Of course, the best luck is the luck you make for yourself. If you are looking to make a little extra luck for your business this spring, some new content marketing might be exactly the four leaf clover you are looking for.

Not sure what new content would be the best lucky charm for your business?

Consider one of these ideas while taking advantage of our St. Patrick’s Day promotion.

1. Summer is Sooner Than You Think

Memorial Day is May 30th this year, which means there are roughly two and half months until summer begins in the minds of most Americans. People are about to start purchasing their summer wardrobe and making summer plans, if they haven’t already.

This is the perfect time to update your content marketing with promotions on summer goods and services.

Fresh new compelling product descriptions can give you a sales boost by enticing customers to buy and also help you find new customers by improving your ranking in search engine results.

2. Every Season Deserves a Promotion

There is a reason that Crowd Content is doing a new promotion right now and it isn’t because we really love leprechauns.

Well, that isn’t the ONLY reason

Regular seasonal promotions are great for building and maintaining customer engagement.

Odds are your business hasn’t had a promotion since the Christmas season. That was almost three months ago.

Keep your customers engaged with a new promotion, whether it be for St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, the start of spring, or National Frozen Food Month (seriously, it is a thing).

Once you have worked out your promotion, the best way to advertise it is with e-mail content, a newsletter, or landing page content. A Crowd Content writer can easily assist with any type of content.

3. Free Blog Sundays

Does your business have a blog that is updated daily or weekly? If so, you are already getting creative fresh content regularly.

The 15% deposit bonus means that you could get a bonus blog post. Think of it as “free blog Sundays”.

And if your business doesn’t have a blog, you should consider starting one. It is difficult to overstate the impact a blog can have on your business, especially in creating customer engagement.

The post 3 Reasons Why Spring Calls for a Content Refresh appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Where there used to just be a simple thumbs up icon, you may now see a variety of smiley faces, or even a heart. These new icons are part of the Facebook Reactions that Facebook recently rolled out.

New Icons?

Even if you do frequent Facebook regularly, it is very possible that this review is the first you have heard of Facebook Reactions. The reason is that it isn’t immediately apparent how to use the new options if it hasn’t been explained to you, because the user interface hasn’t changed.

The old “like” button appears on every post, but there aren’t obvious buttons to produce the other reactions.

In order to do anything other than like a post, you have to hover over the “like” button until a pop up menu gives you other options.

Facebook Reactions In-Depth

Facebook Reactions increase the ways you can non-verbally respond to a post. In addition to being able to like a post, you can now also express shock (wow), anger, love, sadness, and even laugh at a post.

There are some limits to this new system, though.

First, you can not express multiple reactions for a post. You can change your reaction, if you want, but you simply can’t laugh and love at the same time.

Second, Facebook Reactions only apply to the initial post. Comments are still restricted to simply being liked or not.

Third, only the top three reactions (ordered by number of reactions given) are visible on the post. Anyone who can read the post can click on the reactions to get a more complete accounting of how many of each type of reaction was given and who gave each reaction type.

Where is the Dislike Button?

Simply put, there isn’t a dislike button. Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2014 that Facebook would never include a dislike button, because he doesn’t think such a button is a force for social good and doesn’t want to see posts getting demeaned on Facebook in that way.

Bullying Concerns

Facebook reactions were released worldwide on February 24th, 2016, which happens to coincide with Anti-Bullying Day in Canada.

This is rather appropriate because there are some concerns that the new system could be used for bullying. Whether this concern is merited has yet to be seen.

There are some who believe that Facebook Reactions can actually be used to fight bullying. And while Facebook hasn’t made any direct statements on the matter beyond those made when referencing a potential “dislike” button, at least one part of the feature does seem to combat bullying.

Since only the top three reactions are visible on any post, even if a few individuals do give inappropriately negative reactions to a post (like anger on a happy post), those reactions are likely to be hidden from view by the positive reactions.

Additionally, at least in the first 24 hours, the system doesn’t seem to be getting abused yet. On one of the most abused Facebook pages in history, Feminist Frequency, not a single person has yet to post an “angry” response to any post.

Final Analysis

It is too early to tell for sure whether Facebook Reactions will become popular, but the initial response by Facebook users shows a lot of excitement.

The system has been thoroughly tested for months in other countries, so hopefully the bugs are fully worked out.

Even if interest fades, the flexibility of Facebook Reactions is sure to increase the overall value of Facebook for private and commercial users alike.

What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section below!

The post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Facebook Reactions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Certain people, whether they are naturally outgoing, simply like to express their opinion, or always feel the need to get in the last word, tend to post more than others.

The reverse of this is also true. Certain people, often referred to as lurkers, tend to post very rarely, even though they may actually read every blog post or forum post.

The shame about this is that those lurkers are actually rather devoted members of the community, but due to shyness, uncertainty, or possibly a dislike for other posters, they simply aren’t interacting with the community in a very meaningful way.

No matter what your brand is, if you can manage to get these lurkers to start interacting with your community, it is a huge win for your brand.

Understanding the Lurker

Every lurker is different, which means there is no magic bullet for getting every lurker to start posting. But the following are a few reasons that many lurkers choose not to post:

• Posting requires logging in and log in procedures are cumbersome
• Posting requires creating an account and account creation procedures are cumbersome
• Security procedures on your website are weak and poster is concerned about stolen information
• Anonymity is not protected by your site
• Posts aren’t monitored on your site, which is creating a toxic environment
• A few active posters are dominating the conversations
• New opinions or new members are belittled by some posters
• Brand representatives seem robotic or dry
• There are no or few meaningful benefits to posting
• Potential poster is shy or insecure

Each reason requires different solutions, ranging from game-like incentives to using the right language to dealing with a toxic comment section. The best solutions are simple and cover multiple of the reasons above.

Solution: Change Your Tone

Maintaining a consistent tone is important for brand recognition, but you are beyond the recognition point when you are trying to get lurkers to post. This means you can change your tone with little consequence.

Study the tone of your customers, especially those that post infrequently. If you can match that tone with your comments, you make the environment friendlier for those rare posters.

Solution: Adjust Log In / Posting Procedures

A user friendly comment section / forum allows users to log in automatically and post semi-anonymously. Additionally, because anonymity comes with toxicity problems, your comment sections also need to be moderated or include simple, effective reporting mechanisms that are actually well enforced.

Solution: Reward Regular Posting

Depending on your brand, rewards could range from discounts on products to a lottery for a free service to a ceremonial title on your forums.

Whatever the reward you devise, creating a system where customers are rewarded for posting regularly, but not for volume posting, is the ideal way to get lurkers to post without increasing the posts of already high volume posters.

The post How to Encourage Lurkers to Interact with Your Online Community appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

1. Finding Compelling Images is Difficult

Images, whether they are photographs, charts, or illustrations, are an increasingly critical component to content marketing. Properly using images in your content marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage your audience. The challenge is finding high quality images.

The best images are protected by copyright. Fair use exceptions may exist, but rarely for content marketing because it is used to earn money. The simplest solution to this challenge is to create your own images when possible. Tools like memegenerator are ideal for making snappy, engaging images that you own the rights to.

2. Everyone is Using Different Social Media These Days

While maintaining a presence on every type of social media may seem like it will have a net benefit to your bottom line, that actually isn’t true. You will spend more resources on maintaining your social media presence than you will earn from the media saturation.

Instead of using every type of social media, you benefit more by focusing only on the types of social media that best support your business and are most used by your customers.

If you are lucky, your customers primarily use the same type of social media that best benefits your business. If not, the best solution is to use the primary social media of your customers to direct those customers to your primary type of social media.

What is your primary social media? That depends on your business, but usually the answer is based on how often you want to interact with your consumer base.

If you want to interact multiple times a day, use Twitter. Approximately once a day, use Facebook. Approximately once a week, use YouTube.

By maintaining a presence on only a few types of social media, you make social media a valuable part of your content marketing plan.

3. Everything Has Been Said Before

If your product or service doesn’t change significantly over the years, your content marketing is likely becoming stale. There are only so many ways you can discuss the same service or product before your customer base gets tired of hearing the message.

Tackling this challenge requires innovation. If you have a new service or product on the horizon, focus on that with previews. If your don’t, focus your content marketing on something other than your product.

Other valuable things to focus on are your customers, your business, or maybe just something that is only lightly related to your product or service. For example, a month or so of marketing that focuses on amazing U.S. locations to visit may help your car dealership get sales even if you don’t ever make a pitch during that time.

4. Short Term Campaigns Are Often Hit Or Miss

Short term campaigns have the potential to be truly memorable and create a major uptick in your page hits and sales. Unfortunately, they also have the potential to fail miserably. Creating a truly excellent content marketing campaign usually requires solid planning and perfect timing.

The key to conquering this challenge is to schedule your marketing campaigns, preferably about a year out (and at least six months out). This gives you plenty of time to create truly memorable content, ensures that last minute problems don’t derail your campaign, and lets you create linked campaigns that build off each other.

A well designed marketing campaign that incorporates lots of short term campaigns, including perfectly timed holiday campaigns, is practically assured to be memorable.

The post 4 Content Marketing Challenges That Can Be Solved Today appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Well…

If I want to be truly honest with myself, I never actually fulfill any of my resolutions. Maybe that will change this year if I call them goals instead of resolutions. Maybe not, but it is worth a try.

Goal #1 – Use Time More Efficiently

As a freelancer, time is probably my most precious resource. When I don’t have projects to work on, time continues to flow, even though I have nothing useful to do with it. When I do have projects to work on, those projects compete for my available time, as do clients who pretty much always want projects completed yesterday.

In 2016 I am committed to using downtime more efficiently. There are plenty of ways that I can support my freelancing and support my future clients if I put in the appropriate effort. As for times when projects are pouring in, I would like to save time while still maintaining a high level of writing excellence.

Goal #2 – Build a Tool Portfolio

Between reading and writing, I spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours each year improving my writing skills. Unfortunately, the ability to write well is only one important requirement for a freelance writer. In today’s market, you also need an electronic drawer full of content creation tools. I don’t have one.

My best tool after my keyboard and my brain is pretty much Yahoo search engine.

That is effectively like saying that my only way of watching movies is on my VCR. It works, technically, but it is very outdated and much less efficient than modern options.

Conveniently, this is one goal that I have already started working on. I’ve been compiling a list of useful tools and I am slowly beginning to practice with them. Hopefully, I’ll have a full set before the end of 2016.

Goal #3 – Write a Novel

As my guidance counselor told me in high school, you should always have a reach goal. She was talking about colleges, but the advice works more generally as well.

This particular goal may not even be as much of a stretch as it seems, either. At this point in my life I have already been published in three different short story anthologies and I am scheduled to be published in a fourth before the end of 2016. Moving from short stories to novels is challenging, but definitely within reach.

If I get the right inspiration and time, I will probably publish as an e-book. I’d love to publish a physical novel, but I consider that a future goal.

Your Goals?

Do any of these goals sound similar to your freelance goals in 2016? At Crowd Content, we’d love to hear about your 2016 freelance goals. Shout out in the comments section below.

Happy new year!

The post My Top 3 Freelancing Goals for 2016 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you want your holiday marketing to stand out, the best way to do that is to learn from the few marketing teams that have managed to stand out in the crowd.

REI – #OptOutside

REI is a retailer that sells outdoor sports equipment. Like a handful of retailers this year, they publicly refused to open their store on Thanksgiving. Additionally, they took that one step further and also refused to open on Black Friday, instead opting to spend that time engaging in outside activities and encouraging others to do the same. The results were that almost 1.5 million people joined the #OptOutside campaign.

The main takeaway from this is that many consumers are getting tired of the constant commercialization of the holidays at the cost of family time. By emphasizing the traditional values of the holidays and standing by the values of the company (outdoor living), REI showed that it was a company that didn’t put profits above the holiday season.

Even if that didn’t result in immediate profits, the good will is certain to pay off for the rest of the holiday season and probably into 2016.

Z-Man Games / Pandasaurus Games – 12 Days of Giveaways

Z-Man Games and Pandasaurus Games are two independent board game companies that happen to be running nearly identical Facebook campaigns. Both are offering a game a day for free. The “cost” of entry is to share and like the posts (and comment as well for Z-Man Games).

Pandasaurus is a small company, with less than 4,000 who like the page, but it is seeing about 100 entries a day. Z-Man is liked by 22,000 and the first day almost 1,700 entered the contest. Those are pretty good numbers for Facebook.

