5 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid Like the Plague Posted on June 1, 2018June 12, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Despite the growing popularity of social media, email is still the most effective and affordable marketing tool for businesses – especially B2Bs building relationships with customers and prospects. With a solid email marketing strategy, businesses can nurture leads to conversion and stay top-of-mind with existing customers. But what makes a great email marketing strategy? More importantly, what things shouldn’t you do if you want to see real, measurable and sustainable results? Let’s take a gander at a few common email marketing blunders and how you can avoid making the same mistakes in your own business. Buying vs. Building In a fast-paced digital world where time is precious, it can be tempting to take shortcuts by buying an email list of prospects. Doing so, however, is likely to prove both futile and a waste of money. When it comes to email marketing, the quality of your contacts is much more important than the quantity. Focus instead on slowly but surely building a list of qualified leads. It will take longer, but the payoff will be far greater in the end. Winging It If you don’t have a strategy for your email marketing, you’re wasting your time. As with any other type of marketing, you need to set specific goals for what you’d like to accomplish. For instance, you may want to use email to increase traffic to your website, boost social media engagement or drive more sales. Knowing what you want to get out of your efforts will enable you to develop a strategy that will help you achieve those objectives and move your business forward in the right direction. Being a ‘Me Monster’ The end goal of your email marketing campaigns may be to convert more customers and increase your bottom line, but if your messages are filled with self-promotion and other company-centric content, your results will suffer. Effective email marketing is about relationship building, which means the content you share should be customer-centric and of value to your recipients. Figure out how you can solve your audience’s problems, and you’ll win them over for life. Not Optimizing These days, email service providers are coming up with newer and better algorithms for keeping promotional emails out of your recipients’ inboxes. If you’re not careful about how you’re approaching your email campaigns, your messages are likely doomed to die in the spam folder. To prevent this, you must optimize your emails by doing things like avoiding certain spam trigger words and asking your recipients to whitelist your email address. (Here are a few more tips for email optimization.) Not Automating When you’ve only got a few customers, it’s easy to stay in touch manually, but as your business grows (which it hopefully will), sending manual communications will become cumbersome. You can optimize your time and still maintain those important relationships with your customers by leveraging email automation. And don’t worry – with the right strategy, you can still automate without losing that personal touch that’s essential to nurturing your leads effectively. With the total number of email users worldwide expected to reach 2.9 billion by 2019, there’s no question that email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching, engaging with and converting customers. It’s only effective, however, if you do it right. By avoiding the five mistakes listed above, you’ll improve your results and enjoy a greater return on your investment.
How Marketing Automation Can Increase and Benefits Sales Posted on May 31, 2018January 17, 2020 by Tricia O'Donnell You are probably already familiar with the basics of marketing automation. It automates tasks. It streamlines processes. Overall, it makes our lives a whole lot easier. But a quality marketing automation software is capable of doing much more than just enabling your marketing team. When used to its full advantages, it’s a tool that can ultimately help your sales team close more deals. By streamlining and optimizing the process of gathering, scoring, and prioritizing leads, your business will be able to drive higher conversions and generate more revenue consistently. But, wonderfully enough, that’s just grazing the surface. Here are a few more ways marketing automation benefits your sales and improves your bottom line: Provides a Full View of Your Leads Effectively qualifying leads can be a complicated process, especially if you’re targeting high-profile businesses or elusive prospects. You may spend hours conducting research — from scouring websites to contacting employees and gathering data from phone calls. Marketing automation tools make understanding your leads a sinch and don’t require tons and tons of manual digging. More specifically, they can: Track lead behavior: By leveraging marketing automation software within your CRM, salespeople have insights at their fingertips. They can see what pages of their website their leads have visited, what emails they have clicked on, and what online forms they have filled out. Not only does this help salespeople build relationships faster, but ultimately allows them to respond to leads more quickly. Track lead information: Why not automate your qualification process so you can spend more time doing what has to be done by a human? Tools like Contact Enhance can automatically generate key sales information, including company size, history, employee contact information, and more — and deliver that information right to your inbox. Integrate these tools with your CRM so you can get as much information on your leads as possible, which