The Marketing Spotlight

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What #blogoff2 is Teaching Bloggers

There are dozens of posts for Blog Off 2. Some have zero comments while others are well into double digits. Why is that?

Let’s take a look at 6 things the most popular posts are doing so you can put them to use for yourself. Each of these posts has:

1. An Attention Grabbing Headline
2. Emotional Appeal
3. Useful Content
4. A Current Topic
5. Graphics
6. Conversation

How well are you doing at putting these into your blog posts and articles? If you’re interested in improving your social media ROI, do keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

This is the third video in the series. It’s also the shortest. Twitter doesn’t require much for your profile.

These videos, plus a free electronic download of the book, are part of what I’ve planned as supports for when “friends, followers and Customer Evangelists” is released. After all, there are so many hyperlinks in the book it just makes sense to get the electronic copy when you buy the print copy.

Then everything will be added to the membership site we’re developing. Plus there will be monthly updates to the book posted on the membership site, of course.

Can I ask you to help me out? The target audience is local, small business owners who want to use social media well – people just like you and me. Would you mind telling me what will make the membership site useful for you?

Thanks. I appreciate it. All the support, input and feedback everyone is giving makes this project consistently better. Thank you.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This is a video I created to go with my new book “friends, followers and Customer Evangelists.” It’s actually part of a series of 3 videos to give readers a step-by-step guide to creating profiles for the Golden Trio (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Please feel welcome to share this video with everyone you think will benefit. There is no sign-up or registration – just click and watch.

Happy New Year! And thank you for watching. Go ahead and leave a comment to let me know what you think of the video.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This is a video designed to support the information in my upcoming book “friends, followers and Customer Evangelists.” I’d appreciate having your feedback – especially since this video is the longest of 3.

The videos cover each of the Golden Trio sites – LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. This one goes into the most detail, and is the longest at 29:41. I’m wondering if I’ve tried to put too much information in here.

Please do let me know what you think.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This is from Regina Brett, a columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, OH.

You’ve probably seen an e-mail circulating that says she is 90. Well, she’s actually 50 and has a book coming out next year (2010) based on these life lessons. They aren’t earth shattering – or even anything you haven’t heard before. They’re good advice.

Since this is the time of year when we think about family and friends, and when we look at making a new start in the New Year, it makes sense to have a little bit of help like this. So read on and see what life has taught Regina.

To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me.

It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written. My odometer rolls over to 50 this week, so here’s an update: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

What #blogoff2 is Teaching Bloggers

There are dozens of posts for Blog Off 2. Some have zero comments while others are well into double digits. Why is that?

Let’s take a look at 6 things the most popular posts are doing so you can put them to use for yourself. Each of these posts has:

1. An Attention Grabbing Headline
2. Emotional Appeal
3. Useful Content
4. A Current Topic
5. Graphics
6. Conversation

How well are you doing at putting these into your blog posts and articles? If you’re interested in improving your social media ROI, do keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Today kicks off the second annual Blog Off competition at Community Marketing Blog.

Andrew Ballenthin, the founder and organiser, tells me there are 20 confirmed competitors and maybe a couple late comers. There is one person from Huffington Post competing, another newbie (Sam Diener) who has been blogging for just a few months – he’s already built an audience of more than 20,000.

There are two objectives to Blog Off 2

1. Show the power of social media to build community
2. Demonstrate how to measure social media ROI

To do that, competing bloggers have 12 days to engage their audience, develop traffic and Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

The editorial calendar says I’m supposed to write about “copywriting – editorial vs. promotional.”

I like that topic, and it’s important – but it’s either happening after lunch or getting pushed to tomorrow. (Gee, it’s nice being your own editor!)

Why? Because Day 20 of 31DBBB is about Leaving Comments on Other Blogs.

When I read this through,two ways of commenting occurred to me.

1. Follow the instructions and interact with other blogs. I’ll do this.
2. Expand on the instructions and write a comment post today about the 31DBBB book.

Picking up a copy of 31DBBB was a result of thinking “I need to get more organised about managing my blog.”

To be honest, I had never heard of Darren Rowse and was Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

My last post was about the 3 kinds of info product.

Now let’s have a look at setting goals for your information marketing efforts. I wrote a similar article recently for Technorati about small business goal setting in social media. The ideas are the same.

You know some of your information products will be free and others paid. Among the paid products, the price can range from a few dollars all the up to tens of thousands of dollars.

But how do you decided where you want to get to, and how fast?

Start by deciding where you want to go. Ultimately, you might want to develop information marketing into a replacement for your current income. Bob Bly has done that. He still makes more from his copywriting than from information marketing, but $1,000 a day from info marketing is pretty good.

Let’s say that’s your goal. You want info marketing to bring you Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

There are only three kinds of information product:

1. Text
2. Audio
3. Video

There are all kinds of combinations for these three. We see them all the time. But these are the 3 profit generators of information marketing.

And those 3 profit generators take one of two forms:

1. Free
2. Paid

Whether it’s the free-on-free offer for a newsletter with a report, the monthly payment of a membership site, or the hefty fee of a conference, all information products are either free or paid.

Looks pretty simple, doesn’t it? Can information marketing really be that easy?

Well, I’ve written 6 books in 20 months that have combined revenues of Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]