Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

  • As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
  • Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
  • My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
  • Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
  • I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 
5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

  • Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
  • Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
  • Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
  • Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.
A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.  

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Article Marketing and Syndication Techniques Used for SEO Campaign

As you know, Google rolled out its Panda update in the first quarter of 2011 and sites like Ezine Articles  suffered badly. Now the cynics among us might say things like ‘well they should have seen it coming,’ but what many people fail to realize is that websites like Ezine Articles were the main watering holes for thousands of web marketers. Not only has EZA suffered many online marketers and web businesses have suffered too.

The strategy of writing articles and submitting them to article directories to gain back-links and direct traffic was the cornerstone of many web marketing businesses, and now the well seems to have run dry.

First, the way in which these article directories have been utilized by marketers over the past few years wasn’t really the way in which they were intended to be utilized in the first place. The concept of an ‘article directory’ was and still is this: to serve as a repository for good quality content, a place where webmasters can find articles for their websites/blogs/ezines in exchange for providing an acknowledgment in the form of a link to the author’s website.

Then the opportunity seekers moved in and turned it into something different. Just like back-link building, blog commenting, and SEO in general; the concept was taken and exploited to the point where it simply had to be ‘regulated’ (by Google).

Now, if you’re thinking about apportioning the guilt for this, well, the Article Directory owners were not entirely without fault. They could and should have tightened up their quality standards and made it more difficult for people to exploit the system by throwing low quality canned/spun articles into the directory for the reward of a couple of back-links. Instead they added more and more advertising slots around the content and made hay while the sun shone bright.

So, where does this leave us? Do we walk away from article marketing in the same way we’re walking away from low quality back-link building and other strategies of the past? Well, we shouldn’t be too hasty.

Let’s wind the clock back to the days just prior to the point where it all went south, and look in more detail at the real purpose and function of a quality Article Directory.

There are many hundreds of thousands of niche blogs and websites which have a loyal and focused group of followers. Often, the number of followers can reach into the thousands, with some of the larger blogs boasting traffic stats of many multiples of that figures.

The key to creating such a successful enterprise is to keep your followers fed on a steady and reliable diet of whatever it is that drew them to you in the first place. Usually this falls into one of two fairly distinct categories, they’re either following the personality of the blog owner, or they’re following the specific topic of interest.

In the first case, it’s hard to have a surrogate personality, so the onus is on the blog owner to continue to make him/her available to the followers. In the second case, there is no reason why the information cannot come from a variety of sources, as long as the information, which is on-topic and supportive of the general theme of the blog/website.

But as a blog owner, how on earth can you continue to feed your followers information at the rate they require to keep them ‘entertained’ and wanting more. You need to have some form of ‘outsourcing’ of content.

And this is where the larger Article Directories came to known. People would submit quality articles in the hope of their articles being noticed by these niche (and oftentimes not so niche) websites and blogs. The blog owner would search the directories for content which he/she felt would satisfy the demands of his/her followers, and re-publish the article/content on their blog. In the spirit of any ‘exchange of services,’ the blog owner would retain the links within the article body, and/or bio box, so that the author would receive the recognition for their original work.

The blog owners would benefit from the fresh content being delivered to their readers, and some of those readers would follow the links within the article to the author’s own website. Hence the ‘exchange of services’ are the mutually beneficial exchanges.

What you have is simply a system of providing a service to fulfill a demand. It is called ‘syndication’ and it is widely used in the world of news and media. Associated Press is one of the best known syndication operations around. They have teams of writers who create news stories from around the world and the subsequent articles are syndicated out to partnering websites.

So, when one looks at the concept of Ezine Articles and some of the other article directories, they began life as a valuable resource created to feed a large and hungry crowd of web users with a constant supply of information. So has that really been neutered by Google or does it still exist?
Yes, things have changed, but you can still benefit from syndication as a writer and a blog owner. In fact, now that Google has stepped in and forced a reorganization of how these sites operate, you can benefit more than ever before.

Here’s a simple and condensed strategy which you can adopt if you are a blog publisher or website owner looking for more targeted traffic:

1 - Write an interesting and informative article on your niche. Don’t use blatant self-serving sales language, make it something entertaining and try to leave a question unanswered towards the end of your article.
2 - Create a bio box and word it to suggest that the unanswered question may be resolved if the reader would care to follow the link in the bio box.
3 - Link people to a page on your blog or website which provides a smooth continuation of the article and eventually answers the question posed in the original article.
4 - Integrate some ‘sticky’ components on the ‘landing’ page. Use a discreet opt-in box, have a step to a sales page or combine both together. If your ‘landing’ page is too commercial, too aggressive, you won’t satisfy the needs of point five.
5 - Search for blog / website owners whose content complements your own in some way. If you and they are commercial enterprises occupying the same niche, they’ll be less likely to want to work with you, but there will be some who will. Now write to these blog owners and offer them on-topic content for their blogs/sites. Offer to send them an informative article which is sure to please their readers and followers and include an example of your writing. Suggest that you would be willing to become a regular contributor if your work proves popular with their readers. Of course, your work will contain at least a bio box with links, and you would require that they respect you as the original author and retain your name and bio box intact.

Now simply repeat the above strategy over and over, contacting more and more blog owners with your offer of syndication. Maintain a careful record of your communication and start to build a relationship with the people who accept your work.

There will also be some syndication partners who operate Ezines. These can result in a very large surge of targeted traffic to your website over a short period, so be sure that your website is equipped to handle it and that your landing pages are optimized to reap the full benefits.

Lastly, towards the later stages of your syndication effort, submit your articles to the Article Directories. They can still be a source for syndicated content and there is no reason why your article might not be picked up directly by someone proactively looking for information to share with their readers.

As your syndication efforts pick up momentum, you’ll start to see that article syndication becomes a very real alternative to search-engine derived traffic, you’ll no longer be beholden to Google for your leads and prospects.

Of course, there is a need to do things the right way with article syndication to avoid some common pitfalls and to get the most out of your time. In the next article in this series for SPN I’ll be looking in detail at landing page optimization and list building, and exploring some of the problems with duplicating your content around the web.