How to Get  Readers to Spend Serious Time with Your Core Content

Be brief. Be complete. Be Enticing.

Headlines have always been important in print publications. They are even more important online.

They grab readers’ attention and lure them into reading entire articles.  If you have lots of great headlines, avid readers will linger much longer with your content.

Solutions for Short Attention Spans

Today’s readers have short attention spans. That’s exponentially true for your online visitors. You have seconds to grab them before they move on.  You need to show why they should care enough to continue reading. Otherwise, your content marketing efforts will fall short.

Easier said than done, you might think. Fortunately, a quick scan of this morning’s online edition of the New York Post illustrates the 3 shocking secrets that you can apply to your online headlines.

Here’s a Random Headline Selection from the December 29 Issue of the New York Post Online

• Gal Cuffed for Gun Possession at 9/11 Memorial
• NY Times Caught in Lie Over ‘Spam’ E-Mails
• Zoe’s Clothes Lost in Transit
• Jobless Claims Rise 15K to 381K, missing expectations
• Verizon Gamed Cell Phones, Suit Says
• Knicks Lose to Warriors; ‘It was awful’
• Chavez Blames Cancer on US

Here are 3 Shockingly Successful Headline Secrets We Can Learn from Them:

1. Be brief. No headline is longer than 8 words and 53 characters. That’s less than half a Tweet.
2. Be complete. Each headline tells a short, but full story. You know exactly what’ll you get if you read the entire article. No guessing required.
3. Be enticing. Each headline makes us want to read more. If the subject is important to us, we feel compelled to continue. Even when it’s not a hot topic for us, the best headlines often intrigue us enough to keep going.

My own headlines don’t always pass the New York Post brief, complete, and enticing benchmark. But, I think I nailed it today in 7 words and 42 characters with exactly the right amount of compelling content to entice you all the way to this sentence.

How’d I do?

Beautiful blog design and compelling, relevant content by historical novelist Catherine Delors.

This is one of the best websites I’ve seen from a novelist. It brings us deeper into the 18th century period about which she writes. The engaging content and simple, but elegant style are a perfect match. Kudos to Catherine.

More about Catherine and how her writing journey may inspire budding authors:

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became the youngest member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one.

She later moved to the United States and passed the California Bar. She worked at a few large American law firms before setting up a solo practice following the birth of her son.

She now splits her time between London and Paris, while remaining a partner in an international law firm based in Los Angeles.

Her second novel, For The King, was published in July 2010. Catherine is currently writing on a third novel, a prequel to Mistress of the Revolution. She is also researching a fourth one, which shall revolve about Jane Austen and her French connections.

For those of us who are authors–or would-be authors, she traces her journey from unpublished to published:

From unpublished to published: the journey

“What does it take for a first-time novelist to find a publisher? There must as many paths as there are writers. My advice here is based on own experience. Follow it or not, at your pleasure.

First have fun writing Enjoy every moment of it, the exhilaration, the bursts of creativity, the times of crushing self-doubt, of discouragement, the passion. Watch what happens to your characters. They are like kids: they grow up before your eyes, they become independent, they take off, they live their own lives. You think about them while driving to work, in your bath, at night during your moments of insomnia.

This is what I experienced with the character of Villers in my story. At first I conceived him as a pampered aristocrat, what we would call nowadays a womanizer, a brilliant, vital but shallow man. I wondered how on earth I would be able to make him interesting. In fact, he was the character who surprised me most. He gained in complexity, in bitterness, in violence as I wrote on. Now I realize that my readers like him far better than I do.”

Read the rest on her website: CatherineDelors.com

Enjoy her blog: Versailles and More.

Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

From the Hubspot Blog, by Karen Rubin

HubSpot launches a free new tool to help you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your entire marketing program.

Since 2006, HubSpot’s award-winning free tool, Website Grader, has graded more than 4 million websites. Website Grader has given marketers advice on how to improve many aspects of their websites and encouraged millions to bring their website presence to the next level, all for free.

But now the time has come to replace Website Grader! A lot has changed since 2006, and these days, marketing is about much more than just your website.

