How to Write a Good Blog Post for Today’s SEO

Sales Renewal has a team of very skilled – and clever – writers who produce top-quality content for our clients’ company blogs. The fact that we have these great writers is critical in today’s online marketing world, because, as has been said repeatedly, “content is king.” But it’s not enough to rely only on “clever” to get your blog posts read.

Because while content may be king, it’s only half the story. If your great content doesn’t come up in an online search, it will most likely only be read by the friends and family who know about your blog. The other half of the story? SEO.

SEO is Half the Story

We used to see SEO as a separate beast that had to be understood and tamed. Keywords in a query had to exactly match keywords on a page, and they had to be repeated multiple times to be sure Google knew what your keyword was (remember keyword stuffing?) Submitting your site and content to hundreds of directories and sites to get inbound links was part of the game, too.

But the changes Google recently made to its ranking algorithm mean that SEO is now much more closely aligned with solid writing practices that any good writer would typically follow anyway. Google can now handle more natural language associations (score one for anyone who refused to fall into the keyword-stuffing trap). The number of sites that link to your site is not as important as what sites they are (gone are the days of linkbaiting and link exchanges).

So how do we incorporate today’s SEO into our editorial content? It begins before we put pen to paper (or keystrokes on a blank doc) and is easily incorporated into the basic steps of any piece of content creation. By answering the following questions, our writers can be sure their posts are written for readers and search.

1. What are you writing about (blog post topic)? In SEO terms, this is your keyword, or search term. As long as the post is focused on a specific topic, you can consider the post optimized. We have one caveat: Be sure to use the keyword in the headline. For example this headline – The Difficulties and Pleasures of Working in Wood – although clever, does not clearly define the keyword/topic of the actual article. A simple change to: Custom Signage Supports Corporate Identity: the Difficulties and Pleasures of Working in Wood, is a more clear indication of what the post for our business sign manufacturing client is about.

2. Who are you writing for (blog post audience)? In SEO terms, this is your customer persona. Once you understand who you are writing for, what they already know, what they need to know, and where they go on the web for information, you can target your post content and its distribution.

3. What do you want the reader to take away from your post (blog post goal)? Unlike traditional publication vehicles, publishing on the web comes with invaluable tracking capabilities, so whether you’re targeting sales, lead generation, or demand generation, you can write your post with the most appropriate call to action, whether it be contact us, download a tip sheet, or some other result.

Have you embraced the “new” SEO in your content creation process? If not, and you’re interested in finding out how it can benefit your business, Sales Renewal can help.

6 Tips for Writing a Good Blog Post

We recently came across an article that really boils “content marketing” – all that goes in to blogging and social media posting – down to its essentials. It was so nice, simple and clearly put, that we wanted to share it with Growth Spurts readers.

To summarize, 6 Mistakes to Avoid in Content Marketing outlines the mistakes to avoid to get better results from your content marketing. In a nutshell, these mistakes are:

1. Too Many Hashtags and Keywords – write with one or two main keywords in mind
2. Too Wordy and Unfocused – stick to one topic, keep the paragraphs short and guide the reader
3. Too Full of Jargon or Unfamiliar Words – make sure you know who your audience is and their level of understanding
4. Too Self-Serving – inform and educate vs. sell
5. Too Short on Visuals – use images and graphics to help tell your story
6. Too Long on Promises, Too Short on Delivery – stay away from hyperbole

We encourage you to read the full article – and we promise that it is focused, clear, informative and to the point. Robert Moskowitz practiced what he preached.

Growing Sales with Social Media: 5 Things You Haven’t Done Yet (but Should)

Social media is the best free advertising program ever! Social media is a huge waste of time! I don’t understand how social media can help my business!

We’ve heard all of the above from frustrated business owners who say they’d like to take advantage of social media platforms and turn those leads into sales. Maybe you’ve used social media to increase sales, but need a few fresh ideas. Either way, we’d like to help. Below, five things you can do to generate leads and increase sales on social media – things you might not have considered, but probably should.

1. Create a Slideshare version of your business card – and add the link to your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages
2. Reach out regularly – by asking your clients/fans/followers to submit photos, jokes or testimonials. Tip: be aware that Facebook and other SM platforms have rules about contests and giveaways. Be smart and check before you post.
3. Round up the best of something – ideally, something that relates to your business. If you sell sporting goods, why not the best lures to catch walleye? If you sell textbooks, how about the best news about education this week? Present your “bests” in a video, a blog, or if it’s really good, a downloadable format to collect emails and other data about your prospects.
4. Reach for the Vine – if your CEO refuses to blog, will he whine on vine? A 6-second video about something relevant to your industry (taxes?) or not (daylight savings time?) could be a fun way to reach prospects and encourage them to share your humorous snippets. If you’ve got some hams who want more time in front of the camera, use Instagram.
5. Get in the game! Gamification is good. It can be as simple as posting a trivia question (and later, an answer, with recognition to all those who posted their guesses) or developing an app to hook millions.

Want help projecting the right image with your social media platforms of choice? Got an idea for an app to reel in new leads? Contact us.

How to Use a Contest to Increase Sales

There once was a sales contest

that everyone agreed was the best.

