Your Blog: Quality over Quantity

, ,

There are likely different schools of thought on this and there are SEO metrics that can prove or disprove the visibility impact of more posts vs. fewer posts, but in my opinion less can be more and quality beats quantity. As the cobbler’s children, we are still enhancing our blog post capacity and shortly, our core team will be more consistently writing posts. But our objective is not to game the SEO system with inbound leads. Our goal is to share articles and perspectives that we think might add some value to our readers and continue the conversations we have every day.

With the increasing spamming of the social web, we are in danger of losing site of the true value of content. I get very concerned when clients consider mass article writing strategies – particularly those clients that market and sell a complex product or service to a sophisticated buyer. These readers know when they are being trapped with content proliferation. Now the buzz is content curation – we need to be careful here too. We don’t need someone to simply compile articles, but we do value an editorial perspective and a careful selection of relevant posts. If I trust you, I will trust the links and content you collect and share.

So, rather than stuff your website with trash blog posts and articles every day, if you are trying to reach a more discerning audience, think quality over quantity.

/0 Comments/by

2011 Top Ten List for Revenue Growth

,

We had fun this year with our holiday greeting and we offered a top 10 list of resolutions. Why not share it with the blog reading audience.

We hope you can be:

  1. Visible… Get to the top of search results page with your content and SEO strategy.
  2. Present… Extend your brand beyond your website with social media outposts.
  3. Approachable… Build relationships by being authentic in your online dialog.
  4. Focused… Identify your strongest niche markets and tailor your value proposition.
  5. Nurturing… Help your prospects remember you and understand your value.
  6. Synchronized… Develop a revenue attack plan that aligns marketing and sales teams.
  7. Automated… Use marketing and sales technology to free up time for new ideas.
  8. Relevant… Provide the content that your customers value.
  9. Tenacious… Follow-up on your leads and manage your account relationships deeply.
  10. Engaging… Make your story more entertaining with video, mobile and multi-media.

Some might say- “OK, but I already have these items on my wish list… how do I get them all done?” To that I would ask whether they have a plan in place.

  • Have you clarified your strategy?
  • Is everyone on board – including both marketing and sales?
  • Have you prioritized and considered the dependencies (people, skills, process, technology)?
  • Can you place initiatives into a timeline and a release plan (must, could, should)?
  • Do you have the right team and skills to execute?
  • Do you know the budget required?
  • Is the ROI clear?

If you can’t answer these, it is worth a little time to get organized – it will save you in the long run. Most every client we work with is on a continuous path to maturity around each of these areas and the bar keeps moving. Just when you think you have your content marketing plan in place with relevant articles and blog posts, you realize digital video is more important to reach audience and communicate message.

/0 Comments/by

Why You Should (re)Tweet

,

Successful tweeting is about focus. Numerous companies small and large have shown that diligently writing a few tweets with content their customers want to read can greatly increase connection that a person has to the company. Even more common are twitter feeds that are rarely read and pretty much irrelevant. The difference is focus. Treating a feed like it is business will go unnoticed. Treating a feed like a friendly conversation will get noticed. Think of it as telling a friend “I liked this article and you probably will to.”

By doing something as simple as tweeting news articles or retweeting other’s valuable tweets that your firm’s clients want to read makes your twitter feed worth reading. The simple truth is that most people don’t want to spend their time finding news that directly pertains to them in the vastness of digital information.

The number of news outlets has risen exponentially in the past decade. Just as books became significantly cheaper and more available after the Gutenberg press, the internet has again dropped the cost of publishing to a new level. One of the numerous side effects is that the amount being published has risen and, because content is king, newspapers have been publishing more because their main reason for not publishing has all but disappeared: Cost.

The cost of publishing, as Clay Shirky has told us, was the main deterrent for publishing articles that consumers wouldn’t read. Publishing too many unread articles would lead to decreases in readership then subscriptions and eventually profits. The cost lowering effect of internet media has removed that physical barrier on printed page real estate. It is this cost reduction that has lead to a decrease in the inherent filtering that newspapers perform and hence an increase in total articles published. This has lead to the popular notion of “Information Overload.”

This impression isn’t exactly accurate because since shortly after the Gutenberg press was invented there were more books than a human could physically read in a lifetime. The difference between printed and e-newspapers eras is a question of filtering. Trusted newspapers became trusted because filtered for to find the best of “all the news that’s fit to print” and printed quality, vetted news that their readership wanted to read. By becoming the filter for your audience you become the source. Using the retweet function can increase your Social Capitol because you are the filter. As any retailer will tell you, being the source is good for business.

Retweet – and be the filter – so that you are the source.

/0 Comments/by