Why is Marketing Grader Replacing Website Grader?

In 2012, marketing is about more than just your website. It’s about social, mobile, blogging, email marketing, lead nurturing, and analytics. As a marketer, you need to be aware of how your marketing impacts your entire sales and marketing funnel from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel. Marketing Grader does just this by analyzing all aspects of your marketing efforts and letting you know where you’re succeeding and what you need to spend more time improving.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1hBsjpKyg

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1fnkZP9xW
Via blog.hubspot.com

Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

A sophisticated Web site that would have cost $500,000 in 2001 can be replicated today for $5,000.  Even solopreneurs with a modest amount of talent and training can put WordPress to use to build a blog-powered website. Ann Porter with KitchAnn Style : Unique Design for Distinctive Living delivers a simple but image rich website/blog that illustrates her design knowledge and visual sense. She did this on her own at no cost.

The same is true with the online equivalent of circulation development and management. Print publications must still invest enormous amounts of money in acquiring and retaining subscribers. But, online, mailing list and eNewsletter software that integrates with social media costs less than $100/month even for a sizeable mailing list of 10,000 or more. Constant Contact powers the NextBus monthly newsletter which reaches 1000s of transportation executives at a cost of less than $50/month. This technology powerhouse delivers sophisticated transit solutions that benefit millions of bus and rail passengers. And, their small staff and modest marketing budget can achieve results that outshine much larger organizations. They also use WordPress to power their news site.

Social media may be the ultimate leveling force as small company content marketers can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to build an interactive community of customers and prospects. Often, as with George Bowers Grocery in Staunton, VA, they can outcompete Kroger on Facebook in the local market. Click here to read more about their creative approach to social media. In fact, they have increased their Facebook fans/likes by almost 40% since we first wrote about them in January 2011.

Low-cost, easy-to-use Web technology and the emergence of business-friendly social media solutions now enables medium-sized manufacturers, small companies, or one-person service firms to build online content solutions that are more sophisticated than what most media companies were putting online just a few years ago.

In fact, with focus, creativity, and a little outside help, these smaller organizations often do a better job of providing targeted content that fully engages their best customers than do some of their billion-dollar competitors.

If You Don’t, You’ll Be Just Another Generic Acme Corporation Whose Content Marketing is Doomed to Fail

Mission and vision statements may be important to your company internally.  They may even deserve a place on your website once your visitor begins to drill down to learn more about your company.  But they don’t belong on your homepage.

Why? Because they are all about you. They rarely have anything to do with your customer.  To capture your visitors’ attention, you must make your homepage content all about them from the first instant. 

Here’s an actual example of content marketing getting clobbered by the prominence of company-centric clichés.

Really Bad Real-world Mission/Vision Statements Scuttle Home Page of ‘Acme’

The following example makes the case better than I can. I swear that I didn’t invent these two paragraphs.  Nor did I use the automatic mission statement generator from NetInsight. Read these and weep. (I owe the company pseudonym to the always victorious Roadrunner who outwits any Acme products.)

Our mission is to establish Acme Corporation as the National innovative provider of services and products within Organizational Development, Diversity Integration, Homeland Security and Project Management, while maintaining our uncompromising core values and achieving sustainable profitable growth.

Our vision is to be the global provider of products and services within our fields, and practical enough to expand strategically while maintaining our uncompromising core values and achieving sustainable profitable growth.

To be fair, there is a single sentence at the top of the page that provides a pretty generic  benefit statement, “Acme Corporation is a management consulting company that has been helping organizations and individuals reach their potential and achieve greater success since XXXX.”

That’s just 23 words about generic customer benefit. And, that’s all there is, folks.

The real company behind my Acme pseudonym may do great work for its clients. But, as a visitor with no time to waste, I don’t get the sense that Acme knows or cares about me.

As a result, I and most other visitors will take off at the speed of the Roadrunner to find a company that does.

Beep, beep!

Lessons from an Eye Doctor Website That’s Not Visible Enough for Search Engines

Of course, your website must provide relevant and compelling content for your prospective customers.