will assist with qualifying. Score and qualify leads: Marketing automation helps identify your hotter leads with a simple lead scoring model. Specific scores are applied to customers based on interactions on your website, company information, and content they engage with. Prioritize hot leads: There’s nothing more frustrating for a salesperson than having to dig through piles and piles of unqualified leads just to find someone who’s ready and willing to buy. Not only is this a waste of time, but it’s also a poor allocation of resources, which means it costs your business money. The right marketing automation platform should be able to identify and alert the sales team of hot leads so they can focus their efforts where they will produce the best results. Your business can weigh certain interactions and information differently so that scores and qualifications reflect the actual progress of a lead. This way, when the salespeople receive their leads from various marketing initiatives, they know the hot from the cold and where to focus their valuable sales time. The result — salespeople spend less time cold calling and more time talking to “hot” prospects and earning commissions. Segments and Nurtures Leads By using the lead information and scoring your automation software provides, you’ll be able to segment your prospect. Segmenting your prospects is a significant step for effective sales outreach, as separating contacts into various lists allows you to send those lists content that is more specific to their needs. There are three main stages of the buyer’s journey that your leads can fall into. It’s important to have a lead nurturing strategy that includes content applicable to the top of the funnel through the customer lifecycle. Just Looking or “Awareness” Stage: The customer probably doesn’t need a hard sell, but might be better served with a simple three-step email campaign introducing your business and how it can solve a problem they have. Shopping or “Consideration” Stage: Create a more focused response to that interest using targeted emails. These emails can be customized according to prospects’ interests, how often they have visited your site, which content they’re downloading, and which product or service page they’re looking at. Ready to Buy or “Decision” Stage: Pretty self-explanatory, but prospects at this stage are ready to become a customer. Congratulations, you’ve successfully nurtured them to a sale! By engaging or nurturing your customers seamlessly using marketing automation software, you can better prepare leads before sending them over to sales. Keeps Your Brand Top of Mind Life would be infinitely easier if every prospect were ready to convert at the first interaction. But as we already covered, it takes multiple touchpoints to guide a lead from interested to ready to buy. With marketing automation, a good portion of those touchpoints is handled automatically through email marketing tactics like drip campaigns or newsletters. This kind of consistent nurture is spaced out so that your leads aren’t feeling too much pressure from you. Instead, they’re being offered educational content to help them make better decisions. The result is them being continually reminded of your brand and product, so when they’re ready to buy, it’s you they’ll call. Optimizes Sales Efforts Salespeople are very busy and often move from one meeting to another to another. The key to successfully converting leads into loyal, paying customers is building and strengthening relationships, but it’s tough to do this when you’ve got a dozen or more other things on your plate. Because automation shifts much of the menial, day-to-day tasks from human to machine, your sales team will be freed up to build more high-quality relationships with prospects and customers without the need to increase staff numbers. They’ll be able to focus on the more important aspects of their job, so sales go up while staffing expenditure stays lean. Manages Certain Tasks Instead of working in various apps and platforms for project management needs, your sales team can use marketing automation software to manage their tasks. This keeps everything in one place and avoids unnecessary runaround and confusion. When creating tasks, there’s the opportunity to get as specific as needed. This includes tying tasks to a perticular contact and deal, classifying the type of task (i.e., call, email, free trial, demo, etc.), and due date. Your team will also be able to assign tasks to other people, so the appropriate person is held accountable. Offers Data and Analytics One of the nicest features of marketing automation is the ability to gather detailed analytical data on your customers and leads. This information enables managers to make better decisions on how to focus their efforts and their budgets. And by using a data-driven approach, you’ll be able to better engage your customers, which can lead to higher revenue and a distinct competitive advantage. What’s more, your automation software can provide you with sales and marketing performance results so you can see how well your efforts are doing. For your campaigns, you’ll be able to examine the open rate, click-through rate, conversions, demo requests, and free trial sign-ups to determine which campaigns need to be adjusted, and which are effective. The goal of marketing automation software is not just to make the sales team happy, but to give them high-quality and organized leads to make them more productive and drive more revenue for the business. By leveraging automation, you and your team will gain better insights into your contacts and have more time to spend with those leads who are ready to purchase.