It rocked website clicks and showed sales upticks

Call Sales Renewal for your contest fix!

OK, obviously we’re not in the poetry business. And you probably aren’t either. But the fact is, businesses can generate a lot of customer chatter (and move new prospects to check out their goods) by running a contest. Photo caption and limerick contests are popular, for consumer goods as well as business-to-business services.

What Rhymes with Competition?

Contests can be useful internally, too. Among other things, we’ve helped our clients use contests to increase employee participation on their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Some of our clients offer incentives for employees who write popular blog posts or frequently-shared posts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Feel a contest coming on? Call us – we can help you make sure it’s a winner.

Facebook Business Pages Need Friends, Too

So… everybody told you your business needed a Facebook page, but when you created one nobody befriended it? Sorry, it’s not exactly the social media Field of Dreams. When you build it, they don’t always come. (The cold hard truth is that some of those people who said you just have to have a Facebook page don’t know how to use the site themselves.)

Getting people to Like your Facebook business page…

…is a little bit like old-fashioned networking (you know, which people did when we lived in the real world, before the virtual one existed). In other words, people want to like you – but they need to be asked to like you. Take the first step and you’ll be collecting friends before you know it.

Three easy steps to getting more likes on your business page:

Step one: Look at your page’s list of current “likes” and make sure ALL OF YOUR EMPLOYEES “like” your page! (A little shame and embarrassment go a long way.) ((However, don’t make Facebook use mandatory – the EEOC frowns on that sort of thing.))

Step two: You know all those cousins and former neighbors and college roommates on your Christmas card list, in your email address book and on your Facebook (personal page) news feed? They’re great prospects to “like” your page. Contacting them one-at-a-time works best, but it can be a slow process. The faster, easier way is to use the “invite friends” box (on your Facebook page, in admin view, to the right of the Insights box). If few friends like your business page after you’ve tried the easy route, commit to the more personal approach, sending a note to each friend as you invite him or her to check out your page.

Step three: Watch the Likes pile up, and feel extremely popular. No, seriously – there’s a little more to it. You need to interact with those Facebook users who have liked your page to encourage them to stick around. Their engagement may even generate some new friends for your page and your business. Wondering how to engage? Post a status update every few days welcoming those who have recently liked your page. Invite them to comment, post photos, or ask questions. And then, reciprocate – visit their pages and comment on their posts.

That’s it – you’re on your way.

Of course, the next thing you know, we’ll be telling you it’s not enough to be liked – that you have to do something to convert the likers to buyers. But that’s another post. For now, just win friends. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here to show you how to influence people so they become more than friends – customers!

*We’ve heard some people still live there. No kidding. Just to play it safe, we still create sales letters, printed brochures and even direct mail pieces for our clients who need them. Have a trade show or conference coming up? Contact us – we can help you make the most of your sales prospects.

Three Ways to Be Prepared for Google’s Penguin 2.0 Search Update

Nothing gets those in the business of SEO talking like rumors of a Google algorithm change, and it seems that this time around (yes, another change is on the way), Google is trying to preempt some of these rumors by clarifying, in advance, what businesses can expect. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently published a video explaining what businesses can expect in the next couple of months, including the algorithmic change called “Penguin 2.0, ” which is targeted to black hat web spam (watch the interview).

In the video, Cutts outlines several areas that businesses should pay attention to.

1. Stay away from link spamming

We believe that Sales Renewal clients can confidently disregard this warning, as we take a “natural” approach to linkbuilding – requests for links on relevant or complementary websites, guest blogging, participation in forums that are appropriate for our clients.

2. Set up Google Authority

While Google Authorship and Google+ may not have the visibility or popularity of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, rest assured that behind the scenes, Google is working to connect these two aspects of a personal and business profile with search results. Whether a business is highly active in the Google+ realm or not, we recommend at a minimum maintaining your listing, posting regular status updates, and working to increase your followers. Likewise, any blog post that can be linked to Google Authorship can only help your website, as Google looks for these connections as signals of your authority in your field. (Learn how to set up Google Authorship.)

3. Use Webmaster Tools on a regular basis

I know webmasters who are reluctant to use Google’s Webmaster Tools because of frustrating experiences when using it in the past. But Google has made periodic improvements to the tool, and it now has a more useful, more intuitive, easier-to-navigate interface. This is part of Google’s attempt to better communicate with webmasters, providing information about how to deal with a hacked site and more concrete details about ways to handle other technical issues as they arise.

In conclusion, Cutts repeats Google’s message that if you “create a great site that users love, tell their friends about, bookmark, and come back to over and over again, ” you have nothing to worry about.

– Audrey Trieschman

Fun with Charts: Right Content, Right Time

Infographics are cool. So cool they were hard to resist – at first. After you’d clicked on 80 or 100, though, be honest: you realized some of them were a waste of time, right?

Like so many internet trends, infographics look like an overnight sensation, but they’re not new.* In fact, they’ve been around long enough to cause a bit of a rift in the graphic design world. And we’ll admit, we’re not quite ready to dive into the fray and come up with a definitive answer to the question, is it an infographic or an infoposter?