Receiving 100 visitors and nearly 2,000 visitors a day is great for both companies, but even more importantly, all those visitors are sharing with all of their friends. That is excellent marketing for the small cost of a few games. These types of giveaways tend to work best during the holidays when people are looking for gift ideas anyway and a shared post from a friend may spark an idea.

12 Days of Deadpool – 20th Century Fox

“Deadpool” is an R-rated superhero movie that is slated to be released in 2016. From the very start the movie has used internet marketing to excite consumers. Despite that, this most recent holiday campaign is truly unique. It started on 12/14/2015 with a video released on YouTube. This video not only spelled out the concept of the campaign, but did so with the kind of smart humor that has been used throughout the film’s marketing.

Looking at the video, you will find a veritable road map to how to make a successful holiday marketing campaign. It is designed to resemble a traditional advent calendar, albeit online, but the content lightly makes fun of traditional Christmas concepts (like the man in the red suit and eggnog). The campaign also outright states the benefit that consumers will get for sticking with it to the very end: a new trailer.

The most important technique used here, though, can be seen by stopping the video at the 0:26 mark. This is where the video shows the upcoming advent calendar. On eight of the twelve days, a different website or company will be revealing the surprise for that day.

This means that 20th Century Fox has teamed up with eight different outside companies, all of which now have a stake in helping the movie succeed. It also means that regular visitors to the websites of those companies will become aware of “Deadpool” if they weren’t already. Internet marketing is rarely this efficient or effective.

The post 3 Excellent 2015 Holiday Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you engage in content creation, you have almost certainly had a similar thought many times in your life. All too often, you then spend the next hour or so searching fruitlessly through your browser history until you eventually give up and insert a picture a kid eating cereal into your content.

Digital asset management, a growing trend in e-commerce, is the solution to this common problem.

Maintaining a Library

The main advantage of digital asset management for all types of e-commerce is the ability to store and organize digital assets for later use. This makes it easier to find good images, charts, and videos and attribute them correctly, when you most need them.

Statistics show that content with visual media garner 94% more page views than those without, which is why it is important to use good visual content in your content marketing.

A Consistent Voice

Voice is something that we have discussed often at Crowd Content, but one thing that is often left out in that discussion is how voice is affected by visuals. Once you have created a consistent marketing voice, you need to make sure the visual content you use maintains the voice as well as the written content.

Managing your digital assets allows you to easily tag any and all content (visual, audio, or written) with the voice it projects, so that anyone in your business can use that content consistently.

Repetition is Memorable

There is an old joke:

• What is the key to humor?
  • Repetition
• What is the key to humor?
  • Repetition
• What is the key to humor?
  • Timing

The joke works for the simple reason that human beings tend to focus more on things when they are repeated. This principle applies to e-commerce just as well as it applies to humor. The trick is simply to create the repetition in a way that is consistent, but not dull.

For content creation, that means repurposing content. For truly effective repurposing, you want your audience to think back to the original content without feeling like you are simply rehashing the same old content without adding anything new. That can be a tricky line to walk because you want all content to feel fresh.

Digital asset management is the perfect solution. By re-using images from old content, you create a visual connection to the repurposed content, allowing the actual content to deviate more, while still seeming similar. The asset management simply allows you to easily track where images, video, or content was used before and to easily find it again when you want to re-use it.

Source of Ideas

An unexpected benefit of digital asset management is that it can be an excellent source of ideas for content creation. Lets be perfectly honest. The well of ideas runs dry occasionally, even for the best content creators.

A library of digital content that you can peruse when you are out of ideas can help spark new ideas. You can even proactively develop ideas this way by simply storing images, videos, or audio snippets that you think may be useful in the future. If an asset spurs an idea when you see it, but now isn’t the time to create content based on that idea, digital asset management even lets you tag that asset with your idea when you store it.

The post How Digital Asset Management Supports E-Commerce appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Facebook uses data mining in order to better direct advertisements, Google uses data mining to provide better search results, and one of the reasons that Microsoft is giving Windows 10 away for free is because it tracks user data better than previous versions of Windows.

Big companies track and analyze data because it allows those companies to offer a better user experience. While they don’t have the same resources for data mining, smaller companies can similarly benefit from data collection and analysis.

Using the right tools and techniques, content marketers of any size can use data to power content.

The Right Tools for the Job

Companies like Google have literally spent billions of dollars gathering and analyzing data. There simply isn’t any way that your business can use data in the same way. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t gain and analyze useful data with the right tools.

If you are creative, you don’t even need professional tools. While tools like Google Analytics will tell you exactly how how many page views your content is getting, you can get a similar benefit by creating a poll that directly relates to the interests of your audience.

The numbers won’t be exact, but because interaction is voluntary, it will give you a good sense of how well your content engages your audience.

Choosing Your Data

Collecting data is only useful if you collect the right data. What type of data you need to collect depends on various factors, including your business goals, your audience interests, the industry of your business, and the purpose of the content you are creating.

For starters, you almost always want to collect data on the reach of your content. This doesn’t mean just how many people are seeing it, but also how much it is being shared and how much time your audience spends looking at your content. That kind of data is useful for determining whether you are connecting with your target audience.

In addition, you want to collect data that more directly relates to your industry or customer base.

For example, if you run a car rental service, you should collect data on what types of cars are rented at various times of the year. If that data shows that SUVs rentals increase by 50% during the summer months, you can schedule your marketing content to highlight your available SUVs shortly before and during those months.

Using the Data

The above example is just one way you can use data to implement your content marketing strategy. It is an example of using data analysis specifically for demographic targeting.

Another way to use data to power your content is using data to reinforce the substance of your content. This article from Quick Sprout perfectly highlights how that is done. Supporting data is sprinkled throughout the article, usually in a graphic that visually emphasizes the point being made.

By sharing interesting data with your audience, your content becomes more engaging and appears more trustworthy.

By using a mixture of data sharing and audience targeting, your data collection and analysis efforts are almost certain to produce higher audience engagement, retention, and action.

The post How to Use Data to Power Your Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

While all of these writing techniques apply to any form of writing, if you want to master the art of writing for an online audience, you need to educate yourself on a new set of best practices. Excellent prose will only take you so far if you don’t tailor your writing specifically for the online reader.

Below, I’ve listed a few of the basics to get you started with optimizing your content for online readers. Each header links to a supporting lesson at Crowd Content University — a series lessons designed to help improve your online writing skills.

The Inverted Pyramid

Traditionally writers envision their work as a hill. The narrative of the piece builds up to a climax and then winds down to a conclusion. Pieces created for content marketing will often place that climax very close to the end of the piece and wind down much more quickly, but the layout of the piece is still relatively similar to traditional prose.

A common journalistic technique is to instead front load content with interesting and exciting information. The information in the content then becomes increasingly less important throughout the rest of the piece. This is an excellent technique for content that is designed to inform or engage, because your audience gets important information even if they don’t finish the piece. It is less valuable for content marketing that includes a call to action at the end, because this layout doesn’t encourage your reader to read to the end.

Choosing the Right Tone

When it comes to online writing, there are probably more tips for getting tone and voice correct than there are tips for any other aspect of online writing. The correct tone for a piece depends on the content being discussed, the target audience, the purpose of the content, and in many cases, content that has preceded and will follow.

There is no right answer. However, some argue that a more conversational tone is appropriate online. Feel free to experiment and break traditional writing rules. It will pay off more often than you expect. Even when it doesn’t, you gain valuable insight from the effort.

Keep It Short and Simple Online

You need to say a lot with just a few words when writing online.

Opening Lines

Every professional writer will tell you the same thing: if you don’t hook your audience in the opening paragraph, everything else you wrote doesn’t matter.

Even more than your average reader, online readers have a short attention span. You need to hook them quickly and powerfully. An average piece of content with a great hook is more likely to be read to conclusion than an excellent piece of content with a terrible hook. If you want to ensure your content is read to conclusion, once you have finished writing the piece, go back to the introduction and make it sizzle just a little bit more.

Make it Scannable

If your content has a comment section, there are two comments that you dread to see: “Wall of text” and “TL:DR”. Both of these comments mean the same thing to you as a writer. You have failed to make your content easily readable.

The easiest way to make content easy to read is to make it scannable. In layman’s terms, this means that the reader can easily understand the gist of the content without actually reading it. Furthermore, it also means that the reader can easily skip to sections of the content that they find most compelling.

Formatting tricks like lists, subheaders, italics, bolding and use of white space all help to make content scannable. Short sentences and short paragraphs also are important. One of the nice advantages of scannable content is that it also makes longer content more palpable by providing mental breaks for the reader.

Titles

Before your first paragraph ever gets a chance to hook your audience, your title needs to hook them first. This is no small challenge. Most forms of print media employ a person whose entire job is simply to create good titles. That is how challenging it is to create engaging titles.

Practice makes perfect when writing titles, but unlike with tone, you don’t have a lot of leeway to experiment. A poor title practically ensures your content never gets read. While you are learning to write great titles, and even once you have mastered the art, use online tools to double check the effectiveness of your title before publishing.

Let’s Hear Your Tips!

Do you have any hidden gems that can help writers improve their online writing style? Do you agree or disagree with what I’ve listed here? Let me know in the comments section below!

The post How to Optimize Your Content Writing for Online Readers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Start Small But Exciting

Fans of the original “Star Wars” trilogy understand this concept. The first conflict in the original movie was the capture of Princess Leia. Her rescue mission was rather easy to accomplish, but incredibly engaging. It was only due to the completion of that mission that greater conflicts were revealed.

Social media content marketing should work the same way. Social media is designed to express compact ideas, between the 140 character limit of Twitter to the way Facebook only shows the first few lines of long posts. If you try to sidestep these limitations, you are using social media the wrong way. Embrace the format for what it is when posting to social media.

Sharp, witty, exciting, and engaging posts on social media attract attention. And if the posts are amusing, exciting, or powerful enough, your audience will share them with others. By starting with small ideas that attract attention, you help build an audience that will be receptive to larger posts in the future.

Diversify

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating a social media plan is focusing on only a single social media platform. While Facebook continues to hold the lead in social media network usage, that lead is shrinking. Networks like Twitter, Google+, and Instagram all also have hundreds of millions of active users.

More important than statistics, though, is the fact that social media users tend to be aggressively attached to their networks. If you don’t support a social media network, you are likely alienating potential customers or clients.

Make Employees Part of Your Plan

Customers and clients love interacting with employees on social media, because it makes them feel like they better understand your business. Not only should you permit employee generated content on social media, but you should encourage and reward it.

If employees are engaging in a running dialogue with your social media audience, that audience is more likely to return in the future.

Keep Up the Pace

Once you have managed to build momentum, it is just as critical that you maintain it. If your social media presence doesn’t keep up with the level of interest that you have created, that interest will begin to fade.

Maintaining momentum means dedicating resources to your social media plan that streamline your social media content. If you don’t streamline, the value gained from your social media plan will be counteracted by the increased costs of maintaining that plan.

The post How to Create a Social Media Plan That Builds Momentum appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Leave Them Satisfied

The first step to building a relationship with your audience is getting recognized for the quality of the content you produce. Clients will recognize content that furthers success goals, but your audience will judge you by a different standard.

If a person is reading your content, the vast majority of the time it is because something in your headline sparked their interest. Assuming that is the case, the way you satisfy your audience is by fulfilling the promise of your headline, whether that is answering a question, solving a problem, or explaining a complicated concept. When you fail to fulfill the promise of your headline, you disappoint your audience and damage the relationship you are trying to build.

Leave Them Wanting More

This piece of advice may seem like it directly contradicts the last piece of advice, but it doesn’t. You fail to satisfy your audience if you leave them wanting more in regards to the promise you made in your headline, but that doesn’t mean you can’t leave them wanting more about a related topic.

That is the trick here. When fostering a relationship with your audience, you want to create interest in topics related to that content. By referencing unanswered questions on those topics, you set up the audience to want to learn more. You shouldn’t be obvious about this. You want your audience to leave with a niggling question that itches like the need to sneeze.

Leave a Great Memory

Apple has aired hundreds of commercials over the decades, but there is one that is remembered more than any other, their “1984” ad.

It is considered as great a classic among commercials as “Gone with the Wind” is considered among movies. The sharply contrasting gray scale of the world and the bright colors of the protagonist make it a visual masterpiece and the direct reference to the novel “1984” tugs on the memories of the viewer.

Content that builds a relationship needs to be similarly memorable. This is best done with a number of tricks:

• Popular references
• Humor
• Images or words that appeal to emotions
• Conflict
• Shock value

If something in your content leaves a great memory, your audience will return for more great memories.