33 Quotes to Reignite Your Marketing Spark Posted on May 30, 2018October 14, 2022 by Allie Wolff You’ve been slogging through your blog posts, trudging through your advertising analytics, and basically running social media on autopilot. In other words, you’ve lost your marketing spark — and you’re not sure what to do next. Lustless marketing certainly shows. Your prospects will be able to tell in an instant if your latest LinkedIn post was no more than a hasty “check” on your to-do list. But if you’re not passionate about your marketing, how can you expect customers to be passionate about your brand? Here are some of the best marketing quotes on social media, content marketing, and more to help breathe life back into your stale marketing strategies. Read them aloud, share them with your colleagues, or plaster them up on your office wall to reignite your marketing spark. Quotes On Social Media Marketing “People read, share, and generally engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.” – Malorie Lucich, Lead PR at Pinterest “Pushing a company agenda on social media is like throwing water balloons at a porcupine.” – Erik Qualman, Speaker and best-selling author “Transparency may be the most disruptive and far-reaching innovation to come out of social media.” – Paul Gillin, Author of The New Influencers “The number of people publishing content on social networks is growing at a staggering rate. Standing out means not trying to be all things to all people. Stand for something specific and focus on going deep on that topic with your messaging, engagement, connections and content.” – Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing “Too often, feeling intimidated becomes our excuse not to be awesome.” – Scott Stratten, Owner of UnMarketing Inc “Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” – Lori Taylor, Founder of Rev Media Marketing “Everyone starts out with nobody listening to them and nobody to listen to. How and who you add determines what Twitter will become for you.” – Laura Fitton, Inbound Marketing Evangelist at HubSpot “You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.” – Pam Moore, CEO & Founder of Marketing Nutz “If you get bored with social media, it’s because you are trying to get more value than you create.” – Fast Company “When you lose followers because of where you stand – you strengthen you tribe.” – Glen Gilmore, Author, speaker, consultant Quotes On Content Marketing “Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.” – Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist “Your top of the funnel content must be intellectually divorced from your product but emotionally wed to it.” – Joe Chernov, CMO at InsightSquared “Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it.” – Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert “People want to do business with you because you help them get what they want. They don’t do business with you to help you get what you want.” – Don Crowther, Social media marketing expert “You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.” – David Meerman Scott, Keynote Speaker “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.” – Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.” – David Ogilvy, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather Quotes On Advertising “Don’t settle: Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.” – Chris Brogan, CEO of Owner Media Group “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis, Marketer “Whether B2B or B2C, I believe passionately that good marketing essentials are the same. We all are emotional beings looking for relevance, context and connection.” – Beth Comstock, Vice Chair at GE “Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms.” – Dale Carnegie “Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.” – Erik Qualman, Speaker and best-selling author “Search marketing, and most Internet marketing in fact, can be very threatening because there are no rules. There’s no safe haven. To do it right, you need to be willing to be wrong. But search marketing done right is all about being wrong. Experimentation is the only way.” – Mike Moran, Speaker and marketer “Finding new ways, more clever ways to interrupt people doesn’t work.” – Seth Godin, Entrepreneur, author, speaker Inspirational Marketing Quotes “Most of us have experienced wow moments. We just haven’t taken time to think deeply about them.” – Michael Hyatt, Author and entrepreneur “Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.” – Ted Rubin, CMO, strategist, keynote speaker “If you are an artist, learn science. If you are a scientist, cultivate art.” – Karin Timpone, Global Marketing Officer at Marriot “You can have everything you want in life if you will help enough people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar, Speaker “Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall, Entrepreneur and speaker “The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” – Thomas Jefferson “Money follows passion — not the other way around.” – David Siteman Garland, Online marketer “I make a conscious effort to keep things in perspective when I get burned out. It is easy to get stuck in the daily grind, but if you think about all the distance you have covered, and what lies ahead, it is much easier to feel motivated and optimistic.” – Alex Litoff, Director of Client Services at Event Farm “There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it. For if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.” – Madam C.J. Walker, Entrepreneur and philanthropist
