king maker? It’s a simple question that unfortunately comes with a whole lot of “it depends” attached.
Richard Neville, 16th century Earl of Warwick, England was nicknamed, The Kingmaker
While it is rare that there is ever any one simple answer to complex online marketing questions, there are thankfully a few handy guidelines that we use to focus our client’s Online Content Strategy.
Think like a customer.
The obvious answer here is to simply create entertaining content around your most frequently asked questions. In fact, the FAQ is often something that you will find on a lot of websites, and is a veritable gold mine of content possibilities. It really doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to slowly turn your most asked questions into graphics or video.
Say you run a Hair Salon: Do people keep asking what the best hair care product you sell is? Make a video of a stylist “answering” this question from a person in the chair. Lots of cutaways, establishing shots and closeups can create a sense of intimacy, serves to personalize your answers, as well as showcase your salon and an exceptional client experience.
If you haven’t got a list of FAQ’s, just sit down and try to think about all the questions your friends and family ask when you tell them what you do. Just don’t venture too far from highlighting your Unique Selling Proposition and why your customers do business with you in the first place.
Use Google tools like Analytics and AdWords.
Google wants to provide a better search experience to it’s customers. In other words, Google would like the first item on your Search Results Page to be exactly what you are looking for. So let’s make it easy for poor old Google and take some advice right from the horses’ mouth.
Installing and using Google Analytics (or some other Analytics software) is 100% necessary. Google’s package is free, so there is absolutely no excuse. If you don’t have Analytics installed on your site, go do it right now after you’re done reading…
The Adwords keyword tool, and quality rankings will give you the knowledge of what people are looking for within your market. If your quality is low, yet searches around that subject are high – it is a pretty good indication that you need to develop some better quality content.
Analytics will tell you whether people who actually make it to your site found your content to be of any use. Examining the visitor flow charts will show you where you are loosing thier interest and perhaps their business. Nobody seems to get past the first page? Guess what, you need to engage these people by providing your best most relevant content up front.
Taking these two systems together will tell you exactly the type of content you should be developing and give you a baseline measurement to improve against.
Ride the coattails of popular trends.
Pop open twitter and take a look at the trending hashtags. Are any of them related to your business? Is there any way that you could make them relate? The trick here is to do it quickly. Get on top of the trend, add your two cents and then move on.
Think of the long tail.
This is the area that will pay dividends in the long run. A simple way to come up with Long Tail content is to conduct various searches around your business topic and look for top rated links that are more than three years old. You may think the Original Poster (OP) has said everything that needs to be said, but hey, a lot has happened in the past several years and there is always follow up information that could be added.
Long tail content is often highly specialized and usually very specific. Highlighting technical aspects of your business or discussing possible ideas for multiple systems integration may seem boring and unsexy, but guaranteed with over a billion people on the internet, someone (lots of people) will share your enthusiasm.
The most important lesson
In the end, the important lesson here is to just start creating content. You will post things online that seem to fall flat and you will start to get discouraged, just ignore it and keep posting. Nobody produces great content every single time they put something on the internet. It takes patience and luck.
Don’t sit around trying to predict the future, it makes more sense to simply look at what people are doing right now, and put your own unique spin on it.
If you are still stuck trying to come up with content ideas give us a call or drop us an email and we can talk about some of these approaches and how they will work for your business. Because hey, it’s good to be king.
A.
Twitter, in a very short amount of time has become a serious force within the Media Landscape. With millions of users and hundreds of millions of tweets daily, twitter provides a quick, effective, personal outlet to entrepreneurs looking to develop and nurture their customer base. Twitter is actually one of the simplest social media tools [...]
Twitter, in a very short amount of time has become a serious force within the Media Landscape. With millions of users and hundreds of millions of tweets daily, twitter provides a quick, effective, personal outlet to entrepreneurs looking to develop and nurture their customer base. Twitter is actually one of the simplest social media tools available to business owners and marketers, and it dovetails well with the passionate mindset of entrepreneurs.
As with all forays into Marketing and specifically Social Media Marketing it is important to mention that you MUST have given a significant amount of thought and effort to your strategy. Twitter is a tool like a cordless drill, if you haven’t got anything to build or fix then it won’t be much use. Don’t get caught up in the novelty of the tool – continuously focus on the end goal.
So, you have created your account and are wracking your brain for what to say? I won’t go into the details of what a hash tag is or how to get more followers as that type of info has been covered all over the internet. Let’s focus on the content of your first tweet. There are a few ways you can go here and they can be summed up rather easily with three examples.
Example 1.
A "personal" message
Example 2.
A "business" message
Example 3.
A "promotional" tweet
In the first example we have a tweet of a personal nature. The purpose of this tweet is simply an expression of the personal tastes of the poster and appears to have no monetary or financial tie in. The second example is market driven and questioning in nature. The purpose here is to promote discussion around a topic, idea or product. The third example is what I like to call a promotional tweet, simply because it directly points to a product, service or content created by the tweeter. (in this case re-tweeted by the content creator)
In very simple terms these three types of tweets can be employed by the same account to very effective use. Using personal tweets to tie your customers to the real you creates a personal connection and tangible support. Using business or market messages establishes you as an expert in your field. It goes to building social proof and can spark some amazing business and marketing realizations. Promotional tweets have their time and place. Of course it is always better if someone else does the promoting for you, as in the above example. But given the immediacy of Twitter, like radio, it is a good fit for daily or weekly promotions. Using too many promotional tweets will lose you followers and decrease the engagement of those who decide to stick around.
