Tag Archives: topics

Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 27, 2010

Posted on by

Those who stalk me (and you know who you are) know that I’ve been talking a lot lately about “ Storyselling ,” which is a way to sell stuff using stories. But nothing is infallible, so I wanted to publicly announce some flaws I’ve found with it: Don’t use Storyselling with the police. Tell them about Uncle Phil’s hairpiece and they’ll still put you in jail for running over a Photomat booth with a city bus. (Don’t ask how I know this.) Don’t tell your story after being pushed off a building by the person you were trying to convince not to push you. Tell it before. After is too late. It’s amazing how many people get this one wrong. Don’t watch The Story of O with your grandmother, unless you enjoy uncontrolled squirming. Now, with that out of the way, let me tell you the story of what happened this week on Copyblogger: Monday: 50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics I could give you an elaborate summary of this one, but really, the title says it all: it’s a collection of 50 can’t-fail techniques for finding great blog topics. Instead, I’ll spend this summary talking about Hollywood gossip. So… do you guys think Lady Gaga is a dude? Read the full post here . Tuesday: Want People To Read Your Sales Page? Make It Scannable To prove how true this post is, I scanned it only briefly to write this summary, and did so while driving a race car off a cliff. A lot of people are like me, so if your sales page is full of dense text that requires people to read every word, you’re going to turn us off. Also, after scanning this post, I’m pretty sure it was about waffles. Read the full post here . Wednesday: 8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success I totally get this one. Most people have the potential to be creative, but they do these 8 things that stifle creativity and make them boring. Don’t want to be boring? Then stop doing these 8 things, and also get a multicolored hat with a feather. Read the full post here . Thursday: Scribe 3.0: SEO Made Simple Hey, everyone, Scribe just got even better! I like Scribe. It’s cool for people like me who hate SEO because they think it gets in the way of your writing style, but then you get Scribe and it goes all ninja and suddenly you’re ranking well and life is grand. NOTE: Scribe does not include a pair of those little ninja slippers, exploding powder, or those shiny little stars you throw at people. Yet. Read the full post here . Friday: Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich I was in a pink full-body suit, climbing the Sears Tower to drop lemons on pedestrians when I read this post — and just in time. Attention may be the first step to building a lucrative business, but it’s not the only one. In this post, Sonia Simone outlines what else you need to do in order to convert attention to currency. For me? I’m selling “I got hit with a lemon by a pink guy and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts. Read the full post here. This week’s cool links: Signs That Blogging is Not Only Alive, But More Critical Than Ever : Think that blogging is dead? Um, no. That would be a stupid thing to think. Digg Founder “Burned Out,” May Leave by End of 2010 : Kevin Rose has had it, and reading this, I think I’d be expecting a “postal” reaction out of him. Can we get Pete Rose in there instead? Trouble Choosing a Niche? Start a Personal Blog : If you’re not sure what to blog about, Darren Rowse suggests starting a personal blog as a testing ground. (Note to self: It’s possible to have a business blog that isn’t all about yourself? Strange, but possibly true.) 14 Incredibly successful ways to stand out from the crowd : Like monster * posts? This one about finding a way to stand out in an otherwise crowded space will suit you well. * Does not contain Cookie Monster. ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ Comes True In Age of Twitter, Facebook : The book The Cluetrain Manifesto , written in 2000, is totally being proven true a decade later. (Also, it describes a train on which you can play the game “Clue.” My money is on Professor Plum in the parlor with the candlestick.) About the Author: Johnny B. Truant wants you to know that his new course Storyselling 101 is half price this weekend and says “You should totally get it now.”

be15e0c150e wrap.jpg 150x150 Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 27, 2010

Originally posted here:
Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 27, 2010