5 Steps to Outstanding Leadership Posted on May 29, 2018May 29, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick When you first started your business, it was probably just you handling everything. As your company has grown, however, so has your need to hire additional employees. For many business owners, leadership isn’t something that comes naturally, but it’s essential if you are to drive your company forward. If this is an area where you struggle, or if you’re just looking to get ahead of the game before you bring on additional staff, here are five tried and true steps to become a positive, consistent and effective leader. Hire the right people. You can’t expect to lead others who aren’t a good fit for your company to begin with. Make sure you put a good deal of time and effort into who you hire. Look for people who are natural problem-solvers, who can communicate well and who are on the same page as you in terms of culture. In other words, if your company culture is customer-centric, seek out individuals who strongly value service and support. Then, invest the necessary time and resources into onboarding and training them properly. Over-communicate. Your employees cannot thrive if they don’t know exactly what’s expected of them. Moving from self-sufficiency to collaboration can be a difficult transition, but the key to navigating through those rocky waters is communication. Be clear on what your goals are and the role each individual plays in achieving those goals. Never assume that just because your staff is highly intelligent and independent that they know what’s going on in your mind. Clarify objectives, duties and deadlines and check in regularly to confirm that everyone is on the same page. Identify and nurture strengths. It’s great to have employees who are talented and highly skilled, but if you take those things for granted, you might end up losing your best talent in the long run. Remember to recognize excellence and show your appreciation for great performance. Take the time to review each of your staff members to identify what their areas of strength are and then find a way to nurture those strengths. Not only will this add value to them, but it’ll also be great for your company. Be forward-thinking. As a business owner, it can be easy to become so engrossed in the operation of your company that you forget to look up and see what’s going on around you. Unfortunately, if you’re not careful about staying abreast of what’s disrupting your industry, you could easily get left behind. Part of being a strong, effective leader involves keeping an eye toward the future and being adequately prepared and agile enough to adapt as the landscape changes. Keep your ears open. A lot of well-meaning business owners forget that leadership is actually a two-way street. Your employees are smart and innovative. It’s highly likely that they know of better ways to do things that will boost service levels or improve efficiency. Make sure you’re actively listening to what your team members have to say. Be open to feedback, encourage idea sharing and implement suggestions whenever possible. When your employees feel heard, they’ll be much more engaged and dedicated to helping drive your business forward in the right direction. The truth is, with the right approach, anyone can be a great business leader. By putting the above steps into action, you can strengthen your company and realize even greater success in the future.
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Earned, Owned and Paid Website Traffic Posted on May 25, 2018June 12, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Modern digital marketing can be divided into three results: owned, earned and paid traffic. And while they seem distinct, and you’ll measure them using different metrics, in truth they can overlap wonderfully – if you know how to play them right. Let’s start by defining the terms, in case you’re unfamiliar with the distinctions. Paid traffic is traffic you paid for with traditional outbound marketing efforts: creating pay-per-click ad campaigns, hiring an influencer to write about your product, paying for sponsored content on a media website, and so forth. All these marketing techniques require you to pay a company or person to achieve a certain audience reach. It’s a pretty standard cash-for-value transaction. Earned traffic defines people who found your site or product through word of mouth. The most common way is via social shares (because your content is so darn shareable), but other ways include customer referral programs, forwarded newsletter campaigns or authentic inbound links you didn’t pay for. This is an extremely valuable asset, because it requires an often impartial outsider to vouch for your product and sell it for you. Owned traffic refers to direct results from your inbound marketing campaigns. It’s essentially content marketing – when audiences search for a keyword and find your blog, or when you post on Facebook or Twitter and your followers click on your link to your site, that’s content you own. Now that the definitions are clear, it’s important to note that these are not mutually exclusive exercises. In fact, they rely on one another, and you can create campaigns that integrate all three elements to promote your brand. But when taken in isolation, they each present clear pros and cons. Paid Traffic The Benefits: By far, the most obvious benefit is how much control you have over the campaign. With PPC campaigns, you can choose your budget; sometimes with influencers or sponsored posts you can negotiate for a lower price tag. If we’re talking about Google PPC or display ads, you write the copy and create the banners. It’s easy to split test your campaigns and track them to find the most statistically efficient combination, then invest more money behind that to scale up. And there’s no question about the results: the data cannot lie. In addition, Paid Traffic usually sources bottom-of-the-funnel buyers. That is, these leads are actively searching for a solution. With paid traffic, you see ROI faster than other channels. The Pitfalls: