Content marketing tools and training.
Over the past few years, I’ve conducted a number of focus groups on subjects ranging from email marketing to blogging.
When I ask participants why they’ve chosen to receive emails from a particular source, read a specific blogger, or follow a certain Twitter user, they give me a variation on the same answer:
“Because I like their unique point of view.”
Readers will only listen to you if you’re giving them something they can’t find anywhere else.
Marketers of most stripes know how important and powerful calls-to-action are.
If you want someone to take a specific action, you have to actually ask them to take that specific action.
But, it seems like social media marketers have either forgotten CTAs, or rejected them altogether.
One of the most engaging features of the blogging platform is the commenting system.
Many bloggers believe there is as much or even more value in the discussion than the posts they write themselves. Comments are a classic form of social proof for blogs, and blogs that attract lots of comments appear more authoritative.
Because of all this, comments can become addictive, and many bloggers want to know how to get more of them. While there is a lot of great anecdotal advice out there from experienced bloggers, I thought some might appreciate a more data-driven approach.
Many bloggers already know that Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog.
When I talked to Guy Kawasaki about my book, he called the Tweetmeme Retweet button “the most important button on the web,” because of the enormous traffic-driving power it possesses. With one click, any of your readers can spread your post to hundreds or thousands of their followers.
As a marketer, I, of course, see this as an opportunity for optimization. When I see a powerful tool, my first impulse is to figure out how to make it even more powerful.
Back in 2006 when Brian wrote the Viral Copy report, Twitter didn’t even exist. Now Twitter is a force that any serious web publisher needs to reckon with in order to gain maximum exposure for content.
Twitter is changing the way information spreads online. Links that would have been blogged a couple of years ago are now more often shared via the micro-blogging service instead, which fundamentally changes strategy when trying to get content to spread.