Leave Them Wanting You

No matter how well you follow the previous advice, the frustrating truth is that their are other writers who can offer a similar experience. That is why it is critical that you foster a relationship where “similar” isn’t good enough.

To do this, you want to plant the seed that your knowledge and content offer unique benefits that the audience can’t get elsewhere. Depending on the content you are creating, this could be because you prove that you are the most knowledgeable writer on a specific topic, you claim to have resources available to you on a topic that other writers don’t have, or just that you are the only writer who has ever asked certain questions.

However you approach this, once your audience is craving your content specifically, you have built a relationship that is beneficial for you, your client, and if you are doing your job right, your audience as well.

The post How to Build and Foster a Relationship with Your Audience appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But what exactly are those qualities that are in demand?

1. Excellent Writing Ability

It almost goes without saying that you need to have excellent writing ability in order to create excellent content marketing.

But excellent writing means more than just good grammar and good spelling. It requires a solid knowledge of semi-obscure, precise words and synonyms (or good skill with a thesaurus), the ability to vary sentence length for readability, and the ability to be witty without going off topic. Truly great writers even know how and when to break these rules to create better prose.

Even if your writing skills don’t pass muster, you needn’t fear. There are plenty of resources available for improving your writing, and effort goes a long way when it comes to writing. Work hard and you’ll improve.

And always remember this most important of rules: even if they haven’t said absolutely everything, excellent writers need to know when to just stop writi..

2. Superior Communication Skills

The best content marketing is created when the writing process is a cooperative endeavor between the client and the writer. But cooperation only exists with communication.

Clients expect that writers are available to discuss projects during normal business hours (time zones permitting) and prefer writers who are available during extended hours. This allows writer and client to engage in a real time dialogue about the project, even if the communication is relegated to e-mail.

But simple availability isn’t enough. You need to be proficient at communicating effectively. This may seem like a skill that every good writer has, but the difference between creating prose and conversing is not insignificant.

In conversation (even when done by e-mail), you need to suppress your ego and listen carefully to the concerns and desires of the client.

3. Audience Empathy

One of the many secrets to good content marketing is that it should sound like it was written by someone that has used the product or service being marketed. Personal familiarity is often the main way this is accomplished, but exceptional research skills can make up for a lack of familiarity.

Even personal familiarity isn’t particularly helpful, though, if you aren’t able to express that familiarity to the audience. You need to express yourself in a way that resonates with the majority of the audience.

This is where audience empathy comes in. Whether you are writing from personal experience or research, you need the ability describe the product in much the same way that an average user would, just with more compelling language. Unique experiences make for great blog content, but only if you have either first positioned yourself as a legitimate user of the product / service, or if you weave the standard experience in with the unique experience.

4. Proficiency at Matching Voice

Any long term content marketing campaign tries to portray a single voice. It makes the message more cohesive and produces better results. Most clients are aware of this and look for writers that are capable of matching the voice of their business.

No matter how good a style guide you are given, though, if you aren’t capable of adapting your writing style to match a different voice, you will be limited in your potential in the content marketing world.

This particular quality is actually quite difficult to master, so you shouldn’t be concerned if it doesn’t come naturally.

Practice makes perfect. If you find that lack of this quality is holding you back, a good way to practice is by trying to write prose in the style of a famous author and seeing whether someone who has read some of that author’s work can tell the difference.

The post Businesses Look for These 4 Qualities When Hiring Freelance Writers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

We’ve already seen the potential problems that arise when a client insists on too much control, but equally dire problems can arise when a client doesn’t maintain enough control or a writer takes advantage of the trust they are given.

The causes and consequences of these problems are different from the previous problems discussed, and thus require different solutions.

Writing is an Art Form

While there are plenty of functional and mechanical rules that good writers know and follow, especially when producing content marketing, writing is still very much more of an art than a science. And, like most artists, writers take pride in their work.

Unfortunately, sometimes pride becomes ego, and that is usually what causes writers to take advantage the trust they are given by clients.

The final product that has been created may be creative, unique, and even artistically masterful, but it simply fails at its one goal: marketing.

Most likely the writer doesn’t even realize that the final product isn’t fulfilling its purpose. And even worse, because the prose and style is so good, the client may not realize the product won’t be effective either, creating a situation where weeks or even months have gone by before the client realizes they need to update the content to properly market to their audience.

Solving this problem is tricky, but not impossible. Here are a few good approaches.

Mea Culpa

If you are a writer, you need to learn to take responsibility for your mistakes with good grace. An immediate apology and offering to provide a prompt solution can keep your professional relationship from being irreparably damaged.

Do you always have to apologize and offer reparations? No. But if you know that you violated the instructions given or allowed the focus of your work to stray from actually marketing the client’s content, then you certainly should.

Ask For Direction

“It is often easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.” – Anonymous

This may be true in some situations, but it is not the mark of a professional. As a professional, while you should be able to produce great content with minimal direction, there are definitely times when you simply need clearer instructions.

If you receive a content marketing project that doesn’t have clear instructions, ask your client for additional direction. Whether you realize it or not, it is actually your responsibility to recognize when instructions are unclear and request clarification. If you don’t, you are harming your client and your own reputation.

Should you be unable to contact the client before the deadline, it is still best practice to identify to the client points of confusion you had and provide explanations for how you approached them.

This clearly indicates to the clients what portions of the content may not be sufficient and helps the client provide clearer instructions in the future.

A Light Touch of Control

If you aren’t maintaining enough control as a client, it is probably because you either trust the writer you are using or don’t want to inhibit the writer’s creative juices. That is perfectly reasonable, but there are ways to maintain brand guidelines without shackling your writer.

The best way is to offer examples of successful content marketing similar to what you need. This creates a framework for the writer without forcing the writer’s hand. Great writers are remarkably creative at innovating even while adopting a particular style.

Explain Your Motivations

Most clients are very good at defining their goals, but few clients offer information about the motivations behind those goals. For example, if you are trying to market a new line of clothes to teenagers, specifically because summer is approaching, explain that motivation to the writer.

The knowledge that the content should be seasonal will significantly alter the writers approach and make it more likely that content fits your marketing needs.

Ask For a Synopsis

If none of the above approaches are working and you continually have difficulty maintaining control, try asking the writer for a synopsis before they start the project.

This slows down the process, but it can give you additional control in a way that still gives the writer creative leeway. It isn’t a perfect solution, but it is an excellent compromise. And at the end of the day, the relationship between a writer and a client should be one where both parties are willing to make reasonable compromises.

The post Trust vs. Control in the Client / Writer Relationship |Part. 2 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need” -The Rolling Stones

When it comes to content marketing, there is a complex dynamic between the client and the writer. Clients are investing in content that will provide positive growth for their product, their company, or maybe just their name recognition. Writers are trying to produce excellent quality content, both for the success of their client and for the improvement of their own reputation.

The result of these slightly different motivations is that clients need to have relationships with writers that give trust and leeway, while also maintaining control and direction. When one of these relationships involves an experienced writer and an experienced client, the ratio of trust to control works to produce excellent content.

But sometimes a client insists on too much control, or doesn’t offer enough trust, and then the results can be damaging for both writer and client.

The Root of the Problem

While the rare bad apple can arise in any batch, it is incredibly rare that an overly controlling client is due to the client simply being unreasonable. More often than not it is the result of a client being overly cautious. In general clients are overly cautious because they:

• Are new to content marketing
• Have had a bad experience with a writer in the past
• Learned bad information about best practices in content marketing
• Are trying to mimic another successful content marketing campaign

No matter the reason for this level of caution, the result is almost always the same: strict instructions that shackle the writer and result in ineffective content marketing.

The Difference Between a Good Writer and a Great Writer

Good writers will produce passably good content marketing, regardless of the instructions. Great writers will identify harmful instructions and find a way to get the client to loosen those instructions. Then, once those instructions have been altered, a great writer will produce excellent content marketing.

As a writer there are situations where you will simply have to refuse an assignment, because the instructions simply are impossible to work with. But any content marketing writer that is dedicated to the craft should take every effort possible to help the client create quality content before taking that step. The following are some approaches that may be effective in helping your client create quality content.

Discuss the Instructions

Assuming that prompt communication is possible, the best approach is to logically and politely explain to your client why the current instructions are not in their best interest. This should be done from a position of knowledge, preferably with evidence to back up your suggestions for a different approach.

This is a particularly useful approach when working with a client that is new to content marketing or seems to have given certain instructions due to a misapprehension about best approaches to content marketing. Always make sure to be polite, never to talk down to your client, and to listen as well as speak. Never start working on a project until you are both on the same page.

Even if instant communication isn’t possible, you can still provide limited communication, if only small changes are needed. For example, when a client recently gave me instructions about including a phrase in the first sentence of some content, I balked.

I couldn’t come up with a way to write the content where the phrase wouldn’t sound awkward in the first sentence. Instead, I included the phrase in the second sentence and left a note explaining to the client why I did that. I also promised to edit if the client wasn’t satisfied with that.

Make a Counter Proposal

This is similar to the above suggestion, but is better when communication is limited, but the timeline for the project is flexible. Instead of accepting the project as given, offer a counter proposal that you think would be more successful.

This works best if you are in e-mail contact with a client, but can’t use any instant forms of communication. This also gives the client the option to decline in advance. The one thing to be wary about with this suggestion is that by making the proposal, you are seriously risking your reputation if the content you produce isn’t effective.

Ignore Instructions (With a Major Caveat)

Ignoring instructions is rarely a good idea. Nine times out of ten, it will harm you, your reputation, and your client. But occasionally it is exactly the right thing to do.

If the instructions you receive are likely to be very harmful to the client’s business or reputation (for example: involving plagiarism, using terrible SEO strategies, insulting to potential customers), you may just have to ignore them completely and build unique content marketing that you believe will fulfill their needs even if it doesn’t match their instructions.

If you want this to be successful, you almost certainly need to have built a very strong rapport with the client already or have built a very good content marketing reputation. Additionally, you should write, and be ready to provide on demand, the originally directed content should the client refuse the alternate you provided.

Offer Future Edits

Most of the above suggestions work well unless the client has had a bad experience with a past writer. In that case, the client is often wary of writer suggestions. A good solution in this case is to write the content exactly as directed, but express your concerns to the client when you do so.

Also offer to perform future edits if those concerns come true. If they don’t come true, you provided good content and the client will trust you a little more in the future for that. If they do come true, your good faith offer helps build trust and helps the client.

What You Can Do as a Client

Learning to offer the right amount of trust and to keep the right amount of control can be difficult. You are almost certain to make mistakes the first few times you hire a writer. Experience is the long term solution, but in the short term, it helps to learn more about your writer.

If you are working with a middle man, like Crowd Content, you can ask for more information about the reputation of your writer. If you aren’t, try asking your writer for samples or references. Just knowing that the writer has succeeded in the past when given some leeway will make you more comfortable in giving leeway.

The post Trust vs. Control in the Client / Writer Relationship| Part 1 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

A well designed policy should include guidelines for how your employees should present themselves when representing your company. The reason this is important is because employee interactions add significant value to your online company brand. Encouraging the right type of interactions can have a strong positive effect on customer engagement.

Employees: A Valuable Online Resource

Whether or not you want it to be true, your employees are the public face of your brand. If you create a policy where they largely remain unseen, your customers will take note of this fact and it will probably reflect poorly on your company. If instead you give them freedom to interact with your customers, employee generated content can easily be one of your best content marketing resources.

Blackberry understands this so well that it actively turned employees into company ambassadors. The company determined that enthusiastic, engaged employees boosted revenue, helped create jobs, and even increased stock prices.

These benefits alone would have been worth investing in employee satisfaction. But Blackberry also benefited from employees sharing that enthusiasm with current and potential customers in a way that seemed authentic.

Unleashing the Horde

There are three steps to unleashing the horde and getting employees to create content marketing independently. The first two steps, hiring an online content manager and motivating your employees have already been covered. The final step is giving them the tools they need to engage your customer base.

In terms of technology, these tools include things like moderating authority, or at the very least, a company affiliation tag on your forums. For something like Twitter or a blog, it may include access to post under the company name, or at least an easy mechanical way to submit suggested posts.

Additionally, all employees should receive basic training on best practices for interacting with the public while representing the company.

Best Practices

1. Forums

Forums are an excellent place for employees to have really good discussions with customers. Forum discussions are often on topics that your employees are very familiar with, and employees, like most normal people, like to discuss their accomplishments.