Once your budget is gone, traffic is gone. You have to pay every month for a sustainable traffic stream. Plus, since you have no control over these platforms, you never know when you may need to shift your strategy. For instance, Facebook could suddenly decide to pull the plug on advertisers. A new search engine could make Google obsolete. While these extreme scenarios are unlikely, you do need to prepare to pivot in the face of change. Earned Traffic When we recommended our favorite business apps, we weren’t making money off that – and it was great earned media for those companies. The Benefits: The clearest benefit to earned traffic is its authenticity. Nothing can replace a friend vouching for a product. This is especially true if the person endorsing you has any kind of influential position – it can drive not just traffic and leads, but real sales, because the kind of people interested in that product are more likely to be searching for that kind of product than idly window-shopping. If it’s a digital endorsement online, like an authentic link from a popular blog, your site will also benefit long-term from the SEO juice. The Pitfalls: Here’s a situation that’s the exact opposite of paid media: you have zero control over earned media. Will people share your post? Will people link to your website? Will your content go viral? Who knows! And moreover, even if all that stuff does happen, you have no way of measuring your true audience reach – you can only see the fraction of people who acted on the recommendation and clicked through to your site. You can’t scale up, and you can’t control the message if it turns negative. Owned Traffic The Benefits: Owned traffic should be your bedrock. It’s like building a tower brick by brick: you may not see results quickly, but the product will stay there as long as you maintain it. You’re building an empire, which gives you control over it and allows you to analyze your traffic in full with software like Google Analytics. You can also understand your audience and inform your future developments, maintain full control over your site and pages’ customization, keep things cost-effective and see long-term benefits if you keep at it. The Pitfalls: Well, for starters, those long-term benefits could take a while. What’s more, while it’s cost-effective in terms of money, it’s certainly the most time-consuming of the three channels. It could be a year or longer before your site sees any organic search engine traffic, and your social channels may idle for a while until you find your voice. You’ll also struggle with the eternal uphill battle of creating that authentic voice – people naturally distrust brands more than they do other human beings. Which is best? Try a combination of all three Sure, there will be campaigns – like content marketing or straight-up Adwords buys – that isolate those three traffic channels. But it doesn’t have to always be that way. Consider the process of promoting a Facebook post. You spend two hours writing the post, creating a piece of owned media that will remain yours as long as your site is online; then you post it on Facebook, where your friends and followers can share it, creating a network of earned traffic. If that post is successful, you can “boost” it with a small spend to ensure an even greater reach – and analyze the results as a paid campaign. There are limitless ways to use drip campaigns, subscriber coupons, contests, blogging, social media images, influencers and free products to cross-promote between these channels. By the end, your marketing efforts can be so robust that you’ll glean the benefits of all three while avoiding their pitfalls.
Agency Overload: 5 Tips for Differentiating Your Marketing Agency From the Pack Posted on May 24, 2018December 15, 2022 by Katie Culp Marketing and advertising agencies have done some shape-shifting over the last several years. Blame it on the relative ease and simplicity of social media advertising, the rise in solopreneurship, the growing number of businesses taking advertising into their own hands, or the digital age as a whole – it can feel like a new agency is born every day, and you’re just trying to stay afloat. As a marketer, you know how important differentiation is to your business. So how do you differentiate your marketing agency in a seemingly saturated industry? Agency Differentiator #1: Be a Leader in Your Niche To “niche down” is a hard thing to do, especially if your agency has served multiple industries or demographics in the past. However, as the digital age charges forward, it’s easier than ever for customers to find solutions that fit their exact needs. Think of it like this: imagine you run a fly-fishing supply store and you want to grow your digital presence. You’re comparing two digital agencies of equal competence and experience. The pricing is identical. One agency develops campaigns for small businesses. The other, however, focuses on serving small businesses in the outdoor recreation industry. Which would you choose? Another benefit of solidifying your niche and narrowing your target market is that you’ll see a marked increase in operational efficiency: the more you work with one kind of client, the deeper your understanding of their needs, objections, and taste. You’ll work faster and more effectively. There’s also a psychological component to it, as well. People feel most comfortable when they’re around others with whom they share something in common. The more you connect with your target market in terms of interests Agency Differentiator #2: Improve Your Analytics Game Data has been an essential tool since the stone ages of marketing and advertising. It’s one of the only ways to show ROI to your clients, assuring them that the hard work you’re doing is actually paying off. But are you leveraging the power of all of the data