The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

Posted on October 7, 2010 by BlogPostman

As a digital branding and marketing agency , our company has encouraged, coached, and cajoled clients over the years on the importance of blogging for building traffic, buzz, and organic search. We watched some clients grow by leaps and bounds, attracting hundreds of thousands of blog visitors per month. And we watched others clients stumble along without ever gaining the momentum we were working for. Of course there are a lot of factors that drive success or failure. But among the blogs that succeeded on a huge scale, we noticed two common factors. First, the breakthrough blogs had a strong editorial calendar. And second, they used a thoughtful, strategic approach to managing editorial content. What is an editorial calendar, and why do you need one? An editorial calendar is just a fancy term for a publishing schedule. If you blog regularly, you should look ahead at least one month and make some decisions about which posts you want to publish on what dates. It’s really that simple. An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging. That little bit of planning goes a surprisingly long way toward getting the most audience reach from your blog content. 1. An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead By planning your posts ahead of time, you drive perseverance. An editorial calendar encourages blogging as a habit, wards off writer’s block, and ensures that you never miss another deadline. It’s a small, subtle thing, but you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in your mindset. 2. An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity Many bloggers worry that an editorial calendar will straitjacket their creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. Writing comes to many of us in waves. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, a blogger can write two or three posts in an afternoon. That’s fine — keep writing about what inspires you. Then use your editorial calendar to publish each post according to a plan that keeps your target audience in mind. Staring at that blank screen and trying to come up with a topic can be one of the most stressful aspects of blogging. But you’ll find that when you make those decisions weeks in advance, you actually come up with more and better ideas. You’ll be more creative, not less. 3. You can take a great concept further An editorial calendar is a powerful tool for maximizing the reach of your content, while removing the pressure of having to generate new concepts for each post. Say you’ve got a great topic in mind, one you know your readers care a lot about. There’s no reason to blow it all in one day. Would it make a valuable series, parceled out over a period of time and then gathered into a content landing page ? Could you run some interviews or line up some guest posts on the topic? Or go multimedia and round up a few engaging videos or cartoons on the subject? Whether you write everything yourself or use guest writers, planning ahead lets you group your content more effectively. Once you start looking at your blog a month at a time, you can develop patterns and make sure your content is well-balanced among all the readers you serve. 4. You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends When you pair planning with a strong foundation in SEO , you start to build your audience highly efficiently. An editorial calendar helps you pay better attention to key outreach strategies, such as blog post titles and link building. At a more advanced level, you can use it to plan and time posts related to your target audience’s search behaviors. Capitalizing on search activity can be as simple as timing posts and topics to synch with public holidays or product launches. Or it can be as complex as doing deep keyword analysis and planning content around trending search terms that will deliver maximum traffic to your blog. Why Stresslimit developed the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients, using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we wound up in a long discussion with our close friend (and brilliant engineer) Zack Grossbart. Beyond our mutual excitement about blogging and the power of editorial calendar strategy, we shared a passion for open source projects and wanted to give back to the WordPress community. We also wanted to develop a tool that would make our lives and coaching our clients more efficient, easier, and simply cooler. Our clients were excited about the idea of using an editorial calendar. But there was no single tool that enabled us to eliminate “busy work” and free up more time for strategizing and creativity. We were also in synch with Zack on our love for creating simple, intuitive interfaces that help people manage complex behaviors. An eight-month collaborative project was born: co-developing, co-designing and re-iterating the WordPress Editorial Calendar . We’re excited to announce the launch of version 1.0 of our editorial calendar plugin, which is (in our humble opinion) the killer tool for managing and driving the success of any blog — from the small and personal to the large and corporate. We invite you to take the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin for a spin at this link . It’s free, and we think you’re going to get a lot out of it. Here are some of the things you can do with the plugin See a month’s worth of posts at a glance. Juggle your calendar by simply dragging and dropping posts from day to day. Quickly edit your posts’ titles, contents, and publishing times. Publish posts or manage drafts. Instantly see the status of your posts. More easily manage posts from multiple authors. And you can do all of that right from the calendar interface itself. It’s simple and intuitive. No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior. Check it out here . About the Authors: Justin Evans is the founding partner of design branding and online marketing agency Stresslimit . His clients include Fortune 500 companies, startups, NGOs, and global thought leaders. Zack Grossbart is a programmer and author whose sensitivity to user experience and design has driven success for many Fortune 500 companies. He blogs about code and about user experience design , and is releasing his first book as a free serialized release at The One Minute Commute . Editor’s Note: We use Stresslimit’s editorial calendar plugin here on Copyblogger, and we think it rocks. There’s no affiliate relationship, we just found it a nifty tool and think you’ll get a lot out of it.