What we tell our clients: it doesn’t really matter what you call it. The point is the right content, at the right time, is what you need to increase your sales.

The Right Content at the Right Time Sells

Good content is essentially worthless if it’s not distributed at the right time, to the right people. Good content, distributed at the right time in your prospect’s decision-making process, will shorten your sales cycle. Good content, distributed regularly throughout your customer relationships, will increase sales to existing customers and will promote referrals and customer loyalty.

And that’s the point of marketing by way of content: to increase revenue.

Got Good Content?

Rather than investing a lot of time and money in the infographics creation business, we spend a lot of time with our clients before we develop any content for them. Our Blueprint process is a thorough getting-to-know-you process, one we take seriously, because it’s an important phase in the process. While we’re working on the Blueprint, we’re developing a better understanding of your business and building a partnership with you and management team.

Once we have that knowledge, we’re ready to create content that’s really good for you. Using what we’ve learned in the Blueprint, we can determine when and where to place that content to most effectively grow your sales.

Good Timing Requires Good Planning

Our SEO, content, design, and sales team meet weekly – and sometimes daily – to fine-tune our content management strategies for each client. In quarterly content review/planning sessions with our clients, we discuss how well various pieces of content performed related to the one thing we care most about: your sales.

We don’t specialize in infographic design, press release production, or newsletter distribution. We specialize in increasing sales. Very often (like, always) that requires delivering the right content to the right people at the right time.

Whether it’s a new website, a good old-fashioned postcard or sales letter, or a six-second Vine video, we’ll do it – if, and only if, we are convinced it will increase your sales.

Good Content or Good Pie?

Creating good content isn’t a piece of cake. When we’re developing a new piece for our clients, they often tell us, “we never would have thought of that, ” and we love hearing it. We try to think of everything when we create content for our clients, because we believe good content has a clear purpose. Sometimes, that purpose is just for fun – and fun is good! But when it comes to our clients, our primary purpose is to increase sales.

For what it’s worth, we’ve found more sales generally lead to more fun. If you’d like to see how much fun you can have with a noticeable increase in sales, contact us.

*File under Internet History: the website Daily Infographic – which you should peruse, when you have an hour to kill – dates to 2010.

Easy, Time-Saving Tip: Schedule Your Facebook Posts

This is a very easy, very valuable tip that we share with our clients who opt for social media coaching (rather than a more comprehensive content management program). It’s a quick lesson in how to schedule posts on your Facebook Page, assuming you are a page manager/administrator.

Ready?

Using Facebook’s Activity Log and Scheduling Feature

Here’s how to use the Activity Log, in three simple steps:

1. Log into Facebook, then select your page using the drop-down menu behind the gear icon in the top right corner of your screen. On the top right portion of the page there are four tabs labeled Edit Page, Build Audience, Help, and Hide.

2. Click Edit Page to see the drop down menu, where you’ll select Use Activity Log.

3. Use the Activity Log to see all Scheduled Posts. You can reschedule or delete them using a button on the top right corner of each scheduled post.

It really is that easy, and it can be a huge time-saver.

An Important Reminder

Automation can be brilliant, as long as there are thinking humans in charge. In other words, scheduled posts can hit some very sour notes when unforeseen events render your previously-planned posts worthless – or worse. Until you’ve mastered the habit of scheduling and truly managing your social media messages, make it a point to log in and look at your upcoming scheduled posts once a day, to remind yourself what “you” are saying that day and that week. Doing so will also help prime you and your sales staff for calls (and social media!) inquiries from prospects.

Are you schedule-ready? Give it a go, then connect with us here or on Facebook, and let us know how it’s working for you.

Is Your Business Beyond the Basics with Social Media?

We find some of our clients are masters of social media. Some won’t touch the stuff. And most are somewhere in between. The one thing they all have in common is too little time. In the initial phase of the Blueprint, we help our clients discover how to better leverage their time and expertise to grow their businesses. Contact us to find out more.

Show Your Stuff vs. Showcase Your Services

Among the responses to our post about REI’s “personalized commercials” was a very thoughtful reply from Marc Cica, Director of Advancement for the Shenango Valley Catholic School System in Hermitage, PA. Cica pointed out that video can be an ideal communication tool for non-profit organizations. When it’s done well, video can be personal, motivational, even inspirational.

4 Basic Steps of Content Marketing – A Real Life Example [Infographic]

It’s easy to define what content marketing* is: Using original content to acquire and retain customers. The steps a business owner needs to take to put a content marketing plan in place are also easy to describe: Know your audience, create your content, promote your content and build natural links.

But how does a business owner translate these “marketing speak” definitions into things he or she can actually do on a day-to-day basis? Our INFOGRAPHIC: The Content Lifecycle, A Real Life Example, attempts to demonstrate exactly that.

An important feature of content marketing is that each piece of content can be reused or repurposed, thus extending its lifecycle. How long a particular piece can “live” depends on several things, including the quality and timeliness of the original piece and how well it resonates with your audience.

*Wikipedia defines content marketing as: any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – ‘content’ – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.” This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to’s, Q&A’s, photos, etc.

– Audrey Trieschman