available to you? If your gut says no, don’t worry – this isn’t something you have to become an expert in overnight (nor could you, probably). Hire an analytics specialist to join your team, or pick and choose freelance specialists to meet particular needs. Here’s a primer on types of data analysis, so you can speak the language and choose the partner that’s most beneficial to you: Descriptive analytics: This describes what happened – how many “likes” a social post got, how many pageviews a blog had, or how many people downloaded your eBook. Diagnostic analytics: This takes descriptive analytics one step further, and explains why something happened the way it did. For example, diagnostic analytics of an A/B test of two different landing pages might reveal that people preferred one color scheme over another. Predictive analytics: This type of analysis makes educated predictions for future data based on past data. For instance, if you published 3 different advertorials throughout the year in a magazine and only the December ad resulted in conversions, you may be able to estimate that another winter advertorial would produce similar results. Prescriptive analytics: This is the most advanced type of analytics, which takes observations from the former three categories and recommends a plan for the future. Beyond types of data analysis, you can really ramp-up your data game by hiring data analysts who specialize in particular areas — think Facebook advertising, Google analytics, and more. Agency Differentiator #3: Try Unconventional Pricing Big agencies bid on projects, while smaller agencies may have set packages that they offer prospective clients. However, a rising trend among smaller agencies is to offer results-based pricing — meaning the client pays for results, rather than a process. Some agencies are even going so far as to only require payment when they achieve results. Though this is a fantastic selling point, it’s a risky move, unless you have an extremely reliable process (or the overhead to recoup your losses). Agency Differentiator #4: Do Original Research If there’s one thing the internet marketing world needs less of, it’s a regurgitation of the same old information. One great way to differentiate your marketing agency is to conduct original industry research and publish it on your site. Not only will you be contributing something new to the conversation (and more likely to see your agency website rise up in SERPs), but you can repurpose your primary research into valuable content marketing tools like eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, and quizzes. Agency Differentiator #5: Be Memorable One of the great liberties of being a marketing agency is that you’re equal parts artist and scientist — meaning you can take creative leaps in your own branding and advertising. Take a hard look at your brand presence both online and offline: does it gel with your actual company culture and identity? How can you make your brand more memorable? Some achieve this with humor, others with controversy, and yet others do it with stunning or cutting-edge media. When you set out to be true to yourself and your brand, this authenticity will radiate to your potential clients (and attract clients who share your ideals and values).
8 Elements of a Stellar Blog Post Posted on May 23, 2018November 13, 2018 by Allie Wolff Writing. It’s now an art form that anyone with a keyboard can theoretically do. Writing is free, right? Just sit down, turn the spell-checker on and type away. Writing can be easy, sure. But writing isn’t the same as effective content marketing. Content marketing means writing useful, keyword-optimized articles in a way that they don’t read like an elementary student copied and pasted keywords indiscriminately into a plagiarized Wikipedia article. So while many brands decide to dive into the blogging game, it’s not as easy to know what makes good content. To make Strunk & White proud, here are a few elements of a stellar blog post. 1. Start with a clear headline Good blogging is clear blogging, and the surest way to cut through the fat is by starting with a strong headline. Think of this as your thesis statement; your guiding principle throughout the blog post. While some headline writers will wax poetic, the most effective blog titles draw a click immediately. Listicles be damned: numbers work. Why else would we offer “8 Elements of a Stellar Blog Post” instead of just “Here Are Some Elements That Make a Good Blog Post?” 2. Don’t be afraid of longform. While bloggers once feared posts longer than 800 words, ever-evolving algorithms and increasing comfort reading online have led many bloggers to adopt a hardline commitment to longform. This is good for a few reasons: it gives you more room to pack in those keywords; it invites readers to stay on your page longer; and it gives you a chance to actually explore the topic you’re writing about. Some even say that Google is now ranking longer blogs higher than short form ones, judging them based on their quality rather than simply whether people zone out after five seconds. So go ahead and flaunt that expertise. 3. Choose your keywords wisely. Content-marketing experts harp on keywords a lot, but it’s only because the difference good keyword research makes is astounding. Make your blogs targeted and particular, tackling a theme you think you can write about authoritatively—but also one that not many of your competitors have blogged about. The next step is to write naturally and authentically. You’ll notice I don’t keep repeating “how to write a good blog” in this piece over and over, because everyday readers would assume I’m some Russian machine programmed to write spam content. 