As a good way to get started start focusing on the personal side, work into the market side and finish up with a promotion. The actual content should be a reflection of you. What do YOU find interesting? If your end goal is to create a group of like-minded followers of what you do, then it only makes sense to talk about what you do with passion and conviction.
Still having trouble deciding whether to make the time/resource commitment to Twitter? Give Alfred a call at 613-220-2265 and we’ll have a chat.
A
There is one rule that typically holds true for all small businesses: they care about their customers. To a small company, customers aren’t just another cog in the mechanism, they’re the lifeblood of the business. Many small businesses rely on the support and repeated business of a loyal user base. So as a small business [...]
There is one rule that typically holds true for all small businesses: they care about their customers. To a small company, customers aren’t just another cog in the mechanism, they’re the lifeblood of the business. Many small businesses rely on the support and repeated business of a loyal user base. So as a small business owner, naturally, you want to take care of your customers.
Here are a few tips for how “going the extra mile” can be applied to your website. We’ve put together a list of five things you can do to make your customer’s time on your site more enjoyable and more productive.
1. Have a mobile version
With mobile device usage skyrocketing, a mobile-friendly website is practically essential. A mobile site means your customers can access information on the go, wherever they may be. It also means they’ll be more likely to share your site with friends since they’ll be able to pull it up and show it to others, even when not at a computer.
As an added bonus, mobile sites can often be more accessible to those with visual impairments, or who may have difficulties using a mouse, but find touch displays easier to manipulate.
If you can’t afford to go all out and have a separate version of your site for mobile users, then at least speak with your developer and make sure they are aware that you want the website as functional and legible as possible on mobile devices.
2. Provide supplemental information
Your users are looking for information. Period. Even if they’ve come to your site to make a purchase, they’ll first want to research their options and check out the details of what it is they’re buying. Consider making this task easier by providing supplemental information that complements your site’s primary content.
Take the time to provide your customers with information such as product manuals, warranty information, manufacturer contact details, sizing charts and troubleshooting guides. This not only says “We care about you,” but it also makes your site an invaluable resource that visitors will keep coming back to again and again.
3. Use AJAX for simple tasks—but don’t overdo it
Implementing AJAX functionality—using JavaScript to load content into portions of your page without reloading the entire Web page—can go a long way toward making your visitor’s experience on your site enjoyable. AJAX can make retrieving and browsing information faster and more intuitive, and it also creates a more seamless experience for the user. Be careful, though—too much JavaScript can slow things down and make interactions confusing, causing more harm than good. (It can also make bookmarking or sharing portions of your page more difficult for users.)
Finding the right balance varies based on the type of site you have and the products or services you offer, so it’s best to work out the details with your developer. Some examples of good AJAX usage include: loading and switching between product images and checking for and reporting errors in order forms or updating shopping carts.
4. Make it easy to get help
Sometimes, no matter how much supplemental information or details about your product or service you provide, it’s just not going to be enough. Some of your customers are just going to need more help. Make it easy for them by providing answers to frequently asked questions (include links to additional resources) and by placing your company’s contact information (or help desk information) prominently on your website.
Your users should be able to find a way to contact you from every page, be it an e-mail address in the footer, a phone number in the header or a button or link within the content prompting them to inquire for more information.
5. Keep it simple and organized
We’ve talked a lot about providing additional information, using AJAX to build a responsive website and prominently displaying contact and support information. With all of that in mind, it may seem like your website could quickly get out of hand—and without proper attention to detail, it certainly could. You don’t want your site to look cluttered or give your users a case of information overload, so it’s key to keep your site clean and well-organized. Work with your designer to develop ways to keep information accessible, yet unobtrusive.
If you’re building your own site, a good rule of thumb is to look at the design you’ve chosen and then ask yourself, “What can I remove to make this easier to use?” It could be an entire block of text or simply a background color or border. Once you start de-cluttering, you’ll be able to see if items should be shifted to other places in the layout, different pages or removed entirely. Keep revising until you have a site that’s clean, well organized and easy to navigate.
Interesting graphic from a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies.
You can find the full sized graphic here.
Talkback: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/07/the-business-impact-of-social-media.php
As soon as an idea meets expression it becomes a living thing that anyone, anywhere can grasp and use. This is the fundamental power of ideas. The idea here is to build a creative content production company, using “crowdsourced” material. Is it possible?
Assignment Zero, a project sparked by Jeff Howe who coined “crowdsourcing” and Jay Rosen, began with the goal of having “a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.” Jeff Howe considered it “a highly satisfying failure“.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Although there seems to be a market for Artistic and Creative works that reveal or explore the personal lives of “regular” people. From a talk given at SXSW by creative/comic Ze Frank and blogged about by Kirsten Knipp;
Ze explored the idea of emotional content online and shared ways that people were expressing their pain and loss by reaching out and communicating. He is currently thinking about how that works and it seems like he has found ways to share the emotional without exploiting the private. I look forward to seeing more of his work in that arena.
I can imagine the “crowd” being made up of teenagers and young people who are net savvy and creative. It would be many, many people all with their own unique knowledge and abilities that do the job. From Jeff Howe at Wired;
It is a community’s ability to allocate intellectual resources organically in this way that can make it a more efficient machine than a traditional, hierarchical organization.
Sources >>>
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_final?currentPage=all
A.