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The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich

Posted on October 1, 2010 by BlogPostman

Be remarkable. Be the purple cow. Get yourself noticed. Just be your own beautiful and unique snowflake self, and your allotment of raving fans will come find you and buy everything you make. Ever heard that advice? It’s a social media truism that as long as you’re authentic , you can’t go wrong. Fame, fortune, and the latest Apple products will all be yours. Let’s face it — authenticity can be a great way to draw a crowd. Especially if you have an over-the-top personality. And because we live in the age of attention scarcity, many people think that getting attention is the hard part. If only I could get noticed. If only I could get someone to read my stuff. But attention isn’t actually the rarest commodity in the 21st century. Trust is. It’s true that the first letter in every sales formula is “A” All marketing has to start with attention. If you can’t attract attention in the first place, nothing else you do has a chance to work. This is why headlines matter more than anything else you do. And that’s been the case as long as selling has existed. If you’ve ever been to a Renaissance Faire, think about the way the food vendors let you know what they’ve got to offer. When the pretty girl in the tight bodice shouts Hot Turkey Legs! and Cold Beer Here! , those are headlines. They attract your attention and let you know the most important details of the offer. But you need to remember that the work of the headline is not only to attract attention. The true job of the headline is to get the first line of your copy (whether it’s a blog post, email message, sales letter, video, or podcast) read, watched, or listened to. In other words, if you gaze happily at the pretty girl but you never approach her for a beer, the headline (and the bodice) have failed. Copywriting formulas have more than one letter (If the whole idea of copywriting formulas is new to you, you can find 15 of them here .) Conversion is the copywriting term for all the stuff that happens between that initial “A” and the sale. You craft an offer that people will actually want to buy . You build trust. You answer questions and counter objections. You describe appealing benefits to spark interest and fan it into desire. You make it easy for the prospect to see herself as a customer. You increase desire with appealing bonuses. You deliver a clear, compelling call to action . You build in urgency elements to get the prospect to act today. You state your call to action again. Being a jerk is bad for business Lots of us will reward a jerk with attention. But not many will reward a jerk with business . Jerks can’t be depended on. They play head games. They don’t respect their audience. They amuse themselves at the expense of other people. Prospects are already fearful enough . If your prospects don’t trust you, they’re not likely to spend any money with you. You don’t have to be a wimp You’ll notice that some very successful businesspeople have strong, tough personas. They may well make themselves unlikeable to most of the population. That’s ok – they’re filtering out the customers who aren’t right for their business. The message they send to their right customers, though, is always that they can be trusted. That they’ll tell the truth, even when it’s not pretty. That they’re consistent, whether you like them or not. The dad from Sh*t My Dad Says would make a good marketer. Let’s face it, if you bought a car from that guy, you know that you’d have a completely accurate picture of what was good and bad about the car. He may be offensive at times, but he’s trustworthy. (At least, the real dad and not the one who will be played by William Shatner.) The dad from “Family Guy” would make a lousy marketer. He’s capricious, he goes for the cheap laugh every time, and he has no integrity. There are no customers gullible enough to buy a car from that guy. You may find him hilarious, but no sane person would find him trustworthy. It takes more than being remarkable Hey, I’m a big fan of remarkable. I built a blog and a lovely business around it. But “remarkable” doesn’t mean “remarkably annoying,” “remarkably mean,” or “ remarkably useless .” You have my permission to swear on your blog , to fearlessly embrace controversy , or just to make yourself a likeable jackass . But never, ever do it at the expense of the trust of your readers. There is no effective copywriting formula that leads directly from getting Attention to creating a Scandal to making a Sale. That’s just a formula for making an A-S-S of yourself. About the Author : Sonia Simone is CMO of Copyblogger Media and founder of Remarkable Communication . Follow her on twitter . Flickr Creative Commons image by Alaskan Dude