While they should generally avoid revealing inside information, you will want to occasionally give them permission to provide information about an upcoming product or service on the forums. This is highly effective because it makes the employee feel privileged and it excites your more dedicated customers.

2. Social Media

Social media, including Twitter, offers an excellent platform for sharing visual media and glimpses into how your company operates. Encourage your employees to share images of their workplace, the view from the office, their favorite restaurant, or even their cat on company social media accounts.

Similarly, amusing anecdotes about their day or the office are a great way to interact with customers. It may not have anything to do with your product or service, but it is effective in increasing engagement with your customer base because it adds a human face to your workforce.

3. Blogs

There are two great ways for employees to interact with your blogs. The first way is through comments. If an interesting employee comment appears early in the comment section of a blog entry, customers are more likely to get involved in a lively discussion of that entry.

The second way is through the blog entries themselves. When an employee writes a blog entry without any prompting, it is likely to feel more organic than most other blog entries. Customers are likely to recognize this and respond positively, especially if employee enthusiasm is reflected in the blog entry.

Untapped Potential

Your employees are potentially one of the greatest sources of content marketing for your company. As long as you provide easy-to-follow guidelines, and the appropriate digital resources, employees will increase customer engagement and add a much more authentic face to your online content marketing.

Taking advantage of this untapped potential requires a good relationship with your employees and a fair bit of trust on your part. But if you are successful in tapping this resource, just like Blackberry, you will have created company ambassadors that are regularly producing compelling employee generated content.

The post How to Encourage Employee Generated Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As important as an online community is, it only truly has value if you understand the benefits of an online community and properly implement an effective one.

Keep reading for just that advice.

The Basics of an Online Community

In the 90s, if a business had an online community, it was probably just an e-mail list where the business published an electronic newsletter once a month. Since then, online communities have grown with technology. Today, online communities often include forums, social networking, surveys, YouTube groups, and much more.

But online communities are more than just the technology involved. The people are also a key part of those communities. Online communities are comprised of customers, employees, potential customers, and even anonymous strangers that will never purchase your product or service.

Every one of these groups add value to your community and need to supported, even the final group.

Why is an Online Community Valuable?

There is no simple answer to this question, but there are a number of metrics in which an online community offers value. The first metric is exposure. Online communities effectively offer low cost advertising.

This is especially true on platforms like Facebook where a comment made on your online community can be seen by friends of the commenter. That is literally free press.

Another important metric is engagement. An online community is a way for people to essentially engage themselves. When someone takes the time and effort to post a message on your community, they are likely to be interested in the responses they receive.

Each time they return to your community, their engagement increases, until it is likely that they will continue to return to your community even after the first topic has exhausted itself.

The last major metric is resource savings. Many content marketers have discovered that online communities reduce their costs when it comes to customer interactions. Often online communities can provide succinct and helpful answers to questions that otherwise would need to be answered by a company employee.

In fact, Google has embraced this concept so well that the Google Support Forums literally are designed to “allow you to collaborate with other users and get help quickly.”

Build a Community Sooner Rather Than Later

While there is some value to waiting until you have a critical mass of interest before creating a community, it is generally best to build one sooner rather than later. If you wait too long, there is a good chance an independent group will build a community for you.

This does provide free publicity, but it doesn’t give you control over the community.

A good example of this is the Best of Disney Art Facebook page. This group is not associated with Disney, which means the company can’t benefit from it as much as if it were.

Once you have been pre-empted on creating a community, even if you do build one, it is nearly impossible to overtake the original. This doesn’t mean you should give up on creating a community, but it does mean that you should take action to benefit from the competing community.

What Your Company Should Add to a Community

Even though a community is primarily directed by community members, you still want to be involved, in order to best benefit from the community. Online community members appreciate visible and transparent company interactions.

The best way to be visible is for people associated with your business to regularly and publicly respond to community members, especially when community members are upset.

You should also make sure that your business occasionally introduces surveys, contests, forum topics, or announcements that community members can respond to or interact with.

In order to maximize this communication, you need to make sure that all employees understand your brand voice. This doesn’t mean that individuals can’t have different personalities and quirks (in fact, they should), just that there are ground rules about how your brand is portrayed.

The best way to enforce these ground rules is to have an online community manager that directs the content your company adds to the community.

More is Better

If one of something is good, then two of something is better. In the case of online communities, this generally holds true. In general, it is better if you can let people interact with your community in the way they prefer. This means it is valuable to have a forum, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a Google+ page all at the same time.

If people can access your community in the way that makes them most comfortable, they are more likely to have an initial positive view of your business. You can then easily link between your various communities, allowing community members to explore them freely.

It is even possible to set up your forum so that people can log on through their Facebook, Google, or Twitter account, encouraging greater exploration of your community by making it easier to switch between multiple platforms.

Best Community For Your Content Marketing

Every company has a different online community. One company may choose to only have a Facebook page, while another may use a forum on its website supported by Tweets. While these two approaches may look as different as night and day, the differences are actually mostly cosmetic.

No matter the chosen platform, online communities are all places where everyone with an interest in your company can interact publicly.

The decision of what type of community you choose to use should be based on two primary factors: your community members and your online resources.

The easiest way to determine what your community members want is to ask them. Engage in a few polls or surveys and try to incorporate as much of the wishes of the group as possible. The limiting factor here will be your online resources.

If you don’t have access to a reliable server, for example, you probably shouldn’t run a forum. If you can’t devote enough manpower to monitoring communications 24 hours a day, Twitter probably isn’t a good choice.

Once you determine what type of community you can support and what type of community your community members want, all you need to do is create one.

It isn’t cost free, but since you already have an online presence, it should be relatively inexpensive to implement. And, if you implement a good community, the benefits you receive from an online community should more than pay for itself.

The post How to Implement the Online Community Your Business Needs appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

That means that throughout the conference, with over 3400 content marketers from around the world, the main theme that kept coming up was authenticity through content marketing.

This article explores why authenticity is important in your content marketing strategy and discusses best practices from other authentic brands.

Content marketing has always been as much of an art as it has been a science. Simply copying the successful strategy of another content marketer may bring positive results, but it is often almost as likely to net no benefits or even net negative results.

The main reason for this is that content marketing is directed at real people, who make decisions as much with their heart as they do with their heads, and increasingly these people want authenticity in their marketing.

From the days of the traveling salesman, who wooed customers with honeyed words that made potential customers feel like they could trust the product being sold, this has always been the case. But the modern generation, particularly millennials, simply don’t trust those honeyed words anymore.

They have been inundated with advertising their whole lives and see it for what it is: a base attempt to get their money. The millennial generation is tired of mock authenticity. This generation wants real authenticity from the companies it supports.

Importance of Millennials

If you engage in online content marketing, the importance of the millennial generation simply can’t be ignored. Members of the millennial generation spend more time online and more money online than members of any other generation.

And the millennial generation is just a glimpse of what is coming. Generation Z, a generation that is still primarily composed of children and teenagers, is currently spending almost twice as much of its income online as millennials are.

If content marketing strategies don’t adapt to the new generations of consumers, they are certain to fail.

Is Truth Authentic?

The question seems almost trivial, but oddly it isn’t. On a logical level, of course truth is authentic. But on a personal level, truth can often feel the least authentic. Simply providing facts and figures isn’t enough. Audiences are very aware of how easy it is to mislead, even when you are telling the complete truth.

You can’t just tell the truth. You need to convince your audience that you are telling the truth. As in many things in life, perception of truth matters as much as actual truth.

Speak Like a Customer

The simplest way to display your truth is to put your brand voice in the perspective of your audience, the customer. If your content feels like it is created by someone who has never used the product or service, it comes off as not being sincere.

One simple way to have your audience come on board with your true story is to describe the benefits in a way that feels likes a happy customer making a recommendation to friends. Similarly, images seem more authentic when they depict products that have been owned and used for some time, rather than a stale picture of a product that has never been used or has been dressed up to look good.

McDonald’s is a perfect example of a business that has oft been criticized for presenting a false image of its food in commercials, which is why it has recently sought to increase sales through increased transparency.

One of the best examples of a company speaking like a customer is Allstate. Even though the spokesman never claims to be a customer, he dresses casually, looks like an everyday average American, and tells folksy stories. All of these create the impression that he is just like the audience, which makes this form of marketing incredibly effective.

Even if you don’t engage in video marketing, these commercials offer an excellent template for how content marketing can connect with a customer base.

Authenticity Through Caring

Increasingly, customers are more likely to spend money on companies that care about their well-being and the well-being of society. This doesn’t mean that every business needs to run a program that uses profits to feed hungry children, but if you are marketing for one that does, you should definitely publicize that fact.

When I am writing content for a business, I always make sure to highlight any charitable acts of the business in order to help garner customer trust.

For the average business, though, showing caring means showing concern for the well-being of the customer.

For example, if you are marketing for window installations, you don’t just want to highlight the quality of the windows. You also want to highlight how installing new windows can help your customers save money on energy costs. It is a simple benefit, but it is important to customers, and by highlighting it, you show that you are thinking like a customer.

Authenticity is a Form of Trust

Once you decide to add authenticity to your content marketing, you have to be willing to commit to the long haul.

Authenticity is a form of trust, and like normal trust, all it takes is one misstep to lose it completely.

You pretty much have to start over from scratch if you ever present yourself in a way that isn’t authentic.

With that warning in mind, the benefits of earning this trust are already high and constantly growing. Authenticity appeals to every generation, especially the youngest, most tech savvy generations, and creates excellent brand loyalty. It is a strategy that is worth committing to today.

The post Why You Need Authenticity in Your Content Marketing Now appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But the only way you can engage your audience is if you get website traffic to begin with.

In fact, getting website traffic is so important that a majority of B2B and B2C content marketers rate website traffic as the most important metric for success.

Curiously, only about 40% of content marketers consider SEO ranking to be an important metric of success. This suggests that many content marketers don’t fully appreciate the synergistic relationship between an optimized SEO strategy and website traffic.

Optimizing SEO isn’t a new idea, but due to the constantly changing standards that search engines like Google use to identify quality content, your strategy for optimization needs to be constantly evolving. Almost every content marketer makes a few SEO mistakes, but one of the most common mistakes that many content marketers make is relying on outdated strategies and metrics.

The following tips will help you avoid common pitfalls and develop an up-to-date SEO strategy that will improve website traffic.

1. Make Keywords Count But Don’t Actually Count Them

A common request from my clients is to use a keyword a specific number of times. This was standard operating procedure a few years ago after many search engine modified their ranking metrics to try to counteract keyword stuffing, but ranking metrics have since improved.

While keyword density is still a small part of determining the rank of a web page, the quality of that content is even more important.

If you are using keywords organically, you don’t generally need to worry about total number, though replacing a few with synonyms probably won’t hurt (see below).

2. Trust the Robots

Technically Google, Yahoo, and Bing rankings aren’t controlled by robots, but there is a significant amount of automation involved in search engine ranking. One of the nice things about that automation is that it is remarkably good at recognizing query term synonyms and co-occurrence.

Thus, even if your blog uses the keyword “dog walking service” repeatedly, every major search engine will recognize that the term is synonymous with “dog walker” and probably even “pet walker” and “pet care service.”

This is another area where I have found that the knowledge of many of my clients is out of date. I commonly receive requests to use specific keywords, with no room for variation.

You can and should use variations on your keywords if you want to improve your ranking. For similar reasons, you shouldn’t overload your metadata with keywords that are synonyms or co-occurring.

3. The Search Engine Wars Are Over

…and Google won. Google is used by roughly 4 times as many people as the rest of the competition combined.

That means that you want to adhere to Google’s guidelines for creating high quality content if you want to improve traffic. Thankfully, those guidelines were leaked and it is easy to find guides on how to adhere to Google content quality guidelines precisely.

One of the most important takeaways of this leak is that human beings adjust the rankings after the robots have done their job. Appealing to the human reader is just as important as appealing to the robots, if not more so.

And the secret to that is value, variety, and volume. The first two are particularly important for the human analysts who will be judging whether or not your content should be considered high quality or expert.

Always produce top quality work and the volume will automatically come with time.

4. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Clicks

Words aren’t the only metric being used to judge your content. Images and links also need to be a part of your SEO strategy. Good link usage is actually quite easy, because the rules for good links are pretty much identical to the rules for good keyword usage.

Use them organically and always make sure they are high quality.

Images are a little different, though, because they are used to provide a visual break for the readers almost as much as they are used to support your content. One of the best examples of excellent image use on the internet is Cracked.com.

