If you’re a WordPress user, Chris Pearson has just finished up an excellent video series on essential plugins and tweaks for your blog.
Can a tutorial attract links and traffic, while selling at the same time?
We know that a well-written tutorial that stays strongly focused on benefits to the reader can fly under the “sales-alert” radar and lead to great results. This has been true online and off well before blogging and social media became big.
The same benefits-oriented focus can also cause a tutorial to go viral, just like PDF reports, free ebooks, and white papers have done via email forwards since the beginning of the commercial web.
So let’s look at a time-tested 10-step process to creating an educational marketing tool that generates both buzz and sales.
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to Copyblogger today!
Add Copyblogger to your Technorati favorites.
So, let’s say you’re being a good Internet marketer and doing your search engine keyword research. You’re looking for new search trends that you can profit from.
Maybe you’ll start a brand new blog, or even develop an information product.
While poking around in the free Yahoo/Overture Keyword Selector Tool, you discover a phrase that is getting 173,359 searches per month. You think you’ve hit the jackpot.
Hopefully you verified that search count with a more reliable source before you started work, because it turns out that a more accurate accounting for that phrase might be closer to zero.
In the course of shooting an episode of my 7 Steps to Creating and Selling Niche Information Products series at Tubetorial, I happened across just that scenario.
Watch the video here to learn why you should never rely on the results from the Yahoo/Overture Keyword Selector Tool, or any other keyword research tool that pulls solely from Yahoo’s results. And there’s some other stuff in there about finding a strong topic for an information product, too. :)
Subscribe to Copyblogger today!
Add Copyblogger to your Technorati favorites.