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Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich

Social Media Marketing Insight from 21 Smart People (And Me, Too)

Posted on August 24, 2010 by BlogPostman

There’s a new book out called Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars . Yes, that title sets off my hyperbole radar a bit too (not to mention my alliteration alert), but it’s a solid collection of smart social media advice based on real-world case studies, best practices, and proven techniques. I wrote Chapter Two of the book – The Psychology of Social Media . It’s about applying tried and trued influence factors in the social media space to build a business or make whatever case you’re trying to make. Here’s what else you’ll learn: How to Create a Mega-Following With Social Media – Gary Vaynerchuk Personality : How To Stand Out In Virtual Crowd – Andy Wibbels

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Social Media Marketing Insight from 21 Smart People (And Me, Too)

Want More Readers? Try Expanding Your Internet Universe

Posted on July 6, 2010 by

Ever notice how everyone on the blogs you read seems to agree on everything? We all know that content is king, that transparency is good, that sleazy sales pages are bad. We even seem to know the same people: Brian, Sonia, Naomi , Johnny , Dave N , Chris G . What we forget is that this little galaxy we’re occupying is only a tiny sliver of the universe. And if we want to expand our audience, we need to start boldly going beyond our own safe little corner. I was recently exploring some strange new worlds on the Internet, places I hadn’t ever been before. On this particular journey, I wasn’t looking for content, but for patterns and themes. Here’s what I found: Blog and site designs in the rest of the Internet universe are quite different. We might think that Thesis , Headway, and Frugal themes are everywhere — but they aren’t. Their presentation patterns are different. There are many more implementations of left-column, three-column, and, occasionally, one-column layouts. The way they display banners and advertising is considerably different. Highlighter much? The fake yellow highlighter we make fun of here as being ridiculously old hat is a common, accepted tool to focus attention. There are far, far fewer comments on posts, even on “big” sites, than what you’re used to seeing in our galaxy. The blogs you see on “everyone’s” blogroll simply don’t appear. Their trends and pattern are different. They’re not necessarily worse, and they’re not necessarily better. We’re in a hot, flat, and crowded galaxy We often forget that the Internet is a network of data. Instead, we focus on sites that are just individual nodes in that vast network, and we mistake the part for the whole. We don’t really understand what’s going on, because we don’t have a good mental picture of it. It’s too big to get our heads around. The particular galaxy that we’re in is pretty dense, heavily-populated, and interconnected. We read each other’s stuff, link heavily, and have backchannel conversations. This interconnectedness and density creates a strong gravity well of ideas, patterns, and themes. We’re just one galaxy, though. Some galaxies are as tight as ours and others aren’t. But there’s so much space between us that what we do here hasn’t quite reached them yet, like the light from distant stars that takes millions of years to reach the earth. We’re prone to assume that if we don’t perceive something, it doesn’t exist. Bad assumption. Seeking out new civilizations If you’re reading this, you’re probably a bit more on your game. People who write effective copy that’s SEO-friendly do better both in search engine results and in getting readers engaged. If you’re here reading this, it’s probably because you want to make your site better, and because you know where and how to find good information about that. That makes you different than most inhabitants of the other galaxies. Just remember that what’s known and common here isn’t known and common elsewhere. In other galaxies, there’s no launch fatigue as we know it. There’s no third tribe . (Or first tribe, or second tribe.) Hell, there might not even be a Seth Godin . Forget about “fields of opportunities.” There are whole galaxies of opportunities for you out there. While the particular aesthetic styles might be different, the principles of effective copywriting and SEO are universal. You don’t have to lower your standards just because the new galaxies you’re exploring seem to have less-evolved ideas of what makes a good blog. To put it another way, visiting Rome doesn’t turn you into Caligula. Instead of waiting around for the citizens of other galaxies to come to you, go to them instead. Tips for interstellar explorers Instead of using StumbleUpon in the usual robotic way, actually stop at a promising new website and get engaged. Hang around. See who they’re connected to. Be useful, relevant, and helpful there rather than on your own website or in your usual galaxy. Click through to a commenter’s website, then click an interesting, unfamiliar link there. Repeat that a few times. Follow your curiosity and you’ll probably find yourself in a third- or fourth-degree network from yours. Which pretty much puts you in the land of painted green dancing girls and monsters made from scraps of industrial carpeting. It’s in those networks that you’re going to find your new readers . It’s also in those networks that you can really become next years’ A-lister , because A-lists are all relative to particular social networks. If you’re happy where you are, then, by all means, stay put. Keep farming your own home planet. But if your curiosity and ambition aren’t satisfied with that, consider this: Someone out there in the Internet-universe is struggling with something you learned three years ago. What do they need, where are they, and how can you help them? About the Author: Charlie Gilkey writes about meaningful action, creativity, and entrepreneurship at Productive Flourishing . Follow him on Twitter to get bite-sized slices of mojo.