For example, in this article about the environment, note the third image on item #5. It breaks up the monotony of nature images, adds humor, and makes a meaningful statement about the content.

While every use of images won’t live up to this gold standard, you want your images to create a mental break for the reader whenever possible, even if just by adding a little color to your content.

A Great Marriage is Built Over Time

No matter how much you optimize your SEO strategy, and no matter how many advanced concepts you implement, you won’t see drastic results overnight.

It will take time for your content marketing to net positive results from your optimized SEO strategy. Be patient and the results will be worth the effort.

The post How to Unite Your Content Marketing and SEO Strategies appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If past years are any indication, this convention truly lives up to its reputation, hosting an enormous array of speakers drawn from the cream of the crop of the blogging and content marketing world.

Engaging Research

Last year, our focus was an ongoing research project that help us to define quality content. Overwhelmingly, the results of this research were that quality content is “engaging.”

This year our focus has changed slightly, as our current research project is attempting to define “engaging” in terms of content marketing.

As part of this research, just as we did in 2014, we plan to engage (See what we did there?) in face-to-face research at CMWorld.

Anyone visiting booth 32 will be engaged in a conversation to discover their understanding of the word “engaging” in terms of quality content.

As a thank you to everyone helping our research, participants will be given a custom-designed t-shirt (shown below).

Sponsoring CMWorld

In addition to our continuing research, we are once again silver sponsors of Content Marketing World. This means we will be hosting the Barenaked Ladies concert on September 9th.

In your CMWorld event bag, you will find a VIP pass to this event. To activate your VIP pass, you should come by our booth in the exhibit hall (32) during the day on Sept 9th.

VIP will have free drinks, preferred seating and exclusive networking opportunities.

Storytelling Inspiration

We aren’t just hosting the Barenaked Ladies because we enjoy their powerful music (and we do enjoy it very much). We are also hosting them because they represent our mission in the content marketing world.

The Barenaked Ladies are consummate storytellers that have mastered the art of engaging their audience. They do on stage what content marketing writers struggle to do every day of their life.

Whether wisdom can be gleaned from their performance is something we have yet to discover, but we can all use this performance as inspiration and also simply as a way to unwind.

Stay Engaged, Stay in Touch

In closing, Content Marketing World 2015 is one week away. We’re looking forward to learning from, and interacting with, many of the legends of the industry. If you can make it, join us for a conversation and a free t-shirt.

Please join our online discussion of this topic and look forward in the upcoming weeks to reports of what we learned and what is new in the content marketing world.

The post Crowd Content at Content Marketing World 2015 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Creating a high quality blog isn’t difficult, but it does require that you obey certain guidelines.

If you are looking to build a better blog for your online property, make sure to always follow these 8 guidelines:

1. Pick Your Topic Carefully

A blog post is only useful if it is about something that interests your target audience. Obviously, this means your blog posts should relate to your product or property, but that isn’t all you should consider when choosing a topic.

You also need to consider the demographic of your target audience and whether your content can add new value to topic.

Useful ways to determine what your interests your audience is to analyze page views from previous blogs and to create digital surveys for your audience using a program like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.

2. Create an Attention Grabbing Headline

There is a reason that newspapers and magazines have a person on staff whose entire job is literally just to create headlines. A powerful title is critical to getting your audience to read your blog.

A useful tool for building great headlines is the Coschedule Headline Analyzer.

3. Use Strong Formatting

Effectively formatting a blog is a rather in-depth topic. Whole books have been written on the topic. The short version, though, is the internet is a visual medium.

This means you want the formatting of your blog to be visually appealing. Variety in formatting, like bold lettering, italics, and bullet points is one way to create a visually appealing aesthetic.

The other way is to break up the writing into smaller sections, using subheaders and short paragraphs, much like in these guidelines.

4. Include Interesting Images

As just mentioned, the internet is a visual medium. No matter how creatively you format, a plain screen filled with text simply isn’t that appealing.

Add visual appeal to your blog with high quality, interesting images that support your content. Whether you use custom images or stock images, always make sure to follow best practices for image use, including citing your sources.

5. Include Valuable Links

Creating good internal links is both a science and an art. The science has to do with search engines. Your content is more likely to be top rated on a search engine if links are directly relevant to your content.

The art has to do with creating value for you and your audience. Your audience gains value when the links are fresh or interesting.

You gain value when the links support your brand, either by linking to older (but freshly relevant) content you have previously written or when you link to websites that have good authority within your field.

6. Include Strong Metadata

It takes a long time to understand metadata and how it affects the reach of your website, and even longer to master the concept.

Moz has some great resources to help you better understand metadata, or an experienced Crowd Content writer can provide that know-how and create strong metadata for your blog.

7. Include a Call to Action

While it is fine to occasionally write a blog post that exists purely to entertain and engage your audience, the majority of your posts should include a call to action.

That call may be subtle, but it should direct your audience to take action on products or services that you provide.

8. Double Check Your Voice

The voice of your blog is the voice of your entire online presence (and potentially your business). Before you publish anything, confirm that the voice of a blog post is consistent with the overall voice of your business.

If even a single blog post is too light, too firm, too dry, or otherwise doesn’t engage your audience, it can have a negative domino effect on your business.

The post 8 Simple Guidelines for Building a Powerful Blog appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

A content marketing campaign that is built poorly will quickly stagnate, providing no meaningful benefit, and will probably actually cost you money once you take into account the cost of producing content.

If you are thinking about starting a content marketing campaign, the following content marketing tips will help you get started.

1. Focus on the Content

Content marketing differs from traditional marketing, because the focus of content marketing is providing information that your readers want to learn.

Actual sales are a byproduct of customer loyalty, rather than a direct result of the marketing. This means you want to produce content that is colorful, unique, interesting, and helpful, in order to create reader loyalty.

2. Goal Oriented Content

One of the most important content marketing tips is define your goals before starting your content marketing campaign. You can do this by developing a mission statement or creating a list of goals.

Whichever approach you take, you want these goals to always be on the mind of your marketing team when creating content. A good trick here is to print the goals on a poster or write them on a large whiteboard so they are always visible.

3. Create and Follow a Plan

Much like traditional marketing, content marketing works best when you create a long term plan. This is particularly effective for content marketing because your goal is to create loyalty through valuable content.

With a long term plan, your content will directly reference older content and future content. This makes readers more likely to explore your website or subscribe to your content.

4. Understand Your Audience and Your Topic

Content marketing is only successful if your content actually adds meaningfully to the topic your audience is interested in. You can write all day about vintage cars, but if your tips for inspecting a vintage car are effectively the same as everyone else’s tips, your content isn’t useful.

Before you get started with content marketing, you have to understand what your audience is looking for and what others are saying on the topic.

A keyword tool like Google AdWords can help determine what your audience wants to read and simply studying your topic will let you know what others are saying about it.

5. Pick Your Platforms Carefully

Not all social platforms are made equal. Some social platforms will help your business grow, while others will actually cost you money. Choosing between platforms like Twitter or Facebook is primarily a decision based on audience.

You need to use the platform that your audience primarily uses, rather than trying to convince your audience to come to your platform of choice. The simple takeaway here is be familiar and comfortable with all social platforms, but only use the ones that are effective.

The post How to Get Started With Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The internet is incredibly packed. There are millions of blog pages and content marketing sites and literally billions, if not trillions, of web pages total.

Among that sea of words, it can be difficult to create content that consistently draws new viewers and inspires them to return regularly.

Part of the reason this is so difficult is because nearly everyone is trying to stand out, which means that many of the same strategies are being used by others that you might use. The following content creation tools and strategies will help your content marketing stand out, even in the chum filled waters of the internet.

1. Don’t Rely on Trending News

On February 27th, 2015, Leonard Nimoy died. It was the news of the day and every single news agency, blog, and social media user was talking about it. If you had posted your list of “Top 10 Leonard Nimoy Roles Other Than Spock,” your post would have gotten lost among the millions of similar posts that were all created that same day.

That is fine if your blog has a loyal following and the post was simply a one-off to honor Nimoy. But, if every post on your blog is following the trending news, your blog will rarely ever get new visitors.

2. Find Your Niche and Double Down on it

If you want your content to stand out in the crowd, you need to find a specific niche that receives very little attention from other writers. Then, you need to not only write about it, but become a scholar on the topic. Since you have intentionally chosen a topic that has very little coverage on the internet, this means you will have to do research and study offline.

Mastering your topic may require any of the following:

• Taking a course in the subject
• Research at a library
• Engaging in active practice of the topic (ex: carpentry, playing video games, etc.)
• Traveling to locations where you can observe your topic

This approach effectively requires a leap of faith, because this type of study takes a lot of time and until you start writing authoritatively about the subject, you can’t be certain your writing will draw an audience.

But, assuming you truly gain mastery of the subject, it is a safe bet that there are people who are searching the internet for information on that topic.

3. Focus on Solutions

Of all the ways to make your content stand out in the crowd, one of the most successful ways is to focus on solutions. Readers that are searching the internet for information about a problem, usually aren’t looking for a discussion of the problem as much as they want a simple, straightforward solution to that problem.

There is nothing more frustrating to a reader than searching for information about a problem and discovering that lots of people have encountered the problem, but finding no meaningful solutions for it. The following are some good examples of blog topics that directly solve a problem:

• Removing Superfish malware from Lenovo computers
• Choosing the right knitting material to prevent itching
• Advice for convincing your boss to give you a raise

If your content always provides a solution to all problems that it discusses, you will definitely stand out and readers will return to your website confident that it is a valuable source of good information.

The post 3 Ways to Stand out from Savvy Content Marketers in Your Industry appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

One of the more reliable metrics is social engagement. Evidence shows that people who comment or share content are more likely to take revenue producing actions based on that content.

And while correlation is not causation, this does mean that if you are able to produce content that inspires people to share and comment, you are likely to get better results from your content marketing.

The following are five tips for getting your audience to better engage with your content.

1. Post the First Comment

Herd mentality dictates that people are more likely to act once someone else has acted first. If you post something to the comment section of your blog, especially if it is evocative in some way, that comment is likely to get responses or inspire others to post comments.

2. Respond to Comments

One of the best ways to engage readers is to respond to their comments, from an account obviously associated with the blog page. The author of content writing can often feel like a faceless and soulless blob to readers.

But a direct response in the comment thread creates a sense of life in the author. This will engage your readers and make them more likely to comment and share in the future.

3. Create Surveys

There are few more direct ways to engage your audience than to survey your audience directly. A survey creates a direct conversation between you and your audience, and when the survey is completed, your audience has proof of a tangible result from that conversation.

If you create an interesting survey, it is very likely to be shared, which will bring more readers to your content. Some of those new readers are very likely to read additional content and possibly even take action on that content.

4. Add Social Sharing Buttons to Your Content

It can be difficult to maximize social sharing, because you have very little control over whether visitors choose to share your content. Well written and interesting content is more likely to be shared than dull content, which means you want high quality content writing on your website.

But no matter how high quality your writing is, your content is much less likely to be shared if the reader has to jump through hoops to share it. Simple sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ make sharing easy and much more likely.

5. Create Promotions or Contests

Social media seems to exist for arguing politics, publishing pictures of cats, and sharing news about free products and big discounts. Create a promotion that gives people a chance to win something big or with a very large discount (over 50%) on a product and service and your readers are sure to share it.

If you make sharing required for the promotion, you will probably turn people away, but you can get away with making sharing an optional way to improve your chances to win a prize without upsetting your audience.

The post 5 Tips for Increasing Shares and Comments on Your Blog appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It is because SEO requires a greater understanding that it is valuable for content marketing writers to take a “back to the basics” approach when examining the relationship between SEO blogging and content marketing.

“S” Stands for “Search”

In an effort to create great content with strong keywords that will inspire readers to continue reading, make a purchase, or share the content with friends, it is easy to forget that the first step of SEO blogging is to hook the reader.

If the content never appears on the first page of search results or if readers never click on the content, because the title or metadata doesn’t attract their interest, then the content has no SEO value.

Keywords, Metadata, and Titles

In the past, before Google updated its search engine algorithm extensively, keyword saturation was king of SEO. That time has passed. But even though keyword density is no longer critical, quality keyword usage still is.

You want your content marketing to use important search keywords naturally and in conjunction with related search keywords. This lets the search engine algorithms know that your content has value to the reader.

If you aren’t sure what keywords are best for your content, use a program like Google Analytics to determine what people are searching for.

