Content Marketing Today

The 5 Most Important Lessons He Learned about Blogging Success

My pal, content marketing mentor, and book-writing partner, Joe Pulizzi is celebrating his 1st year in the blogging business with his Junta42.com blog.  I would wish him many happy returns, but that might be superfluous since he is already getting plenty of happy returns from his devotion to quality content that he delivers with regular frequency.

In fact, I can thank Joe for introducing me to the world of blogging--and to the joys of book authorship as well. I can also attest that my blog has been a source of new colleagues, new friends, and new business.  It doesn't happen overnight, that's for sure. But, if you are consistent, quality-focused, and patient, you will achieve tangible benefits from your blog.

How can you replicate Joe's success? 

Here are quick takes on the top 5 lessons he learned after 100 posts--and has relearned and expanded upon in subsequent months that led up to the 1st Blogiversary:

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The problem: A great Southwest Florida company with a mediocre website.

The solution: Use a content marketing approach that pulls visitors in and offers them solutions to their insurance challenges.

Many of us rant and rave about big insurance companies, their irritating bureaucracies, their frustrating approach to claims payment, and their frequent unwillingness to insure us when we really need insurance.  But, I'm willing to bet that however we feel about the insurance giants, most of us also count on our local insurance agents to give us reliable advice and assistance whenever we need it.

GulfShore Insurance is one such reliable company.  This Naples-based firm has an excellent reputation and has grown steadily over the past 38 years.  Gulfshore could be even more effective by making some basic but important changes to its website. 

Here is a list of opportunities for significant content marketing improvement:

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Imagine for a moment that every person surfing the web is wearing an identical baseball cap.  On the front of that baseball camp is not a New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox insignia but 5 capital letters: WIIFM

Those five letters enable you to do a bit of mind reading and may keep you from making a very serious mistake.  They stand for: "What's in it for me ?"

You can bet your business life that unless your website quickly and obviously answers that question, your odds of converting those visitors into customers fall famously between slim--and none.  The rest of your content marketing strategy may be lost unless you can answer that universal question. That's why you must include the too often missing ingredient.

What's the missing ingredient?

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Bring your most compelling content front and center and make it easy to search in order to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise at solving customer problems.

Jet Advisors provides a set of essential services for a carefully targeted group of wealthy customers: buyers of private jets.  I learned about the company from an old friend and colleague who, believe it or not, has actually bought two private jets.  This same colleague has shared that Jet Advisors is an excellent organization.

Their website, JetAdvisors.com, does a very good job of describing exactly what they do.  It is clean, well organized, and easy to navigate.  According to CEO, Kevin O'Leary, the website has also become an important source of new clients. They also do a monthly eNewsletter which reaches thousands of current and prospective clients.

Unlike the vast majority of business websites, JetAdvisors.com, provides a rich set of articles (originally in their eNewsletter) designed to help visitors and prospective customers to make intelligent decisions about purchasing private jets--and a whole host of related issues.

The two simple changes that would create a dramatic content marketing difference

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Microsoft makes your job easier thanks to its superb content marketing efforts.

Microsoft's continually improving content marketing strategy empowers its Web visitors to improve their own marketing efforts significantly.  This is true whether you ultimately choose to use a Microsoft product or not.  Here are 3 important lessons you can learn from Microsoft:

1. If a giant with the clout of Microsoft believes a content marketing strategy is critical to its success, it is absolutely essential to those of us in much smaller organizations.
2. You can improve your online marketing by carefully observing and adapting the best practices of other related organizations.
3. If you can give away something free, that will bind your customers to you for the long-term, by all means do so.

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In another post today, we focused on the importance of words versus pictures.  Not just any words will do.  You need to be certain that the words, sentences, and paragraphs connect with your customers. (Click here to read that related post)

The folks who do this for a living are copywriters.  In the age of the Internet, believe it or not, these writing pros are more important than ever.

Political pundit Peggy Noonan, has written recently about the new Pope's visit to the United States.  She suggests that he is the perfect Pope for the Internet because he is all about words.  His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was much more about visual imagery and the meaning that it can convey, according to Peggy.

Whether or not she's right about the Pope, she is absolutely correct about the importance of words on the web.  Ideally, we would all employ high-powered copywriters with web specific skills so that our content marketing strategies play out perfectly on the Internet.

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I spoke earlier this week to a business person who is launching an executive coaching practice.  As I was explaining to her how important it is to establish a comprehensive web presence, I realized that the idea seemed very intimidating to her. 

So, to prove to myself that it did not need to be intimidating, I set about creating a very rough prototype website, using WordPress, to see how long it would take.  From start to finish it actually took about 19 1/2 minutes.

I know what you're thinking, "You do this all the time so how hard could it be for you?"

Fair enough.  I can probably do it faster than somebody who has no experience with WordPress.  But, it is also true that even an absolute neophyte can launch a basic blog-powered website in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.  What would have taken a professional software developer with HTML coding experience days or perhaps weeks to accomplish 10 years ago can now be accomplished in a fraction of that time.  And what would have cost perhaps $50-$100000 or more can be achieved anywhere from free to $5,000 plus.

Here's what you can do in 20 minutes or less.

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If you are a solopreneur, you certainly have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Imagine how much more you could accomplish if your website was actively selling for you 24 hours a day seven days a week! That's exactly what Stephanie Diamond is helping solopreneur, Natalie Currie, to accomplish using a custom MindMap. Natalie provides training and consulting in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields. Because she is so busy working in her business, she has been challenged to work on her business. and, like most entrepreneurs, creating a content marketing-driven website is not something she ever would've learned in school or on the job. Thus, her website is nice but is typical of the brochure sites most small business owners put up on the web. Read More

It's all about the return on objective, not the return on investment

We are long past the days when most companies accepted marketing as a vague concept and a mysterious practice that could not really be measured. Today, most marketers and their bosses want to prove that the dollars spent achieve a measurable return.

Typically they are trying to prove a precise ROI or return on their investment dollars.  Unfortunately, that is usually difficult because processes are not now--and perhaps never will be--in-place to connect dollars spent to increased sales.  One reason for failure is that specific, achievable objectives are not established at the beginning of the marketing program.

That's where ROO comes in.  ROO means return on objective.  This is a more realistic way to measure the success of marketing program, but it does require that marketers establish specific objectives from the get go.  Here is why ROO is better than ROI at measuring what you get from your marketing.

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When it comes to the power of WordPress, you don't have to take my word for it. The Performancing.com blog provided four dozen ways in which websites and blogs can use this powerful and flexible tool to create unique content solutions. This Twist 'n' Shout gallery application is just one example. Blog author, Raj Dash, is a CMS (content management system) expert who, as he puts it, "has both written a small, custom CMSes from scratch as well is evaluated million-dollar professionals see in masses for large corporations, Word press' robustness and never ceases to amaze me." Much of its power derives from the huge open source community of developers who keep adding more and more value and capability to the Word press platform. WordPress is still free, but offers the power of the CMS solutions that might cost upwards of $50,000, even in today's competitive market. Here are my five favorite of those 48 really cool applications of WordPress: Read More