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Want More Readers? Try Expanding Your Internet Universe

It’s the Simplicity, Stupid

Posted on June 14, 2010 by

I’m a cartoonist. This is my tenth year blogging. My work has been mentioned in big media including Wall St. Journal , Financial Times , New York Times , and The Guardian . It’s been mentioned in bestselling books like Groundswell and Tribes . And it’s been mentioned on thousands of blogs, including many of the big, A-Lister ones. That’s all well and good, I suppose. We artist types can use all the PR we can get. But looking back, it occurs to me that none of that “hot PR media action” has moved my business forward nearly as quickly or effectively as this one simple thing: My newsletter subscribers telling their friends about my newsletter, and suggesting that they sign up. No, really, that’s it. That is the money shot. When that happens, my business grows, end of story. More traditional media PR … well, that can work, sometimes. You never know. The results are always foggy at best, and it’s always a lot of voraciously time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass work to make something happen. And even then, it may not actually increase sales . I know getting mentioned in huge media outlets is sexy and all, but seriously, hear me out. I’ve been at this for a while. Traditional PR works, when it works. Most of the time though, it doesn’t. Same with traditional advertising. But my list telling their friends — that never fails. Ever. Make it easy Another thing I’ve learned the hard way is: I cannot make my subscriber list tell their friends about the newsletter, no matter how hard I try to apply my Jedi mind tricks. All I can do is make it easy for them to share . All I can do is make it as friction-free as possible. So this is what I did to achieve that: I created a simple link on the bottom of the newsletter. Hello from Hugh: Please share this link with your friends. If their friends get the link and click on it, the page has a personal message from me. Hello! One of your friends sent you the link to this page, and so here you are. Welcome! My name is Hugh. I’m a cartoonist. I have a newsletter, “ Hugh’s Daily Cartoon ,” which I send out five mornings a week. A wee chuckle in your inbox, to start your day off on the right foot (so to speak). I hope you will subscribe. That’s it. Nothing fancy. Nothing complicated. Just a short and sincere message from me. I also threw in a few cartoons, just to give them something fun to read, other than my sales pitch. A recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a hundred media recommendations. It’s the simplicity, stupid If my subscribers aren’t telling their friends, I’m doing something wrong, end of story. If I’m not making it as easy and friction-free as possible to get my list to tell their friends, I’m doing something wrong. You read Copyblogger, you’re a member of The Third Tribe , and you probably read a bunch of other savvy marketing folks. Great! They have a lot of killer stuff worth knowing about. Tons of it. But just for a minute, forget all that and let me ask you two simple questions: Is your list telling their friends about you? I mean, really telling them? Have you made it as easy and friction-free as humanly possible for your list to tell their friends? Until you can honestly say “Yes” to both questions, you have a severe marketing problem that no cutting-edge marketing theory — Copyblogger’s or anyone else’s — will ever solve. About the Author: Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist who blogs over at gapingvoid.com. He makes his living by selling fine art prints , doing Cube Grenade commissioned art work and sending out daily cartoons on Hugh’s Daily Frickin’ Newsletter.

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It’s the Simplicity, Stupid