The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Content comes in many forms. One thing remains true, however, for all forms of content. It must be strong or it will lose your audience’s attention.

When I say “strong,” what I mean is your content must do three things:

1. It must inform your audience of something that is important to them.
2. It must present you as a subject matter expert.
3. And it must interest your audience in learning more about you and your business.

Any content that doesn’t do these three things isn’t strong content. But here’s a caveat: You must do these three things in every piece of content you produce without mentioning your company. In other words, you don’t have to write a sales pitch. Make your content about your audience.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires a certain mindset in the content producer. You can’t be “all about me.”

You have to be all about your customer.

Your audience is going to want to know what’s in it for them. They will judge you by your content, and they will judge you on whether your content meets their needs. If it doesn’t, they will go somewhere else. You won’t have a chance.

So, here’s the question: Is your content strong? If not, why not?

Seth Godin shares his secret for writing viral content. But is it really that simple? Is all you have to do is write for one person?

Well, yes and no.

It seems simple, and it is. But it’s not easy. The first thing you need to know about viral content is that no one can write viral content every day. Not everything you write is going to go viral. But if you can write one piece of viral content every 30-60 days, then you can make a big impact in your niche. Even if you write one piece of viral content every six months, you’ll make a big impact.

Seth Godin is right about one thing, however. You can’t plan viral content.

You can plan content, and you should. The way to write your content is to think of your ideal audience. Who are you writing to? Write to that person as if your life depends on it. And embed enough value into your content that the person you are writing to cannot help but share it. Make it so valuable that they can’t refuse.

Viral marketing is more a phenomenon than a planned event. That doesn’t mean you can’t plan your marketing efforts. You should plan every piece of content you write. But you can’t predict how people respond. Sometimes, things go viral you never would have expected. That’s a good thing.

Is your content shareable? How do you know?

Creating content that is shareable is no easy task. There’s no magic trick either. It’s a strategy more than anything. You should consider how your content can best be shared before you create it. Don’t create it then wonder how you will share it.

The most important consideration in any piece of content is this: Does it make an emotional connection?

You have to connect with your intended readership. Pull on their heart strings. That doesn’t mean you should resort to sentimentality. What it does mean is you should let them know you are human, and don’t be afraid to address your topic from a real human need.

This can best be done if you put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What do they want? Answer that question and half the battle is won.

One effective way to appeal to emotions is to use humor. Keep it clean, but don’t be afraid to make your audience laugh. Laughter is great medicine. It also has a strong emotional appeal. People will remember you and they’ll want to spend more time on your website.

Nostalgia is another way to appeal to emotions. “Remember when …” posts are powerful because it puts people in a time and place that they remember fondly. If you can do that, then you can make a connection.

Remember, people make buying decisions emotionally. They also make sharing decisions emotionally. If you appeal to their sense of humanity, then you can get your content spread more widely.

No matter what kind of business you are running, you’ll have to create content, but there are different types of content and each type has a different purpose. Here are 5 different kinds of content you should concern yourself with when planning your content marketing strategy.

1. Foundational content – This is content that is foundational to your website and business. It includes your home page, About page, and landing pages. Foundational content is necessary content that gives potential customers an idea about who you are and what you do.
2. Community-building content – This content is social. It can be on your site or off site, but its purpose is to engage with your audience. It usually involves your blog, but it can be wholly contained on your social media outposts as well.
3. Promotional content – Promotional content should be kept to a minimum. Its sole purpose is to promote, such as a notice of an upcoming event or a book you’ve published.
4. Informational content – This content is strictly to inform your audience about a particular topic. It can be a newsletter article, a free download, a white paper, or even a web page or blog post, but it’s strictly for informational purposes.
5. Fleeting content – I call this “fleeting” content because it typically is short lived. That is, it has no long-term appeal. Certain types of blog posts typically fall into this category, but guest articles can too. They address topics that are hot right now but may not be hot next year. Like promotional content, you want to keep this content to a minimum, but it can be good marketing to include it.

There are other types of content, but these are the types you’ll encounter most often. Design your content marketing strategy around them.

It seems the whole world is going ga-ga over social media. It’s practically all you hear about nowadays. People are flocking to the social media sites to establish a presence and build their brands. Often, when they get there they realize it is more work than they thought it was going to be. Then they get the “what next?” glaze in their eyes.

Social media is important. But far more important than social media is the voice behind it. In a word, it’s authority.

Think about the sources where you receive your daily news. Why do you like them? Are you more interested in CNN or Fox News? Why? Chances are, you get your news from the sources you select because you like their reputation as news sources. You consider them authorities.

Readers in every niche look at online content the same way. They want to get their information from a credible authority.

But how do you build authority? How do you establish yourself as a voice of authority in your niche? The surest way to become a respected and recognized authority on any topic is to produce regular material on your subject that is respected. You can get your content recognized by a large number of people interested in the topic, by a few respected leaders in your niche, or a combination of the two.

How you build authority is up to you. The fact that you need to become an authority is getting more and more evident every day. When it happens, social media will be there to help reap the rewards.

