How Your Small Business Can Create Content That Attracts New Customers

Posts Tagged ‘Content Creation’

How Your Small Business Can Create Content That Attracts New Customers

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Online lead generation is critical to every small business. Our websites–and related properties–need to be constantly attracting new customers.

Content–valuable content–is what attracts prospects to our website where we can begin the process of turning them into customers.

Since so many of us turn to search engines or our favorite social media platform to answer questions and solve problems, as businesses we need to make sure that we’re there, too, ready to help.

Start by Creating Valuable Content

Value is in the eye of the beholder, and in this case the only beholder that matters is your ideal customer. What are they struggling with that you can help them with?

Let’s imagine you run a dentistry practice, and you’re looking to get new patients for cosmetic dentistry. You might start by brainstorming some questions or concerns that your ideal customer may have:

What is cosmetic dentistry?
How much does cosmetic dentistry cost?
Will my insurance cover teeth bonding?
What’s the difference between teeth bleaching and veneers?
What questions should I ask before choosing a dentist for cosmetic dentistry?

These questions can come from your experience, surveys, actual questions people ask you or more. For more ideas on how to come up with great content ideas, check out 13 Ideas for Writing Content Your Audience Wants to Read. (more…)

Tags: Content Creation, small business
Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business | No Comments »

50–Count ‘Em 50!–Content Creation Ideas for Your Blog, Ezine or Videos

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block for your blog, ezine or marketing videos? Read on…

One of the most common excuses I hear from people on why their blog hasn’t been updated in weeks, months or even years is, “I don’t know what to write about.” Same is true for email newsletters and videos, but those seem to hide it better when the idea well runs dry.

Even though I have over 1,400 blog posts under my belt, I sometimes suffer from a lack of content creation ideas. To that end, and so that no one can ever again say, “I have nothing to write about,” I set out to create an exhaustive list of ideas, resources and tools for creating an endless supply of blog posts, email newsletters, YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook updates, and just about every other method of sharing content with your audience.

Of course, no list is “exhaustive,” especially one that includes Internet resources. So I included a call to action at the bottom of this post where you can share your best tips for content creation…just go ahead and leave a comment. Like the penny jar at the candy store, leave an idea, take five…it’s all good.

Now, let’s get started…

1. Google Alerts: Use this free tool to get blog posts, news stories, and even tweets about your targeted keywords delivered to your inbox every day. With just this one resource you’ll never run out of content again.

2. Tweet Beep: Think Google Alerts, for tweets.

3. Social Mention: A social search engine that measures sentiment, top keywords, and most active users for a given phrase. The results come from a wide variety of social media platforms AND include audio and video results as well.

4. OpenBook: Often hilarious, always unedited, this site is to show off how little privacy we have on Facebook. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to see what your customers–or your customers’ customers–are saying.

5. Quora: Search this popular Q&A site for questions asked around your area of interest.

(more…)

Tags: blog ideas, Content Creation, content ideas, email newsletter ideas, ezine ideas, YouTube ideas
Posted in Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Web Copywriting, Web Marketing, YouTube & Online Video Marketing | 16 Comments »

How Does the Recent Google Changes Affect Your Website?

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Herb, what's a Google?

If you follow SEO news, you’ve probably heard about Google’s recent update named “Panda” or “Farmer,” depending on who’s speaking. If you don’t follow SEO news, you probably have a life, which is nice. Please feel free to let me know what that’s like.

Google is continually fiddling with it’s algorithm to (assumedly) continually improve the results it provides. Whenever a major change comes, invariably some people who see a huge drop in traffic bemoan the changes, while other people who’s rankings go up state that “it’s about time.”

The biggest losers this time around appear to be “content farms,” big websites with tons of poorly written, keyword-stuffed content. In a recent piece in Website Magazine (a truly great magazine for anyone who relies on the internet for business–which is another way of saying anyone who needs to eat to stay alive) they list some of the sites that have seen the biggest drop-off in traffic this time around. Unfortunately, the article online doesn’t include that graph.

The worst hit was blippr.com, losing almost 98% of it’s traffic from Google. The list contained some surprises (at least to me), such as business.com and merchantcircle.com. There were also some article marketing websites I’ve contributed to, like ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com that were hit hard.

So what’s the takeaway for the average website owner?

Quality content counts more than ever. Although the “news” is that a lot of content farms took a big hit, the takeaway is that the rest of us putting up unique, quality content are all edging up.
If you used article marketing as a link building technique, that ship has probably sailed. I would focus more on guest blogging opportunities.
Don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket. In fact, don’t put all your eggs in the search basket. Instead, diverse your investments, and spend more time driving quality leads from social media activity.

Rich Brooks
Is a Content Farm Aid Concert In the Future?

Tags: Content Creation, content farms, farmer, Google, link building, panda, SEM, SEO
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Web Copywriting | 9 Comments »

How to Rank Higher for Your Products & Services

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Part of my search engine optimization mantra has always been that:

search engines care more about web pages than they do about web sites, and
that every web page (or blog post) is another opportunity to rank well for another specific search.

Because I believe that, I feel it’s important to create multiple pages around different topics on your site or blog. Recently, I’ve been getting a lot more requests to speak on different topics, (although social media tends to be the current fave, with SEO and blogging also popular.)

I really enjoy speaking to groups, so I decided to flesh out the web marketing seminar and webinar section of our Web site. Here’s what I did:

Created unique pages for each of my “featured presentations”
Created a table of contents on my main page that linked to each featured presentation
Each featured presentation included:
- Keyword rich title that included two iterations of what the page was about, i.e., “SEO Seminars & Webinars: Search Engine Optimization Presentations, Slides and Handouts.” When it comes to page titles, the colon is your friend. (It’s also good for removing toxins from the body, but I digress.)
- Descriptive meta-description tag that (hopefully) appears in the search results and tells the searcher what they’re going to find on the page, luring them in.
- Reiteration of the main theme in the headers and subheaders.
- Reusing the keywords throughout the content in many different ways, but always with an ear for “does it still sound like natural conversation?” If it sounds spammy or artificial, it doesn’t matter how many people find you at the search engines, you’re still not going to land any business.
- Calls to action at the bottom of each page. This doesn’t necessarily help with search engine optimization, but as Nicki Hicks said so well the other day, SEO won’t do squat unless you’ve got good calls-to-action.
- Created a keyword rich table of contents that link to all the other seminar and webinar descriptions. This helps both with usability for site visitors, as well as search engine visibility.
- Added keyword specific links to the featured presentations to the right column of the flyte blog, which should help them get indexed quickly at the search engines. After all, with over 1K pages on the flyte blog, that’s a lot of incoming links!
- Added keyword specific links to the featured presentations to this blog post. See?
- Ah, the power of having a blog of your very own.

Whatever your products and services are, create specific pages for each one, with as much keyword-rich copy as you can fit in without making it read poorly. (Read it aloud if you need to, and if your ears start bleeding that means you’ve overdone it.) Make sure the pages link to each other, and if you have a blog, link to the new pages on your site.

Another benefit of having specific pages is that as you’re blogging you can create keyword-rich links, which help the search engines understand what your content is all about, and helps increase the visibility of the page in question. For example, “too many businesses ignore the power of email marketing because of the fears of spam.”

Do you have any tips or tricks on how you can rank higher for your own products and services?

Rich Brooks
That Webinar Guy

Tags: Content Creation, SEM, SEO
Posted in Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Copywriting, Web Marketing | 2 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘Content Creation’