Sizzling Summer Content Writing Tips

Blog, Branding, Content & Copywriting, Product Reviews

High ThermometerSummer is here and it’s not the time for cool, mediocre content on your blogs or website.  Send your content and website hits soaring with these successful tips to keep your rankings and indexing climbing to the top of the charts.

#1 Consider what sells you on eBay — A good description of a product as well as the imagery selected creates the motivation to buy the item, right? So it’s no different with your product or service description.  Want to heat up the return on your investment of time, money and effort expended on building your business, brand or blog?  You have to engage and inform in such a way that ignites the audience to take action.

#2 Yes, Sweat the Small Stuff — I don’t like saying the “devil’s in the details” but the small, sweat drops of critical points are what’s going to take the success of your content sky-high!  Remember, in the online world, all your competitors are just a few clicks away.  Give them more than just a simple photo and bland product dimensions; engage them visually and then close the deal.

#3 Hot Headlines & Following the News in Your Niche — News is a great source to turn up the heat on your content . You’d be surprised where great ideas can be formulated when derived from the media’s ‘hot topics’ and headlines promoted on Yahoo, CNN and various websites as well as TV. This technique can effectively increase the exposure of your content and be just what you need to jump-start your creative juices and typing fingers.  For example, while on my LinkedIn page, I saw an article about choosing the red vs. the blue pill in ‘Happiness Is Not the Most Important Thing at Work.’  It made me consider a future blog topic about the power of engaging headlines and questioning your audience within your content to fully-engage them.

#4 Test the waters with a Blog Aggregator  – A what?  You read it correctly – a blog aggregator.  It’s a website that keeps track of blog posts and where bloggers go for idea sharing with other bloggers in your niche.  This is a great way to be inspired, share ideas and even professionally debate a topic.  I recently wrote an article on Triberr, one of the prominent blog aggregators today. Not only were people engaged, but one of the founders of the company commented on my blog to address some of the points I made.  Engagement accomplished!

#5 Window Shopping & People Watching – Most of us are out & about more than usual during the summer months.  Whether at the beach, tanning poolside or BBQing in the backyard–watching others can give way to some pretty cool topics for blogging. Window shopping and long walks about town can also be the catalyst for thoughts on a product or service, from or for your own business.  Also, by watching how someone reacts to various stimuli can strike the right match to turn up creative thought within you.

I hope this ignited some inspiration in you with some great insights to consider when writing and posting your content.   I’d love to hear what other piping hot tips you have to share with me!

Social Media ROI – The Truth

Social Media ROI – The Truth

All Posts, Social Media

Are my social media efforts worth it?By now you will have heard all the ins and outs about how important social media is to your business.  I’m not going to poke a hole in that – at least not in this post.  I do agree that is it essential to anyone who has a business of any size.  However a growing concern I’m noticing is how to measure its worth in terms of ROI (return on investment.

There are a host of companies and online services out there that will track your ROI.  Of course at a premium fee. I haven’t really found any that were free that offered good enough services to mention.  I should mention though that any type of marketing should be weighed and measured by the consumer.  Regardless of who is performing the service, you should have your own check and balance system in place to gauge against whatever results someone else is providing to you.

So for starters you need to get your web site statistics.  This will consist of daily page views, referring links, pages per visit, and unique visits. Most web hosting companies offer this within your online control panel. We use 1and1 for tracking all our client managed domains.  If you’d like to see a sample email me and I’ll be glad to send you one.  Some hosting companies charge extra for this, and if you’re does you can try a third party application like Google Analytics.  I love Google Analytics and I will be doing a write on their FREE analytics application soon.  All you have to do is plug in some of your site information and they generate a custom code for you to install on all of your pages. Once installed you can then accurately track all of these metrics and more.

Google Analytics screenshot

Next thing you need to do is draw up a simple spreadsheet.  Use whatever medium you like so long as you can refer to it weekly and continue to add more data to it.  You’re going to measure how many tweets, posts, links, blog posts, email, etc you push per day each week for each month.  Sort them by your social media apps that you are using.  Create a column for responses like post backs, comments, replies, RT’s, and mentions. Lastly, create a column for your leads that were created from any of these mediums.  When you look at all this data at the end of a week or the month, you’ll see how much time you’ve invested in all of these, which brought back the most traffic, which social media platform was most engaging, and those that lacked performance.

The process is simple enough when you think about it.  However try juggling this with the everyday issues of your business, life, and whatever else pops up.  And yes it is time consuming. It is totally justified that some companies may charge anywhere from a few dollars an hour to $2,500 per month or more.  Again, with this new spreadsheet you too can see how much time and money Social Media marketing is worth to your business and make judgement on whether or not you want to pursue it yourself or outsource it.  I’ve actually created a spreadsheet in Excel that I’d be happy to share if you’re interested.  Sign up to the blog and its yours!