Keywords are only half the equation though. Keywords get you on the first page of search results, but metadata and titles get readers to click on your content. You need to appeal to the instincts of your target audience when creating titles and metadata. Try to make sure that the tone of your title and metadata fit that audience.

In general, unless you are writing purely for academics, something slightly witty will draw the attention of potential readers and earn a click.

Engagement is Critical

The key to any inbound marketing strategy is engagement through excellent, focused content. Readers are more likely to click links, share links, or make purchases when they find the content of a website engaging. Furthermore, the search engine algorithm changes that companies like Google constantly make are literally designed to promote more engaging content.

By making your content marketing more engaging and more valuable to your target audience, you will get better returns from your investment in that marketing.

Long Term Strategy

One of the main advantages of SEO for content marketing is, unlike social media marketing or e-mail marketing, it is a long term strategy. Your content can and will be discovered by random searching for years to come.

You want the majority of this content to be evergreen, so it is just as engaging ten years from now as it is today. Finally, make sure to periodically update this content to maintain engagement value and keep it in line with evolving SEO algorithms.

The post The Relationship Between SEO and Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But there is also a type of person who wants to be informed. For this type of person, a press release is a better format for engaging interest.

The following tips will improve your skills as a press release writer.

Structure of a Press Release

A press release has three fundamental parts: title, summary, and body.

As a press release writer, you need to understand the purpose of each of these parts and craft your prose towards fulfilling that purpose.

Title

The title of your press release is the source of your search engine optimization. Current search engines will also analyze the summary and body of your press release, but the title gets a lot of weight. You need to include at lease one popular keyword in your title and the name of your business, product, or both.

Use an application like Google Analytics to determine good keywords for your title. The final goal is to crafts something that both has good keywords and succinctly describes the content of your press release.

Summary

The summary of a press release is roughly two to three sentences long and gives the reader a full understanding of what they should expect to see in the body. The purpose of the summary is to hook the reader.

You want your summary to be interesting and include just enough information that the reader wants to learn more.

If the summary hooks the reader, the rest of the content often all but sells itself. As a press release writer, you should practice writing summaries that are highly engaging.

Body

Finally, the body is the full story of your press release. The main goal of this section is to make the reader feel informed. Start the body with a date and include direct links in the body to your website. While it may seem a bit counter intuitive, a press release is better for marketing if it doesn’t try to sell a product.

Instead, focus on making it informative and not too long. An informed reader that isn’t bored by an overly long press release is likely to explore links, allowing the actual sale to be made by a web page focused towards that purpose.

The post The Secret of Writing a Press Release that Actually Gets Read appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Content marketing had a quite turbulent year in 2014, filled with plenty of highs and lows. Online writing services have also been both benefited from and been a victim of this roller coaster ride.

Now that 2015 is here, it is a good time to look back at 2014 and analyze what website content writing services did in 2014 and what that means for 2015.

End of Free For All Content

With the shut down of the Yahoo Contributor Network, there basically aren’t any more online publishing websites that allow writers to get paid for undirected content. This hurt some writers initially, but it also means that there is less content clogging the internet, which benefits website content overall.

Panda 4.1 Update

Google’s Panda 4.1 update rocked the content marketing world. Keyword density went from being absolutely critical one day to potentially detrimental the next day. Search engine rankings and page hits fluctuated wildly, with some content seeing massive drops while other content improved astronomically. Writing websites adapted by focusing less on keywords and more on quality content. The overall result was simply better output from content writers at every level.

Social Media

Social media has been around for decades, but 2014 saw significant changes in how content publishing services approached it. Instead of treating social media like just another website, content writing strategies developed that were customized to specific social media platforms. This trend will definitely continue into 2015, with video content almost assuredly becoming an option on many website writing services, since 85% of internet users visit YouTube every month.

Content Marketing Won Advertising War

The greatest accomplishment of website content writing services in 2014 was winning the advertising war. Content marketing was the highest advertising priority of businesses in 2014. This is both an acknowledgment of the degree to which the internet has become a part of everyday life and the high quality of the content these writing services produced in 2014.

Superior standards were a priority in 2014 and should definitely remain a priority in 2015 if these writing services want to continue to be in such high demand.

The post What Website Content Writing Services Did Right in 2014 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

This fact is somewhat amazing given the fact that effectively email is to traditional mail as social media is to a phone call. Yet despite email being practically prehistoric in internet terms, it still dominates as a business marketing tool.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing remains popular, despite technological advances in online communication, because it is traditional. It combines various features that no other online communication method offers.

• Unlimited Size – Unlike most chat programs or twitter, you can send messages of effectively unlimited size through email. This allows content marketing to be meaningful and useful, rather than simply presenting a link to click.
• Non-intrusive – A tweet, chat message, or Facebook post is something that must be read now. An email simply appears and then can be read at leisure. Additionally, the sender of an email isn’t notified when the reader opens it, which is a level of privacy many customers appreciate.
• Easily Saved – Another advantage of emails is that a customer can easily save it to read later. It isn’t uncommon for email marketing to spark an interest that is then explored at a later time. Most social media marketing can be saved, but not quite as conveniently.
• Focused Marketing – This can’t be stressed enough. By using multiple email lists based on customer interests, businesses can target marketing sent via email. Targeted marketing is significantly more effective than non-targeted marketing and most social media platforms don’t offer convenient ways to target specific customers unobtrusively.

Using Email Marketing Effectively

Besides using focused marketing, the most important rule for effectively marketing with email is to create a good title. Simply getting customers to open the email (rather than delete it without reading) is more than half the work.

From there, good targeted content should get your customer to click on your landing page.

Using email for marketing doesn’t mean you should abandon social media marketing. Social media marketing is an ideal way for finding new customers. But for returning customers, you want to focus on high quality email marketing campaigns.

The post Email Marketing: Still Business’ Best Marketing Tool appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

This is why you need to fine tune your SEO blogging in a way that increases the time on site of your audience.

1. Time on Site

Evidence shows that the longer someone spends on your website, the more likely they are to purchase your product or services. This likelihood further increases if the reader clicks explores additional web pages on your site.

To this end, the goal of your SEO blogging should be to engage the reader’s interest for as long as possible.

2. Rich Content

All people like to be entertained and the best way to entertain your audience is to provide rich content that constantly re-engages their interest. This means you want to talk about an interesting topic, using compelling language.

It also means that you need to straddle the line between telling the whole story and not belaboring your points. As an added bonus, rich content will improve the SEO value of your site on most search engines.

3. Multimedia

Pictures, video, and infographics are a great way to increase the time your audience spends on your site, but only if presented in a non-intrusive way. If you force readers to interact with a specific type of multimedia to receive your message, you will turn away your audience. Instead, use multimedia in a complementary but optional manner.

4. Comment Section

Interactivity is one of the most effective ways to improve time on site. An audience that is actively participating in your blog is likely to spend more time there or return later. To attract comments to your blog, make it easy to post comments, monitor it for spam or trolls, and introduce comments shortly after publication to encourage responses.

5. Easy Exploration

Finally, you want to make exploration of your website easy. Slideshows, for example, tend to be a poor choice because they require multiple clicks for the reader to absorb the entire message.

Minimize the effort that your readers need to take to navigate your site and they are more likely to spend more time there.

The post 5 Tips to Fine-tune Your SEO Blogging to Increase Time On Site appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Fre.sh

This free website application will allow you to track what is trending on the internet. Use this resource to keep your marketing blogs fresh with trending topics.

Topsy

Topsy is similar to Fre.sh, except that is searches social media sites for trending content. This resource is better used to keep your social media campaigns engaging.

Piktochart

Infographics are an effective way to increase engagement of your content marketing. Piktochart is one of the best online resources for making high quality infographics.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes offers the ability to make a plethora of charts or graphs. This isn’t as flexible a tool as Piktochart, but it is a better tool if you only want to analyze data.

Social Crawlytics

This is a critical tool for any business in a competitive market. It will automatically search competitor websites and reveal what content they are sharing. Use this tool to avoid getting left behind the competition.

Visual Thesaurus

Visual Thesaurus is a great resource for updating your blog. It provides word chains to help inspire new ideas that are conceptually linked to previous content.

Memegenerator

Memes are one of the most effective ways to creating an engaging message on social media. Use this simple tool to create interesting memes that will market your content.

Wikimedia Commons

Visual content helps improve engagement with your audience, while lowering your bounce statistic. Wikimedia Commons is the best source of free pictures on the internet.

Icon Monstr

Sometimes a digital icon makes a better impression than a picture. When you want to add an icon to your marketing content, Icon Monstr has thousands available.

Polar

Polar allows you to easily add polling to social media marketing campaigns. It works best with Google+, since the company just partnered with Google, but is effective for almost any social media.

The post Are You Missing Out on these Content Marketing Resources? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

1. Speling and Grammer are Important

Customers are turned off by pour spelling and grammar. Unless u r tweeting. don’t use single letters or numbers 4 words either.

2. Revise Old Content

If you have a static web page that was written more than three years ago, revise it. SEO standards have changed a lot during that time. A revision that takes into account the content driven standards, as opposed to the old keyword driven standards, will improve your search engine rankings.

3. Update Regularly

Customers don’t want to receive spam, but if they like your product or brand, they do appreciate regular updates on important changes or new products. Use an email newsletter to provide updates to keep your customers engaged.

4. Maintain a Blog

Blogging is another great way to offer up to date information. A blog is a good place to include smaller news than the information you put in a newsletter. This lets interested customers be informed without being pushy.

5. Consistent Voice

If you hire content writing from a writing service, try to acquire the services of a single writer, or just a small team. This will create a consistent voice, which makes your content marketing more effective.

6. Schedule Your Marketing

Create a calendar and schedule your marketing in advance. This assures that you are oversaturating or undersaturating your audience with content.

7. Plan for Mobile

The vast majority of your audience will interact with your content via a mobile device. Create content marketing that is mobile friendly.

8. Add Video to Your Content Marketing

As much as 85% of people on the internet visit YouTube every month. Video is simply a force that can’t be ignored. If you aren’t using video content in your marketing, resolve to add video in 2015.

9. Don’t Set Arbitrary Number Guidelines for Content

Arbitrary guidelines limit the quality of your writing, without adding value. For example, don’t decide that a list needs to have exactly 10 ideas, just because it is a commonly used number in lists. If you can only think of 9 things to say, but they are all really important things, then just be satisfied with that and post your list of “9 Important Things.”

The post Nine Content Writing Resolutions for 2015 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

This is why more businesses are relying on SEO content writing services for their marketing.

If you are looking to be competitive in the field of SEO content, the following tips will help you improve your fundamentals.

Format

Blog writing is very different from press releases or product descriptions. If your content doesn’t match the standards for the format, it will fail to engage readers and thus slip in SEO rankings.

Familiarize yourself with all common formats and research carefully when writing in a new format.

Quality

Quality is king of modern SEO practices. Search engine metrics put high emphasis on whether readers are spending meaningful time on a site, whether they click on links, and whether they return to the site.

Besides standard good writing practices (good spelling and grammar, sentence variety, etc.), you need to understand your audience.

Always target your prose towards a specific audience, rather than a generic one and make your content compelling, informative, and relevant. Modern search engines recognize variations on keywords and synonyms very well, so don’t sacrifice quality just to include keywords.

Social Media Marketing

Using social media to market your content will increase the traffic to your site, which also improves your search engine rank. Of course, using social media effectively requires that you understand how that social media platform works and what methods work on it.

For example, if you are using images, Instagram is a better way to direct traffic to your website than Twitter.

Notable Tools

Google is pretty much your best friend when it comes to SEO. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Authorship allow you to match your content to trending searches and to build your brand, respectively.

Wordstream is another similar tool that will help improve your keyword use. But, probably the most important tool is a good spell check and thesaurus.com. Spelling error free copy that uses lots of creative words is ideal for engaging your audience.

Linkbuilding

Good linkbuilding is more important than ever in content marketing. Search engine metrics significantly downgrade your site’s ranking when links aren’t relevant or are clearly paid for.

On the other hand, just a few relevant links that are inserted naturally in to appropriate keyword text will give you a good boost.

The post The Fundamentals of Writing Engaging SEO Copy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Content marketing is often about selling products or selling services. But certain forms of content marketing are instead about selling solutions, strategies, or techniques.

The two main ways to market a strategy is with a white paper or with an e-book. Which option you use depends entirely on type of strategy or solution you are offering.

E-Book

As the name suggests, an e-book is a significant quantity of writing. The average e-book has multiple chapters and at least one hundred pages.