50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics

Posted on by

It’s one thing to know you need to create lots of great content . It’s another to actually know what you’re going to write about this week. Are you out of ideas for blog posts? Small wonder, if the only place you’re looking is inside your own head. We all need inspiration … and you’re not going to find it banging your head against the desk and hoping an idea falls out. You need fresh inspiration if you’re going to come up with new ideas. To help get your inspirational motor running, here are 50 techniques for generating great blog post topics. Two words: Google alerts . Set an alert with a few industry key words, and ask it to deliver at least 20 stories a day. Read the headlines and throw interesting links into a file for future use. When you get several related stories, you’ve got an instant roundup piece. Skim national newspapers and magazine stories. How does national news such as the recession affect your readers? Talk about national trends, and your audience will come to rely on you to tailor big news to address their concerns. Ask yourself, “What’s missing?” or “What will happen next?” Answer the questions those national rags didn’t address. What’s the next domino that will likely fall as a result of this piece of news? Point it out, and your readers will feel you (and they) are ahead of the curve. Read small publications. If you have an expertise blog, check the experts’ columns in local papers or business weeklies. Few people outside your community will have read these, and their topics are often easily recycled. Read trade publications. Trade pubs cover every imaginable industry and they’re a great source of trend ideas, from Ad Age to TWICE (This Week in Electronics). They’ll also track new companies and products you might mention (see #39). Read your competitors. I subscribe to several competing blogs on my iGoogle desktop, for real-time headline scanning. If you write on a similar topic, you can give the other blog link love. Riff on a popular post. Grab yourself some high-powered linkage by posting your reaction to a big-time blogger’s thoughts. Try a new medium. Burned out on the blogosphere? Look at YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, or watch good ol’ fashioned TV shows or radio broadcasts. Think about pain. What are the biggest problems your readers face? Focus on topics that would provide balm to their wounds. Talk to a friend. That’s right — use your lifeline, just like on the reality TV shows. Jawing about a problem usually helps ideas bubble up. Tackle a controversy. Weigh in on your industry’s hot topic. This can be especially effective if you have a contrarian viewpoint . Join a blogger’s group. Knowing your group will ask what you’re posting should help concentrate the mind. Hearing what they’re blogging on will no doubt suggest subjects for you to cover, too. Scan industry conference schedules. The list of session topics offers a quick guide to your audience’s hot-button issues. Get a critique. Find a mentor. Have them look over your blog and point out what’s missing. Mine your hobbies. People love posts that offer an unusual perspective on your topic. For instance, I once did a post called 7 Things I Learned About Business From Playing Bejeweled Blitz . Do an interview. Do you have a favorite thinker in your space? Get in touch. You’ll be surprised how many authors and thought leaders are game for a quick Q&A. Review your greatest hits. Read your most popular past blogs. Look for ways to take a slightly different angle and further illuminate the same topic. Write a sequel. If something has happened recently that puts a new light on a past blog post, update your readers. Write a new entry and link it back to the old one. Have a debate.

3c3b757d57button.gif 50 Can’t Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics

