Are you struggling to attract prospects? Do you need to increase the size of your opt-in email-marketing list?
How can you stand out in a sea of noise?
With so many disruptive (and alluring) technologies such as email, RSS readers, instant messaging and mobile phones, prospects are distracted like never before—and chances are, so are you!
This attention-deficient dilemma makes it exceptionally difficult for businesses and professionals to stand out.
So what can you do?
This is the first Copyblogger post by Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers.
Today’s “I want it now” culture dictates that you make people happy by providing what they want, when they want it.
Need information? Google it.
However, is it really wise for marketing folks to satisfy people’s desire for instant access?
M. Scott Peck describes delayed gratification as a sacrifice of present comforts for future gain in his book, The Road Less Traveled.
By NOT providing people what they want, when they want it, you can actually improve your image, enhance your branding and increase your sales.
Why?
Many people feel that their blog topics are too common and mundane to be remarkable. The truth is, most businesses and topics are viewed as commodities, so it’s crucial to find an angle that sparks interest and separates you from the pack.
Let’s look at the history of American beer—an industry filled with similar tasting, and some would argue completely unremarkable, products. You’ll see that products that are very similar to others can be distinguishable and remarkable, simply by telling the right story, using the right words, and better serving the right audience.
Before I continue with the SEO Copywriting 2.0 series, I want to interject a bit of perspective. With all the talk about links, traffic, Digg, social media marketing and the pursuit of search engine rankings, it’s important to remember what matters most for business-oriented bloggers.
Subscribers.
The importance of subscriber acquisition is getting its fair share of attention within the social media space, which is good. Darren Rowse recently posted on the value of conduits like Digg and other social media traffic sources to build up your own subscriber-based community over time.
And in the SEO world, Andy Hagens and Michael Gray have touched on the topic as well. They call subscriber attraction and retention a key element in a “defensible traffic” strategy that frees you from the tyranny of search engine algorithm hiccups.
That’s you, remember?
Since the Holiday Season is upon us, and we all have better things to do than read blogs, I thought I would go ahead and shut things down for the year. And what better way to go out than with a recap of what you found notable in 2006?
The question I seem to be getting over and over these days is…
How did you get 6,000 subscribers in 10 months?
The answer is simple—I value subscribers more than any other measure of blog success, such as page views or raw traffic. Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog in my opinion, and frankly, I wish I had more of them. :)
OK, that may be a bit vague.