Ideally, that content should combine both text and images to grab your visitors attention and to keep them on your site long enough to get to know and trust you.

Here’s what is less obvious. Google does not see your site exactly the way your visitors see it. As far as Google is concerned, your website is a bunch of text whose structure and formatting make clear what is most important to the visitors who will benefit most from the site’s content.

Therefore, although you may have a beautiful website with strong visual appeal, it will fail in findability, unless Google discovers text information that it sees as truly relevant to a keyword search.

Google Needs to Find Text on Your Website Structured and Prioritized the Way it Wants

While I was doing competitive research for a doctor client, I uncovered  an example of a missed SEO opportunity by examining the website of one of his competitors.  I found it by doing the opposite of what real patients would do. I dug many pages down on Google search results. In fact, among the top keywords, this competitor’s best ranking is #32. For eye doctor, he comes in at #58 and for eye surgery he comes in at #113.  That’s much too deep for most patients who are looking for eye care solutions using the most popular keyword terms.

The problem boils down to failing to give Google the text and structure it needs to generate valuable search results.

Here’s where this eye doctor’s website went off the SEO tracks:

• Critically important descriptive homepage information is contained only in images. There is no text for Google to read that provides the doctor’s name, the name of his practice or how he describes his specialties and his experience. From Google’s perspective, this information does not even exist.
• His website gives low or no homepage visibility to the most important keywords for eye doctors:
• laser eye surgery
• eye surgery
• LASIK surgery
• vision correction
• eye doctor
• cataract surgery
• eye care
• Although interior pages of his website do include a good bit of information about topics such as LASIK surgery and cataract surgery, there are no direct links to either topic on the homepage either in the primary navigation or in core content. Finding this information requires too much digging for both Google and for visitors.
• His HTML title tag does include does include ‘cataract surgery’ and ‘glaucoma,’ but these keywords arrive only after a long introduction with his name and the word, ophthalmologist. The result is that the title tag is too long and the highest-ranking key words come too late for Google to give them adequate importance.
• His HTML description tag does not include any of the critical keywords noted above that visitors and Google would search for.  If this description excludes those keywords, Google naturally assumes that they are not important to the website or to the doctor.

This website is an excellent illustration of the importance of getting search engine optimization right. You may be the best eye doctor or plumber or construction company on the planet. But, if Google has trouble finding you, your target clients won’t be able to find you either.

The secret to search success begins with this: First, create great content that is relevant to your target clients. Then, design your website so that Google can find that content when your target customers are looking for answers to their most pressing questions.

Classic Truths about Skeptical Customers Remain Modern Business Realities

More than 50 years ago,  McGraw-Hill created an ad that became legendary in the decades to follow  among business-to-business marketers–and among those folks like me who were selling advertising to those skeptical business executives.

As you can see above, the print advertisement featured the ultimate skeptical prospect who says:

• I don’t know who you are.
• I don’t know your company.
• I don’t know your company’s product.
• I don’t know what your company stands for.
• I don’t know your company’s customers.
• I don’t know your company’s record.
• I don’t know your company’s reputation.

Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?

In a single powerful page, McGraw-Hill made the case for business-to-business print advertising.  I used this on countless presentations because it makes the point so simply and eloquently with its visual representation of one very hard-nosed customer.  He is one tough cookie, who is absolutely not predisposed to accept what you have to say at face value.

Back then, print advertising was the logical solution to pre-sell even your toughest customers. Print advertising worked because your message was integrated into trusted business magazines which targeted exactly the buyers you needed to reach. Business publications were the most trustworthy sources of information that helped buyers make intelligent decisions about the problems that they faced every day.

Your Content Marketing Can Answer All Those Implicit Questions–And Much More

Today, you face similar realities. You must still try to sell to tough customers within a highly competitive environment. But, you can do it even more effectively and inexpensively than in the heyday of print business-to-business advertising.

The difference between the old world of advertising and today’s world of content marketing is that in 2010, you can fulfill the complete role of a traditional business-to-business publication. That is, you can deliver both the editorial and the advertising components on your website.