See the rest here:
50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics

5 Reasons Why No One Is Reading Your Email Newsletter

Posted on by

Five reasons? There may be seven thousand reasons why your newsletter won’t get the response you’re looking for. Most of those reasons have the same common problem, though: readers just don’t like it. And that’s probably because you’re making one of these five mistakes. Mistake # 1: Your newsletter isn’t helpful This is a big one. My wife signed up for a newsletter on Ayurveda, thinking she would get some helpful articles and ideas on a topic she was very interested in. All she ever got was a whole bunch of promotional stuff. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You know very well that non-stop shameless self-promotion doesn’t exactly endear you to others, and of course you’d never make every single newsletter into a pitch. Because you’re a Copyblogger reader, you know that your content has to be useful or it won’t get read. Yet most folks can’t help themselves. They mean to write something useful, they mean to be helpful, but they end up being self-promotional because it’s easier . It’s easier to say “Yoga class on Friday, 17th December” than it is to write yet another article about yoga. So they wind up being self-promotional by default — and since it was the easier option, they don’t think of it as being unhelpful to their readers. That doesn’t mean the readers don’t see it that way, though. Mistake #2: Your voice isn’t particularly compelling Voice is not everything, but it sure counts for a lot. When you speak to a friend over the phone, they sound excited and vibrant. Ask them to put down their feelings on paper and you often find what they’ve written just doesn’t sound like them. Their voice doesn’t show up in their writing, and that means their writing doesn’t really convey how they feel. Every artist, singer, and yes, writer has a signature voice . This voice needs to be authentic. If you’ve tried and failed to find your voice before, put down the pen and Skype a friend. Get them to ask you questions about the topics you’ll be writing about in your newsletter — recording every word, naturally. Then just blab away, and transcribe what you’ve said. I know this method sounds tedious. But it’s quicker than slaving over a boring newsletter that takes you two days to write, and still winds up completely devoid of voice. Voice matters. And you have one — you just have to get it on paper. But tone alone won’t save the day. Mistake # 3: You’re not telling stories Many people think their newsletter has to be full of perfectly organized and structured articles — and since they don’t know how to create those kinds of articles, they get frustrated and stuck when they’re trying to write. Structure isn’t the way to create a great newsletter. Stories are. As human beings, we’re entranced by stories from an early age. Start with stories about your clients. Write about what you’ve experienced in your industry and your thoughts about it. When you’re trying to elicit response, nothing gets your readers engaged like the color and drama of a good story. And how do you finish? Tell the moral of the story — just like you would in a real story. Explain what you learned or what you should have learned or what someone else could learn from this experience. The moral of the story also does double duty as the springboard for your call to action. Which brings us to Mistake # 4. Mistake # 4: You have a half-hearted call to action This week, you need to fill up your yoga class. In your newsletter, you’re going to ask a customer to write back or comment. You need that customer to respond. You can’t hope they will — you have to ask them to do it. You have to be pretty darned clear what you want them to do, too. Just saying “please respond” is far too vague. Your customers don’t know exactly what you want them to do or how to do it. Do you want them to click on a link? Tell them to click here (and also tell them why). Do you want them to write back and tell you you’re a god/goddess/schmuck? Use the words “just click reply to email me back and tell me I’m a god/goddess/schmuck.” Do you want them to buy? Tell them . Most folks just hope their customers will act on their own. And their customers mostly don’t — because they’re too busy to figure out how you want them to respond. You need to tell them. Just a little nudge will do. Of course, none of this will work if you’re a complete stranger. Mistake# 5: You don’t have a specific frequency Switch on your TV at 6 pm. What do you see? In most countries, it’s the evening news. And every evening it’s the same old news, but hey it’s consistent. Most newsletters aren’t. If you’re going to write a newsletter, then you’ve got to have a publishing schedule. You have to promise your readers that your newsletter will go out once a month, or twice a month or three times a week — whatever it may be. Your newsletters can’t go to Bermuda on vacation. They’re doing all the grunt work for you. Our newsletter has gone out since 2002 and has done so week after week without any stoppage. You want to stop? You are ill? Sorry mate, but that won’t wash well with your readers. Imagine the TV station canceling the news because some newsreader didn’t turn up. One of the big reasons for the lack of response is that your newsletter is a stranger to your readers. You can’t send them a newsletter whenever you feel like it and hope they’ll respond. Response is directly related to frequency. Muck up on frequency and the rest of the four points don’t even matter. So there you have it: Pure self-promotion won’t work — make it useful. Your tone of writing is critical. Record yourself if you have to, but connect with your own unique voice. If you can’t get your head around structure, use customer stories. Don’t be half-hearted about promotion — give a strong call to action. Without consistent frequency, your customers will forget who you are even if you do everything else right. Newsletters are a lot of work. There’s no point in doing them unless you see the response you’re looking for. And avoiding these five big mistakes will perk up your response in a hurry. About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free article on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter . Be sure to check out his blog , too. P.S. Have you checked out Internet Marketing for Smart People , the Copyblogger email newsletter? It features a free 20-step course that will build your business, so you really should click here and subscribe .