4. Link to your content and others’. There are two types of hyperlinks: internal and external. Linking to your own content (internal) is good, as readers may find that content genuinely interesting and you’ll keep them on your site longer. But Google also positively weighs outgoing links to authoritative sources. Citing news stories and explanations (as you might with footnotes) is a good way to build a trustworthy website. 5. Make your blogs shareable If you want anyone to share your content, it’s got to be social media friendly. Remember: social media is an emotional medium. Blog about something funny, scary or informative and people will be more inclined to share it on their personal feeds. When it does, use this simple litmus test: Would you share it on your own personal feed? 6. Find great photos Social media has proven time and time again that posts with beautiful, grabby images do better than those without. This same logic applies beyond the social world. Find great photos and your content will grab people for longer. Looking for a place to start? We’ve got a list of eight great sites for free (or at least cheap) stock photos. 7. Update it when necessary Did you write a really popular blog post about best blogs for CPAs? Is it getting 100 clicks a day through search engines? Congratulations! If you wrote it two years ago, there’s a chance those hundreds of people are getting outdated information about blogs that could since be defunct. It doesn’t take much effort: add a line saying that you’ve updated this post to reflect the reality in 2018 and then make a few adjustments where necessary. This will help keep that SEO juice flowing for longer. 8. Avoid fluff. The cardinal sin of blogging is fluffy writing. You’re not doing yourself or your readers any favors by packing in more words than you need to explain something. Keep it simple, keep it informative, and your readers will keep coming back for more.
Are Company Retreats Right for Your Business? Posted on May 22, 2018June 12, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Many big companies plan retreats and offsites to bring far-flung teams together, but holding an event like this at a small company does not always make sense and requires some careful decision making. Just as you evaluate the cost-benefit equation with other investments you make in your team, it’s important to do so with company retreats. Here are some factors to consider: How big is your team? If you run a company with a very small number of employees, a retreat may not be necessary. At a small business with three or four employees, it’s likely that you all work together closely enough on a regular basis that concentrated alone time isn’t necessary. Where retreats often make the most sense is at companies with 10 or more people that are scaling up. As a company grows, and perhaps adds remote team members, it is important for everyone to get to know each other. A retreat can be a great way to allow your team to do that in a relaxed setting. Offsites can also be very helpful at companies that rely on a substantial number of remote employees. It’s easier than ever to build a remote relationship today because of the growth of inexpensive videoconferencing tools. However, there’s no substitute for meeting each other in person from time to time. What result are you hoping for? Many companies hold retreats to reward employees for their contributions, such as hitting an ambitious sales goal. Company retreats can be great for your business if you and your team need concentrated time away from the office to work on an initiative that requires focused thinking time, such as a new strategic plan. Often, such work can get pushed to the back burner so often it never gets done. If your goal is more along the lines of building a great culture, consider whether there are other ways to achieve it that will require less of an investment. Taking half a day off to go bowling as a team may be more fun for everyone than driving for 90 minutes to get to a conference center to do team-building exercises. Do your employees have demanding family responsibilities? At a company where there are many working parents, a company retreat that requires team members to be away overnight may be burdensome. Arranging for someone to watch the kids overnight may be costly. For those on your team who have commitments like coaching sports teams in their community, it can also cause logistical challenges. If you suspect it may be hard for team members to get away, that doesn’t mean you have to table your idea for an offsite. Consider planning a full-day offsite during the normal workday. That way, they’ll arrive at the event with a clear mind. What is your budget? Holding an offsite can be costly, when you factor in the need to pay for employees’ travel, the meeting space, and lodgings if the event will last more than one day. If you’re having a very profitable year, this may not matter, but if money is tight, it may be more cost effective to schedule regular informal get-togethers, such as a long catered lunch once a month in your conference room. What will customers think? During the recession, many companies tabled retreats because of “optics.” Even if the retreat might inspire employees, companies feared customers might frown on a trip that might seem self-indulgent or excessive. Although the economy has improved greatly since then, it’s still important to look at your retreat as your customers might. If you’ve just informed customers you have to raise prices to pass along added costs, how will it look if they call the company and find out you’re closed for four days for a retreat? If you suspect it might not sit well with customers, perhaps its best to hold off until the timing is better and opt for a more modest way to get your team together outside of your office. Retreats can be a great way to build teamwork and get away from the everyday stressors of the business, but they’re not the only way.