You have the opportunity to become your own highly focused business publication online.  You can create trusted information products that minimize all the skeptical thoughts that are lurking in the minds of your prospective buyers. Your buyers probably don’t look much like that old McGraw-Hill veteran. But they absolutely share his skepticism when they first visit your website.

Fortunately, because you can create a content rich website inexpensively, you can afford to provide relevant and compelling information that is every bit as engaging and trust building as that provided by print publications that formerly dominated the business-to-business landscape.

Prospective customers in search of answers to their most challenging problems will begin to trust you if you make it obvious that you can provide those answers.  Once you have completed that content marketing mission, you can then lead your prospects to in-depth information about your company, its products, its reputation, its customers, and its people. 

Why not print out a copy of this old advertisement and past it on your wall as a constant reminder of the unspoken thoughts in the minds of your prospects.  It may help keep your content marketing strategy on track by reminding you that the prospects who visit you in search of solutions begin as hard-boiled skeptics in need of transformation.

So, to paraphrase the last line of that wonderful old print ad:

MORAL: Sales start before you connect with your customer–with content marketing.

Veteran Sailors, Steve and Doris Colgate, Make Sailing Come Alive on the Web

Sailing is a wonderful, exhilarating sport for those who have the training and experience to enjoy the ever-changing interplay of wind and water on a boat driven by its sails.

First, you have to learn how to sail.  Happily, like 100,000+ students before you, you can do just that at Fort Myers-based Offshore Sailing School.  Once, you have learned from their skilled instructors, sailing becomes a lifelong pleasure.

But, you can learn even more from the Offshore Sailing School  folks. You can learn a lot about content marketing online.

Bringing Modern Marketing to a Traditional Business

Steve and Doris have been running a sailing school for more than 40 years, building a successful business with multiple locations and a world-class repetition. Although they have been doing this for a long time,  there is nothing dated or old-fashioned about their approach to content marketing. They are fully engaged online with a website, a YouTube channel, a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. 

I particularly like what they are doing on their website and on YouTube as examples of how to take a traditional business and bring it successfully into the 21st century content marketing world–with a strong visual approach to everything that they do.

How Their Website Makes It Easy to Transform Site Visitors into Sailing Students

• They feature a big, beautiful slideshow at the top of the page that illustrates the beauty of the sailing experience. There is almost no need for words to introduce prospective students to the idea of a lifelong love of sailing. Their own eyes will make the sale about sailing.
• When it comes to home page copy, they get right to the point. In just two opening paragraphs, they make the case for sailing and for the  Offshore Sailing School:

Be Inspired by Sailing!
We know your time is valuable, so we’ll teach you everything you’ve always wanted to learn about sailing, fast. In just three days, our Learn to Sail Course gives you the confidence to sail mid-sized sailboats with ease. In one week you can gain skills to sail and live-aboard big cruising sailboats with our Fast Track to Cruising® course. Like to sail really fast? If you’re new to racing or currently race and would like hard-core hands-on coaching, you’ll benefit greatly from seven days of race training on our Colgate 26 fleet, with seminars and video recaps by North U. in Offshore’s racing courses.
Whichever sailing course you choose, you’ll be inspired, refreshed, amazed at how much you learn. Whether you want to get away for a day or go around the world, sailing is now within your reach. Offshore Sailing School is the leader in sailing lessons and sailing vacations – discover one of our seven locations today!

• They make it very easy to connect with a prominent "Quick Connect" box in the upper right-hand part of the page.
• They display the latest news prominently on the left sidebar, using complementary images as appropriate.
• They combine text and images frequently with sidebar items such as their featured course, their sailing specials, and their newsletter sign-up.
• They highlight their social media connections on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube  to make it easy to continue the connection.
• They integrate a timely and informative blog, which, in turn, includes numerous videos from YouTube as well as their latest Tweets.
• And, it may be a small thing,but the site’s background is an ocean panorama on what looks to be a perfect day for sailing. For many websites the sort of background would be superfluous. But, for Offshore Sailing School, this is perfect.