3c3b757d57button.gif 5 Reasons Why No One Is Reading Your Email Newsletter

See original here:
5 Reasons Why No One Is Reading Your Email Newsletter

How Cornerstone Content Gets You Traffic and Subscribers

Posted on by

Blogs are great resources. They let you publish high-quality content quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively. The problem is, the default functionality of blogging software makes it easy to show what’s new — but hard to show off the depth of what you’ve done over time. Blogging excels at presenting new content, but fails at aggregating old content in a way that works for people and search engines. So what can you do? How can you help both people and search engines find your content efficiently? Create some solid cornerstone content. If you’ve read Brian Clark’s new SEO copywriting report , you know how important this type of content is to attracting links and ranking for the terms that are central to your site. If you haven’t read Brian’s report, you should to get the full picture. But for now, it’s enough to know that a page hosting cornerstone content helps readers by pulling all of your content about a specific topic together in one place. In other words, each cornerstone page is a home for related content. If you want an example before I continue, check out Landing Pages or Copywriting 101 in the “resources” sidebar to the left of this post. Cornerstone pages let you highlight your most important archived content. They also help you attract links, get subscribers, and increase traffic. Keep reading to find out how. Cornerstone pages are great targets for link-building campaigns Remember, links matter first and foremost with search rankings. But complete, in-depth content on the topics you want people to find you for is important, too. When you group similar content into a home on a single page, you’ll have a keyword dense page which will rank in search engines when you build links to it. Sticking with the Copyblogger examples, do you think they chose phrases like “landing pages” and “SEO copywriting” by accident? Absolutely not. These are two popular keyword phrases that the Copyblogger crew wanted to rank well for in Google. And sure enough, they do. I know what you’re thinking. Copyblogger is a large site. They don’t need to focus on building links to each page, because they will gain links naturally over time. (Never mind the fact that, like every blog, Copyblogger started with no links and just one subscriber — which in this case was Brian.) That’s why cornerstone pages are even more important for new bloggers. These resource-rich pages are perfect for you to link when you do guest posts on other blogs. They’ll help you rank for specific keyword phrases and help you find new readers. 2. Cornerstone pages help you get subscribers People listen to authority figures. Brian also wrote a complete report on authority : why you want it, what it will do for you, and how to get it. People also tend to bookmark, share, and reference authoritative content. Cornerstone content is authoritative because it demonstrates your knowledge around a specific topic. And if it’s genuinely useful, people won’t hesitate to go further with your content, such as subscribing to your blog or signing up for an email newsletter. Does this strategy really work? Yes. How do you think Copyblogger became one of the top blogs? Scroll through the left sidebar and you’ll see all of the Copyblogger resources. Most of these are cornerstone pages, grouping several pieces of valuable content with a call to action to subscribe to the blog. 3. Cornerstone pages are shareable Since each piece of cornerstone content helps people address a specific need, they often remember it. For example, any time someone asks me how to write a great blog headline, there’s one resource that comes to mind . . . the Headline Writing series here on Copyblogger. Even though I first read it almost three years ago, I still refer back to it every time I need some inspiration. Whenever anyone asks me how to write a headline, I send them to this resource because of how helpful and complete it is. I don’t have to send them to five different sites, just one simple URL that’s easy to share. How do you create cornerstone content? There are two ways. One, you can start from scratch and write a blog series with the main goal of turning it into cornerstone content. This is a great way to kick off a blog, or to give your blog a boost. But if you’ve been blogging for a while, there’s a faster way to benefit from this strategy . . . without doing extensive content development. Let me explain. You probably have blog categories, right? Take a look through some of your more important categories. What if you hand-picked some of those category-specific articles and grouped them onto a cornerstone page? It would be easy, right? Now what would make this content effective? First, you’d want to do some basic keyword research to make sure you’re targeting a keyword phrase that makes sense. Then you’ll want to write a snappy, informative introduction that builds desire for your content, using smart SEO copywriting to make it search engine-friendly. And finally, you fill out the page with links to content you already have on your site. It’s that simple. Now get to work. If you focus, you can get your first cornerstone page posted in 30 minutes. And of course, the next time you write a guest post, make sure you link to your new cornerstone content page using the appropriate keywords as anchor text (Brian’s new report gives an example of this). How about you? Using any terrific cornerstone content on your own blog? Let us know where to find it in the comments. About the Author: Derek recently launched the blog Social Triggers . Check it out to learn how to use human psychology to get traffic, sales, and subscribers. Also, don’t miss out on his cornerstone content page, Online Sales 101 .

73e4ed88a1rstone.jpg 94x150 How Cornerstone Content Gets You Traffic and Subscribers

See more here:
How Cornerstone Content Gets You Traffic and Subscribers