How To Break Through Three Top Obstacles To Getting to $1 Million Posted on May 21, 2018June 12, 2018 by Guest Author A guest blog by Elaine Pofeldt, author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business. Since the release of my book The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, I’ve enjoyed holding several panel discussions with entrepreneurs featured in the book and and business owners whom I’ve met since writing it, who have also broken the million-dollar mark before hiring any employees. Often, members of the audience ask me afterward for advice on how to overcome obstacles they are facing to achieving high revenues. Here are the three most common ones, with some thoughts on how to break through them, by drawing on what I learned from entrepreneurs in the book. Obstacle #1: I don’t have access to capital. Having a pipeline to startup cash can be a powerful advantage, but it’s not mandatory to success. Most of the entrepreneurs in the book started out on a shoestring. In some cases, the entrepreneurs self-funded by relying on their own labor or money from a day job to fuel the business. That was the case with entrepreneurs such as Laszlo Nadler, who had a full-time job as a project manager at a bank while launching Tools4Wisdom Planners, an Amazon store that sells daybooks. He kept his day job for two years after starting out and has built the business to $2 million in annual revenue. At Brooklinen, one of the businesses that has now grown to more than 20 employees, founders Rich and Vicki Fulop persuaded family members to help in funding their direct-to-consumer sheet store initially, then raised money by pre-selling the linens they sell on Kickstarter. Finally, when the business was growing rapidly, they raised venture capital. We all have unique circumstances in our lives. Fortunately, what I’ve learned is there are many creative ways to find money if you are serious about starting or growing a business. Obstacle #2: I’m can’t break six-figures revenue, let alone seven. Don’t give up yet! Many of the entrepreneurs in the book didn’t hit six-figure revenue until their third or fourth year in business, because. Some started their business as a side hustle or didn’t nail their business model on the first try. Just because you’re bringing in less than $100,000 now, it doesn’t mean your business does not have growth potential. If you find your sales are climbing, even incrementally, analyze what you’re doing that’s working and try to amplify that. De-emphasize activities that don’t help the business grow. What if you’re making very little money or bringing in less than you did when you first started out? You may have to do some experimenting to find a business model that works better for you. Many entrepreneurs in the book experimented with products and services that didn’t sell and pivoted away from them in favor of pursuits that helped the bottom line more. Obstacle #3: My business is growing, but I’m working 24/7—and want my life back! Although many of the entrepreneurs I interviewed had seasons of imbalance, they eventually course-corrected and got back control of their schedules. Colin and Angie Raja, who run RIMSports, a fast-growing ecommerce store based in New York City, are a good example. In one panel discussion, they shared how they worked late into the evenings their first year in their sporting goods business. Eventually they realized that to restore their work-life balance and make more time for family and friends, they had to step outside of daily operations. They began documenting exactly how they wanted key tasks done in their business so they could outsource it, first to contractors, and later to their first employees. Now that they have enlisted other to help them, they have freed up a lot of time. As the Rajas other entrepreneurs I’ve met through the book have taught me, when you run an ultra-lean business, you, as the founder, are a precious resource. If you let yourself burn out, you won’t be able to achieve your business goals. By giving yourself time to recharge, you’ll be surprised at how much better your decisions are—and how much more quickly your business grows. Author Bio Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in small business, entrepreneurship and careers. Her work has appeared in FORTUNE, Money, CNBC, Inc., Forbes, Crain’s New York Business and many other business publications and she is a contributor to the Economist Intelligence Unit. She is the author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, a look at how entrepreneurs are hitting seven-figure revenue in businesses where they are the only employees, tapping automation and other technology to scale their efforts (Random House, 2018). As a senior editor at FORTUNE Small Business, where she worked for eight years, Elaine was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her features and ran the magazine’s annual business plan completion. During her time at FSB, she ran the magazine’s website, fsb.com, for four years, building its traffic from two to five million page views a month.