Offshore Has Their Own YouTube Channel with Plenty of Engaging Videos

The Offshore Sailing School YouTube page has been nicely designed to complement their website.They have 20 videos which provide sailing instruction, testimonials, and some examples of the sailing experience. Their "Learning to Sail" six minute video has had more than 3000 viewings.That’s pretty powerful when you compare towhat they might have expected from traditional magazine advertising in days gone by.

Does their approach to online content marketing work? Well, if you search for  "sailing school" on Google, you might not be totally surprised that they come up #1 in the organic results.

Not bad for a couple of old salts.

If Your Visitors Have To Search for It, They Won’t.

I continue to be surprised by the number of marketing and advertising companies who have websites that hide examples of the great work that they do behind a bunch of content clichés that fail to distinguish them from every other similar company. 

I recently stumbled upon the website of such a company who is missing its primary content marketing opportunity. They have great stuff, but it’s really hard to find.

Content marketing is all about providing relevant, compelling, and easily accessible information to your prospective customers.

In this case, what is genuinely relevant and compelling is the work that this agency has done on behalf of of its clients. That  visual content represents potential solutions to the problems that its Web visitors are facing.Unfortunately, the content that counts is lurking behind some same old, same old verbiage.

The copy below is from the actual website that I happened upon  They appear to do some really good work. But,  as a potential client, I would have to be truly driven to find that work. First, I would have to wade through all the generic copy that promises pretty much what any good marketing/advertising company could do for me :

“Fill in the Blank” Advertising Company creates custom marketing solutions from strategy through execution to help build and transform your business needs. Let us get to know you inside and out. Let us become instrumental in helping you develop breakthrough solutions to meet your brand objectives and increase your profits. With smart planning & execution, we strengthen your image and reputation as the world around us changes. Change is reality.

We differentiate your company from the competition……

A genuine irony flows from the website copy that makes the promise: "We differentiate your company from the competition."  Sadly, there is almost nothing in the copy that differentiates this agency from its competition.

Actually,  there is a differentiation to be found on this website–but not easily found. That differentiation consists of the proof behind the copy clichés, that is, the actual work that this agency has done. But, you have to struggle to hard-to-find it.

Making It Too Hard to Get to What Really Matters

To get to the good stuff,  you must click on a small  link called, "The Work,"  that sits at the bottom of the page. There, you will find a wealth of visual examples of excellent marketing and advertising projects done for a broad range of companies from relatively small to very very large.  You can even watch videos of commercials that are memorably amusing and interesting.

Moreover, the agency’s work examples include several very well-known brands that add implicit credibility to their skills and experience.

There is another missed opportunity, however. In an era of quantification, none of the work examples are accompanied by information about the objectives of the work and successful outcomes. I’m sure that there were plenty and that they would provide plenty of trust building content for potential clients.

The simple lesson: When you have great work to show, make sure that it is front and center on your website so that impatient visitors find it immediately. Then, use that work to power the copy that populates your homepage and the rest of your site.  Content marketing fails when you cannot find the content that counts quickly and easily. Only pirates love buried treasure.

In other words, when you can show specific successes, you do not have to rely on generic copy that fails to differentiate you from dozens of other similar companies.

Oh,and be sure to avoid clichés like the plague.

It’s not an oxymoron. Cool government content marketing is thriving up North.

Surprise! The Liquor Control Board of Ontario manages to tread the fine line of selling cases of liquor while extolling moderation.

Their website, www.LCBO.com, couldn’t be any more graphically pleasing or fun to peruse. Believe it or not, they also entice you to come in and shop for premade cocktails or to select from a huge selection of vintage wines.

They are currently featuring visually appealing ‘French Lessons’ that make it easy for anyone to understand French wines.  They combine slide shows and videos to turn even the most uninformed wine drinker into a knowledgeable purchaser of vintages from Beaujolais to Bordeaux.

This is a terrific example of accessible and informative content serving the marketing needs of its government agency, the LCBO. It’s even kind of sexy. And don’t start with me about Canada and sexy being another oxymoron.

Nice work, eh!