You write an e-book when you are offering advice, strategies, or solutions that are generally applicable to an industry or specific subsection of an industry.

For example, an e-book designed for lawyers might discuss strategies for maximizing asset splitting in divorce procedures.

White Papers

White papers are more focused than e-books. As a white paper writer, you identify a very specific problem and then offer a single solution to that problem. Your white paper is a focused and efficient piece of writing.

Most white papers are relatively short, usually maxing out at about 10 – 20 pages, and potentially only a page or two.

An example of a white paper designed for lawyers might be the discussion a specific strategy about how to win possession of the family home while minimizing the compensatory assets during a divorce procedure.

Marketing White Papers

Despite the growing prevalence of e-books, white papers are still marketable, and actually offer numerous opportunities. The most effective way for a white paper writer to take advantage of these opportunities is on an industry blog.

An informative blog engages readers and sparks interest. Use a blog entry to introduce the problem and frame the solution, placing the full solution, your white paper, behind a pay wall.

Alternatively, a white paper is actually a rather ingenious way to market an e-book. If you’ve written an e-book, simply excerpt a single chapter or idea from the e-book to create a white paper.

Offer this white paper for free via social media, an industry blog, or other marketing vehicles. This will interest readers who you then direct to your e-book, hidden behind a pay wall, for additional information on the subject.

The post White Paper or E-Book: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Blog content doesn’t have any sort of organic reach. The Hub and Spoke model of marketing your content can add organic reach to your blog.

Hub and Spoke Model Explained

This model of content marketing uses social sharing to add organic reach to your blog content. Your blog is the hub of all of your marketing, while social media platforms are the spokes.

For each spoke, you engage in a platform specific marketing campaign that is designed to drive traffic towards your blog hub.

Building the Model

The hub is quite simple. It is a standard blog designed to optimally market your content. You will create this independent of what spokes you are using.

The spokes are a different matter. Each spoke should be created uniquely based on the platform of that spoke. The spoke should be designed to take advantage of the unique qualities of that specific social media platform. For example:

• Facebook – Facebook is a highly interactive platform. Use a quiz or poll to engage the reader and direct them to your hub.
• Twitter – Twitter is great for teasing readers. Tweet a snippet of something exciting and link to your hub for the whole story.
• Google+ – The main advantage of this hub is multimedia. Mix your marketing with a sound bite on Google Play or a shared file.

Whichever platform you are using, the purpose of your spoke is to drive your audience towards the hub. If your spoke engages or entertains, but fails to actually increase traffic to your blog, you need to change the way you are marketing on that spoke.

Finally, a major advantage of this model is that it is easily expanded. If you want to start using a new social media platform, you don’t need to change your hub, you simply need to create a new spoke.

The post The Hub and Spoke Model of Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick 2.

This rule even applies to content marketing. If you want good quality writing that is delivered quickly, you need to be prepared to pay for it. If you want fast content at a low price, you need to sacrifice quality.

And, if you want good content at a low price, it will take a while. You can’t break the rule, but you can bend it a little.

When looking for blog writers for hire for your content marketing campaign, focus on the following strengths in order to maximize the speed, quality, and cost of your content marketing.

Typo Free Copy

One of the keys to effective market contenting is getting others to share it. Readers are more inclined to share content that is free of typos. The occasional typo will slip through, even with the best writers, but you want to avoid writers that consistently make uncorrected mistakes.

Fast Turn Around Time

As the old saying goes: time is money. This is especially true with blogs, which need to be updated regularly to keep readers fully engaged. A good blog writer will hit every deadline.

A great blog writer will blow away the deadlines by hours or even days, giving you more time to better incorporate the content into your marketing campaign.

Relevant Writing

The tagline for Secret deoderant is “Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.” This is a great, memorable tagline that is completely irrelevant marketing for male customers.

You want to hire blog writers that can provide content marketing relevant to your target audience. No matter how excellent the prose, if the content is irrelevant to the audience, it simply won’t have much of an impact.

Highly Responsive

The best blog writers for hire are those that are communicative and responsive. A highly responsive writer can adjust content to better match your goals, especially if they change rapidly.

Additionally, a highly responsive writer becomes a resource that you can consult with to better improve your content marketing. If the only communication you have with your blog writer is the instructions you provide, the content is likely to be less personalized and less engaging to your audience.

Hiring a Writer

Finding all of these qualities in a single writer can be difficult. There are millions of freelance writers in the market.

Engaging the services of a content creation website will ease your search, since the website will do most of the hard work of identifying the best writers with these characteristics, freeing you to make the final decision after it has been narrowed down to a short list of highly qualified individuals.

The post What to Look for When Hiring Blog Writers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The following checklist will help you improve the engagement value of your website content.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Readers like to feel that the writer is talking directly to them. To make your website readers feel that way, you need to identify the demographics of those that use your product or service.

While it may seem obvious, it is a good idea to conduct internal polling of customers. This polling may turn up surprises.

Once you know for sure, make sure your website content speaks to the target audience.

2. Determine Visitor Search Terms

To optimize the value of your website, do keyword research on the search terms that visitors use to reach your site with a service like Google Analytics.

Even though modern search engines are better capable of performing “fuzzy matches,” you still want to use some of the highest searched terms in your content at least once, in an appropriate context.

3. Analyze Your Current Content

In order to add useful content to your website, you need to be familiar with the content that is already available on it. You want to avoid repetition in your website content and you also want to avoid adding content that doesn’t match the overall theme of your website.

Plan new content to complement the style and substance of the old content.

4. Aesthetics Improve Engagement

Good content isn’t enough to engage readers. You also need a visually appealing website. Break up your content with bolding, italics, large font, bullet points, images, infographics, and videos.

Also, sprinkle links throughout your content to encourage a basic degree of audience participation.

5. Compare Competitor Websites

A simple way to plan your website is to look at a competitor website. If your website is practically indistinguishable, you should add some relevant content website that makes your website stand out.

If a competitor website has relevant content that your website is missing, you should plan to add that content to your site in a creative way.

The post 5 Quick Tips for Planning Website Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As a form of content marketing, blog writing has a very specific advantage: it keeps your content fresh.

In fact, the majority of blogs are updated as often as once per day, which is basically more fresh than any platform other than social media.

Fresh marketing content is particularly good at keeping readers engaged. Thus, it is doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the New Yorker has implemented many of the techniques of blog writing into it marketing scheme.

New Yorker’s Revival

Like many print magazines that have only just begun to enter the digital age, the New Yorker experienced significantly reduced sales in recent years.

But those sales have enjoyed a growth spurt due to the new marketing scheme that the New Yorker is employing. This scheme is best described as a “content first” marketing scheme.

The New Yorker’s situation is a bit odd, because the “product” of the New Yorker is content. Thus, you have content marketing that needs to convince the audience to pay for content.

That is sorta like giving people free admission to a horse show and then trying to convince them to pay more to see the thoroughbreds. In point of fact, this is almost exactly how the New Yorker’s marketing has been effective.

The New Yorker makes high quality content available for free, including archives of past articles, in whole or in part. After the reader is hooked by the engaging content of an article or two, a rather low cost pay wall stands between the reader and additional content.

Having gotten a taste of great quality content from the free portion of the site, readers are more apt to pay for additional content.

Copying the Success of the New Yorker

While most traditional content marketing campaigns aren’t marketing news sources, the technique here still applies.

A top quality blog with excellent blog writing will engage the interest of your audience. Great content that constantly offers a fresh perspective effectively advertises itself.

Readers who finish an entire blog article are much more likely to click links, share the content, or further explore the rest of your website.

The post How the New Yorker Uses Blog Writing to Drive Sales appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Email content has the advantage of having better organic reach, but it is less likely to engage your audience. Traditional marketing content is more engaging, in part because your audience usually takes independent action in order to view that content.

Using email marketing to mitigate the organic reach limitations of traditional marketing also weakens the advantage of your website, because the audience was directed there, rather than looking for it independently. A rather effective middle ground is for your marketing to make use of a regularly updated blog.

Advantages of a Blog

The main advantage of using a blog in content marketing is that it is regularly updated. This means the content remains fresh and will generally be more engaging to your audience.

A blog can then link to your traditional marketing in an organic way that doesn’t pressure your audience. A popular and useful blog will organically drive traffic to your content marketing.

All you need to use this technique successfully is to find an effective way to drive traffic to your blog.

Synergizing Your Email Content With Your Blog

The main negative feature of email marketing is that it has difficulty engaging an audience. A good way to make your email marketing content more engaging is to create your email newsletter using excerpts from your blog.

By its very nature, your blog already receives feedback from your audience, in the form of contents, so you know what content in it is the most engaging. Include excerpts of that content in your newsletter and link directly to your blog.

This creates a synergistic relationship between your blog and your newsletter. Your newsletter offers organic reach that directs your audience to the most engaging articles on your blog and re-using blog articles decreases the time spent on making your newsletter.

While re-purposing blog articles is remarkably effective, you shouldn’t stop there. To truly take advantage of this synergy, you need to focus on making your newsletter as engaging as possible.

This means you should test various strategies with your email marketing content and pay close attention to what proves most effective. If you do this, you can combine email marketing, blogging, and traditional marketing for better results.

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Between business web pages, blogs, online newsletters, and the glut of new social media options, the available content marketing options are nearly limitless.

Unfortunately, there are also a growing number of hindrances to content marketing like the Google Panda update or various Facebook algorithm updates.

If the latter have hindered your content marketing attempts on Facebook, consider the following content tips.

The Facebook Algorithm Dilemma

If you have ever refreshed your Facebook page, you probably noticed that the stories in your news feed changed slightly. Some new ones appeared and others disappeared.

This is because Facebook uses an advanced algorithm to determine your individual feed. This algorithm is designed to show you posts that Facebook believes will interest you.

While the algorithm is inexplicably complex, in terms of pure numbers, the effect of this algorithm is that whenever you post, only about 6% of your friends or followers see your post.

This is frustrating for content marketing because it means your message isn’t reaching much of your audience.

Using Images to Circumvent The Algorithm

Building social media into your marketing is an effective way to better engage your audience. This makes it important to try to improve the reach of your Facebook posts. One of the simplest ways to improve your reach is to market with images.

Facebook gives higher priority to images on news feeds, especially photo albums of images. Images are most effective when they can express a message without your audience having to read the comment section.

For facebook, where memes are particularly possible, consider using a meme generator site to create images that will engage your audience.

Beyond Facebook

Facebook isn’t the only social media site where images will help improve your content marketing. Images are particularly effective at reaching disparate audience on popular image sites like Pinterest or Instagram. Avoid sites like Twitter, though, where you audience needs to click a link to actually see the image.

The extra step defeats the purpose of using images in the first place.

The post Social Media Content Tip: Use Images to Get More Reach appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If a person was looking for content marketing tips before the Google Panda update, the most likely response would be: more external links.

But the Google search engine has become more sophisticated with the Panda update, now more effectively judging the quality and content of your external links. In this new reality, you need to modify and update your link building techniques in order to market your content more effectively.

The Problems with Automated Link Building

Automated link building is effectively the shotgun approach to link building. You fire hundreds of virtual “bullets” into the internet and hope that a few of them hit. And while this does result in external links for you content, it does nothing to assure those links will actually improve the SEO of your website.

In fact, one of the major ways that the Panda update changed content marketing is that it is now possible for an external link to decrease the SEO of your website, if that link is to a site that has no meaningful connection to your site or is a link farm.

Since the traditional automated link building methods can now potentially hurt the SEO of the content you are marketing, these techniques must be discarded completely.

Conduct Human Link Building

In today’s environment, the best answer to that hypothetical person’s question about content marketing tips is: content appropriate external links. While the full extent of the Panda update is still something of a mystery, some things have become very clear.

First, meaningful content is critical to good SEO. One of the main ways Google confirms that content is meaningful is by comparing site content of external links. If they are related, then the content is more likely to be useful to readers.

Additionally, external links from highly rated site improves the rating of your site. What this means when link building is you want links from sites with high quality, appropriate content.

Instead of spamming for links, take a personal approach. This means that you need to offer unique and specialized content to your link partners and should send personalized queries. This is more time consuming, but like the parable of the turtle and the hare, slow and steady actually wins this race.

The post Content Marketing Tips: How to Conduct Human Link Building appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The key to good content marketing is visibility. If your content is on page 3 of a Google search, it has poor visibility. This is why so many marketers focus on search engine optimization (SEO).

