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How Great Headlines Score Traffic

So, it’s Wednesday morning of this week, and I’m right in the middle of the daily train wreck that occurs as soon as the kids roll out of bed.

As I deftly prevent the 18 month old from bashing his head on the corner of my desk, the old IM chimes, and despite myself I cannot resist its Siren call.

It’s Markus from AU interactive, and he wants some quick headline advice for a post he’s about to release.

We quickly bang it out, and go our separate ways.

Later on in the day, I notice that his post, 10 Things That Will Make or Break Your Website is on the front page of Digg. Last I looked it had scored over 1100 votes, a bunch of Delicious bookmarks, and spent time on TechMeme.

Not bad.

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The Two Types of Tutorial Marketing

Used to be, there were two steps to using media to market your business.

First, you found an appropriate media outlet to advertise in, and you paid your money.

Then, you created your advertisement so people would call, order, or visit your website.

Now, you are the media outlet, and your “advertisement” had better be quite useful to your readers / listeners / watchers, or you’re wasting your time.

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Finally, Something New in RSS

I haven’t posted about RSS much lately, since there’s been very little going on.

But this week Gabe Rivera of TechMeme announced a very cool use of RSS—he pulls posts from his sponsor’s blogs via feed and displays them in the sponsor area.

Great content is the advertisment (as it should be).

That’s very cool, and there’s a lot more to explore in the area that Gabe is blazing a trail in.

Now today, Text Link Ads released Feedvertising, a free WordPress plugin that allows you to rotate sponsored advertising copy and links in your RSS feed. If you’re reading this via feed (or email) right now, look down at the bottom to see an example.

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The Importance of Social Media

There are so many things in this post by Chris Heuer that resemble my own thoughts lately, I simply couldn’t believe my eyes as I read. I’d like to think I would have written something like this eventually, but now I don’t have to and can simply continue working on pushing the vision into reality.

Give it a read. It’s fantastic from start to finish (hat tip to Brogan for the heads up).

While this represents only a small part of the overall scope of Heuer’s post, I found this snippet particularly relevant to what I’ve been working on lately:

As we have seen with reality television, the hybrid of overly produced “barely based on reality” does not hold sway with people for long. The deep human desire for genuine connections with the hero’s journey via Joseph Campbell will not tolerate gimmicks or fools for long. Genuine human drama, ‘How To’ content, insightful commentary, truly funny comedy, emotionally charged entertainment, engaging conversations, factual news of the world and stories well told will rule the day.

Emphasis mine.

I’ve been talking about Tubetorial a lot lately with people, as you might imagine. And most people instantly get it.

We try hard to make these video tutorials visually interesting while they also teach. We might even try to make you laugh (or at least smile) in the process.

But Tubetorial videos don’t look like overly-polished television productions for a very important reason.

And they never will.

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The Hollywood Way to Online Business Success

I love movies, and movies are what led me into copywriting and entrepreneurship.

Better explain that one, huh?

Back in 1997 when I bolted from the big law firm and moved down to Austin, my plan was to become a screenwriter. Feast or famine, damn the consequences, starving artist type stuff.

Well, instead of writing screenplays, I got caught up in the Web 1.0 boom, and read a lot of books about the film industry in my downtime.

Turns out, being a screenwriter in Hollywood ranks somewhere below “best boy” and “key grip” when it comes to actual influence. Not exactly inspiring.

The only way to have true influence in the film world as a writer is if you are also the director and/or producer. That fact made me realize that I am really an entrepreneur, not a pure writer.

And being an entrepreneur is so much like being a Hollywood writer / director / producer, except you operate in the real world. But often the writing part gets neglected, and that ultimately hurts the business.

I’m not only talking about writing in the blogging / online marketing sense. Anyone starting a business is primarily responsible for both the big story and the day-to-day tales, in one way or another. Online, that responsibility is amplified by the benefits that great storytellers enjoy in the social media environment.

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How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide

Links and traffic… who wants some?

The number of excellent resources that have come out since the beginning of the year on attracting links and building traffic has really mushroomed. Plus there are some timeless classics that are still very relevant today.

I think it makes sense to compile the very best in one handy location and share it, so here’s my entire collection. If I missed your link and traffic resource let me know and I’ll take a look.

Now, it doesn’t matter if you like the term “link baiting” or not. It’s the process that one goes through to attract links that matters, not whether you prefer to think of your content as bait for links. I like to think that creating content that increases web traffic and builds links simply falls under the general social media optimization marketing buzz phrase that is gaining in popularity.

So, here’s your ultimate “how to” guide to creating content that attracts links and drives traffic in the social media environment:

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