As search engines get more sophisticated, good visibility means more than just having the right keywords. Search engines increasingly reward sites that engage their target audience.

Since it isn’t possible to directly gauge the degree to which the audience is engaged, search engines rely on a variety of metrics. Two of the better metrics for judging audience engagement are bounce rate and click through rate (CTR).

Understanding these metrics allows you to better improve your SEO content tools.

Bounce Rate and CTR Defined

Bounce rate is effectively a negative metric. The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of site visitors that never click any links on the site. This indicates the percentage of people that simply weren’t interested enough by the landing page to further explore.

CTR is a positive metric that indicates the percentage of people who clicked on a link that ended at a location where you can purchase something. This represents how well your marketing engaged someone on the website.

The Value of Incorporating These Metrics

Among your SEO content tools, you should have Google Analytics. You can use this web page to check the bounce rate of your website.

It is a common mistake among content marketers to believe that time on website is a good indicator of engagement, when actually bounce rate is a better indicator. By tracking your bounce rate, you can take proactive steps to decrease it or identify changes in your website that increase it.

Similarly, while decreased bounce rate is indicative of a more engaged audience, it doesn’t assure that web page visitors are actually looking at products.

To improve your marketing message, you want to take positive steps to increase the CTR of your web site.

By focusing on both CTR and bounce rate, you are treating visitors to your website as both customers and as an audience, which increases the overall value of your marketing.

The post SEO Content Tools: Understanding Bounce Rate and CTR appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

A good description helps to market products. This is why large corporations spend millions of dollars every year trying to come up with catchy descriptions that customers will remember.

This approach works well for advertising campaigns, but isn’t effective when you need individual descriptions for dozens or even hundreds of unique products.

When dealing with large batches, the optimal solution is to use multiple product description writers at the same time. This approach creates the marketing you need while offering the following helpful benefits.

Alternate Voices

Rick Polito of the Marin Independent Journal once described a movie with the following phrase: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” IMDB describes the same movie with this phrase: “Dorothy Gale is swept away to a magical land in a tornado and embarks on a quest to see the Wizard who can help her return home.”

Both describe The Wizard of Oz, but with very different voices. Your marketing will seem less stale if the products descriptions are written in many different voices.

A single product description writer usually can’t easily change voice, but multiple writers will each have unique voices.

Avoiding the Bottlenecks

Just like any other process, content marketing has its share of bottlenecks. This is particularly problematic in product marketing, since many products have a small window in which they sell best.

If you don’t have the product descriptions when you need them, you’ll miss your window of opportunity for sales.

The biggest bottleneck is usually the actual product description writing. A few hundred words times a few hundred products equals tens of thousands of words.

In order to clear this bottleneck quickly, hire multiple product description writers. Even a dozen writers speeds up this part of the process by roughly ten fold.

Finding Writers

The only problem to this solution is finding writers. Advertising agencies are expensive and specialize more in brand messages than single product descriptions. A convenient alternative is to hire product description writers from a content creation website with a good reputation.

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Looking for new ways to improve the quality of your marketing content? There are literally hundreds of online content writer tools and applications that can help you.

The following top ten content writer tools are the best digital options to help you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your content marketing.

9. Google Calendar – This free, easy to use online tool lets you organize the release date of your content to avoid flood and famine marketing. A great addition to your content writer tools.

8. WordPress SEO by Yoast – If you have any difficulty with metadata tags on your WordPress articles, this tools will help you always pick the best tags for your content.

7. Tag Crowd – Tag Crowd creates a visual representation of your keyword density that allows you to judge how efficiently your content can be found by search engines.

6. Dropbox – Besides providing additional storage, this tool simplifies online collaboration with client or other writers when creating content marketing.

5. Piktochart – Infographics are both popular and effective in content marketing. This valuable application will have you creating your own in minutes.

4. Yahoo Style Guide – This is one of the best style guides available for content marketing because it was specifically designed for internet content, as opposed the AP Style Guide.

3. Keyword Planner – Keyword use is much like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You don’t want too little or too much. You want it just right. This tool is ideal for your needs.

2. Brainy Quote – An on point quote will make your marketing more memorable and memorable marketing sells better. This tool will help you find famous quotes quickly.

1. Thesaurus.com – Your audience will bore quickly if you call a product “amazing” more than twice. Use this website to call it “fascinating,” “incredible,” “marvelous,” and “prodigious.”

The post Top 9 Tools Needed to Master Writing Quality Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Content marketing is a sales pitch. There is no denying it.

But just because the goal of content marketing is to sell a product, services, or an idea, that doesn’t mean that it has to sound like a sales pitch.

In fact, as movies prove, the best sales pitch is often one that isn’t trying to sell anything at all.

Consider, for example, the Star Wars franchise. The popularity of the movies have helped spur $12 billion worth of toys sales.

This is the perfect example of content marketing that doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. The Star Wars movies are action movies.

In fact, conceptually, emulating movie genres is a creative and subtle way of marketing content. If you can master the trick of it, emulating the following genres is a powerful technique to add to your content creation tools.

Comedy

In movie genres, comedy is often used to deliver a serious message in an entertaining way. For example, in Hook, Peter learns to embrace his inner child.

The importance of the message isn’t diminished by the fact that he learns it in a food fight, though. Just the opposite. It is one of the most memorable scenes in the movie and truly drives in the message.

The same is true for comedy in content marketing. By injecting humor into your content, the audience is more likely to remember the message.

Romance

This genre seems like an unlikely addition to our content creation tools. But, it actually makes a lot of sense. We remember great movie romances. Harry and Sally fell in love, while Rick Blaine and Ilsa were not to be.

The trick to romance, that you can emulate in content marketing, is to create a connection between two topics. Then slowly build that connection until you end by tying it together “happily ever after.”

If you build it right, your audience will be breathlessly waiting for the final connection.

Mystery

Emulating this genre requires true subtlety. Mystery works in movies because the audience is caught up in the suspense. Mystery in content marketing requires that you hint at the final message, but never quite spell it out until the last moment.

If you’ve got the trick to it right, you might even misdirect and almost pull a fast one at the end or even never quite spell it out.

The message still needs to be understood by the audience, even if you don’t spill it out, but the right level of suspense will keep the audience reading to the very end.

The post How Movie Genres Are Like Content Creation Models appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Some online marketing sites watched as page view dropped by as much as 90% while others saw page views double. If 2014 was exciting for content marketing, 2015 looks like it will be even more so, as many of the following practices are likely to see a rise in 2015.

Flexible Keywords

Content marketing currently focuses on using specific keywords organically and repeatedly. Google has been getting more and more savvy with its ranking algorithms, though.

By 2015, exact keyword matches are less likely to be important than conceptual matches. Experts suggest that broader matches will be necessary in the future.

This means that content writers have to have stronger expertise when creating marketing content.

More Than Just Words

Popular content sites like Hubpages already recommend at least three videos or photos per article. This just means this site is ahead of the game. A whopping 69% of B2B marketers are currently using some form of illustrations or photos in online marketing and this number is sure to increase in 2015.

Basically all marketing should include at least one picture and content marketers should have easy access to a large quantity of publicly accessible stock photos.

Local Marketing Moves Online

In 2014, 93% of B2B marketers used online marketing. That is practically complete market saturation. Content marketing has moved far beyond just faceless online businesses.

It is being used by local businesses to market locally. More and more marketing requires a sales pitch that resonates with the local community. This means that there will be more opportunities for content marketers to ply their trade based on their local knowledge.

This also means that 2015 is almost certain to see the rise of online websites that connect local writers with businesses that need local marketing, since that particular market segment currently has very little support.

The post The Latest Content Marketing Best Practices for 2015 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Commercials like Apple’s “1984” that are still watched on YouTube today. What makes these marketing campaigns so effective? The Wow! factor.

The Wow! factor is more difficult to reproduce in written marketing than in visual, but not impossible.

You simply need to be writing for the right audience and need the right content marketing resources.

Audience

Part of why “1984” was so successful was that it was marketed to the computer generation. This was a younger generation that thought of computers as exciting devices that could play games, not as an upgraded typewriter.

A powerful, in your face, commercial played to that audience

Similarly, when adding the Wow! factor to written content marketing, you need to understand your audience. If you are marketing something like legal services, you probably have conservative clients who don’t want to see flashy marketing.

The audience for video game marketing, on the other hand, is ideal for using Wow! factor.

Adding the Wow! Factor

Adding the Wow! factor to your content marketing is easier if you keep a good list of appropriate content marketing resources. One very valuable resource is a set of links to famous witticisms. Insert these witticisms in your content to add a little humor to your pitches.

Visual resources are also valuable for adding the wow factor. Images in content marketing are known to be a valuable resource. But, they are especially effective when adding the Wow! factor.

Remembering your audience, images can be funny, dramatic, or even mildly shocking. Articles on Cracked, while inappropriate for content marketing standards, are a perfect example of how images can spice up any prose. For content marketing, use a free resource like Wikimedia Commons for images.

The Wow! factor is about exaggeration, excitement, and shock. You want potential clients or customers to get the same thrill they get when watching a movie.

Tell a captivating story or make your audience laugh and half the work for your content marketing is already done.

If you’d like some help creating content with the wow factor, be sure to check out our range of content writing services.

The post Content Marketing: The Wow! Factor appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

While this helped speed up my writing, it often prevented my message from resonating with my target audiences.

This principle is just as true for content marketing. Strange as it may seem, your audience is one of your content marketing resources.

It is at least as important that you understand the customers you are marketing to as the product that you are marketing, sometimes more important.

Customer Segments

Imagine that you are providing marketing for a car dealership. Each car is different and offers different value propositions.

A truck, for example, has good towing capacity, while a sedan gets good fuel mileage. It is important to not only understand that value propositions, but to understand whether the customer segments that are in the market for that vehicle appreciate that value proposition.

Continuing the truck example again, imagine that the truck dealership is located in Saskatchewan. You have a customer segment that wants to buy a vehicle that is capable of driving well in heavy snow.

A truck offers this value proposition, but unless you market it that way, the customer may never be aware.

Using Buyer Personas to Better Reach Customers

One of the best content marketing resources available to you to make sure your marketing resonates with the right customer segment is a buyer persona.

A buyer persona details the current values of a particular market segment. By referencing your buyer personas, you know that Saskatchewan truck customers want weather resistant vehicles while Texas truck customers want vehicles with good towing capacity. This lets you use the right messages when marketing trucks in those locations.

One major trap with buyer personas is the tendency to create them and then assume they remain static. Buyer personas need to be constantly updated.

For example, if fuel prices suddenly spike in Saskatchewan, you need to temporarily add “good fuel mileage” to the traits that Saskatchewan truck buyers are interested in.

By maintaining good buyer personas and updating this personas with details from the news or your clients, you will more successfully resonate with your target market.

The post Understanding Customer Segments to Better Resonate with Target Audiences appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The purpose of these short stories was to market her novels by introducing these characters a new audience and to maintaining the interest of her past audience.

While physical magazines are much less popular today, the principles behind this idea remain true. Short story publishing is an effective way to market your fiction novels.

Short Stories as Marketing

The best way to publish your short stories is on a blog dedicated to your fiction. This proves to your readers that the fiction you are writing is actually canon.

A blog also lets you easily provide links to your author bio and, more importantly, the novels you are marketing. When writing these stories, remember your audience.

You need to write stories that entice new readers and reward past readers for their loyalty. In general you should focus on your most engaging characters.

One difficulty you will need to deal with is bringing readers to your blog in the first place. The nice thing about writing short stories is that they practically advertise themselves.

Publish an excerpt of your story on popular fiction forums that discuss your genre of fiction, or even fanfiction.net, with a link directing readers to your blog page for the full story.

A good excerpt will draw traffic to your blog and a good story will earn sales for your novels.

Serial Writing to Expand Your Fictional World

In addition to one-shot short stories that paint a vignette about a character or piece of your fictional world, you can also engage in serial writing. This requires effort similar to writing a full length novel, but has the advantage of getting return traffic to your blog, which will increase your blog’s search engine ranking.

Since the purpose of serial writing is to drive sales of your novels, you want to avoid revealing too many major events of your novels. Weave the events of your serial story to the events of your novels in a way that augments and builds on them, without revealing them entirely.

Make sure to tell your audience, in a footnote, exactly what novel is being referenced.

For example:

The events depicted above tie into the events in chapter 14 of “Dancing with Penguins.”

This points the reader directly to where they can read more about the events described. When your reader sees the major the serial content is tied into your novels, they are likely to have an interest in purchasing those novels.

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