If you’ve been writing your company blog for a while and you’re not sure if you are reaching your audience – maybe the engagement is low, you’re not getting a lot of comments, or there’s little interaction with your audience – then try incorporating these 5 content marketing ideas into your blog. Measure your efforts to see how audience engagement on your blog is improved after you implement these ideas.

1. Invite guest bloggers – Guest bloggers can often add a different flavor to your blog and encourage new comments. However, a guest blogging program is more effective if you set reasonable guidelines for your guest bloggers. Among those should be included a requirement to respond to comments and keep readers talking beyond the blog post.
2. Content curation – Look for opportunities to incorporate content created by others on their blogs or through other online media into your blog. This can as simple as creating resource posts with links to pages online that could be helpful to your audience.
3. Include multimedia content – Every now and then, add a slideshow or a video to your blog.
4. Ask open ended questions – Get people talking on your blog by ending your blog posts with requests for feedback. Use open ended questions whenever possible. You can also incorporate surveys.
5. Sync your posts with off-site content – Become a guest blogger on another blog in your niche. Sync your guest posts with a more in-depth post on your own blog. Drive traffic back to your blog and engage your readers with thought-provoking content and open ended questions.

Content marketing requires a creative approach. You can increase your blog engagement, but it will require some planning and thinking outside the proverbial box.

What do you make of Internet marketers, or search engine optimizers (professional SEOs), recommending putting your content behind a paywall? Won’t that drive your traffic elsewhere?

It depends.

There are content publishers making good money with paywalls. And there are others going belly up. So what’s the recipe for success?

There’s no one recipe that will work for every website just like there’s no one way to bake a cake. There are certain things you don’t want to put in a cake, and even if you have all the right ingredients, you have to have them in the right measure. Plus, you have to mix those ingredients in just the right way, and keep it in the oven just the right amount of time, etc.

I’m no baker, but I know about SEO. I know about marketing online. Sometimes it makes sense to put your content behind a paywall. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here are a few things to consider if you are looking at putting your content behind a paywall:

• How much does it cost you to produce a page of content?
• What is your expected return on each page of content?
• How much competition do you have in your niche?
• What is the availability of the content you are producing for free on the Internet? If you have a lot of competition producing the same content for free, then it might not make sense to add a paywall. You have to create value or people won’t pay for it.

Paywalls can be good if you produce enough high value content that can’t be acquired anywhere else. If there’s an audience for it, there could be a profit in your content behind a paywall. But don’t jump into it blindly.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what actually constitutes search engine optimization. Many companies are stuck on a five-year-old model of SEO. They’re still trying to build links and do on-page optimization by adding keywords to the meta tags and optimize their Title tags perfectly.

I’m not going to say those are worthless activities, though there isn’t much need for the keywords meta tag any more, but if you’re still hanging your SEO on the Title tag, then you’re missing the boat.

That’s not to say the Title tag isn’t important. It’s just not your golden egg.

Today, if you’re not approaching SEO as if it is synonymous with marketing – because it is – then you’re not doing it right. It should actually be called search engine marketing. The goal is to increase your company’s bottom line with conversions, not to see how many links you can acquire.

The only real purpose for links today is to increase your traffic. And you want that to be targeted traffic. When you attract targeted traffic to your website, then you’ll see an increase in conversions – if your landing pages are well written with strong calls to actions. A strong call to action closes the sale, but to get the prospect to that call to action you have to lead them there with great content.

Approach your content (on page and off site) as if it is marketing. If you focus too much on SEO, you’ll just start looking for links.

You’ve decided it’s time to update your website design. Good for you. There’s just one problem. You’ve achieved some pretty high search engine rankings over the years and you don’t want to lose them. What should you do?

Think about these three considerations before you do anything:

1. Keyword Research – At the heart of your SEO are keywords. You’ll need to analyze each page on your website for keyword usage. Are you ranking for keywords that aren’t searched for any more? If so, your SEO could be outdated. Or perhaps you have pages that still get great traffic for keywords that are still being searched for. Make a list of all the keywords you are ranking for and how much traffic those pages are getting. Also make a note of any relevant keywords you are not ranking for.
2. Conversions – Traffic is great, but conversions are better. If you have web pages that get a load of traffic, especially from search, but no conversions, then maybe you just need to rewrite the content. Compare your conversions to your search engine rankings and traffic.
3. Content Anomalies – This is a broad category of content problems that could include duplicate content or low-value content. Perhaps you have a large number of pages with little content on them that could be beefed up a bit. They’re targeting good keywords but just don’t have enough content. Make a list of your web pages that might have some version of a content anomaly and determine what you can do to improve them.

It’s important that you improve web pages that have content problems in your redesign, but it’s also important not to significantly change the content of web pages that are ranking well and converting well. So make your lists and analyze your content before you commit to the redesign.

Super Bowl XLVII was one of the most exciting Super Bowls in history. And like most Super Bowls in recent years, you can find the topic trending on all the major social media – Google+, Twitter, where else?

You’d naturally expect the Super Bowl to be a trending topic. But what about local content?

You can create local content that goes viral. You may not see it on the social media trending charts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t trending locally. Of course, there’s no metric (that I’m aware of) that measures local trends. But your end goal isn’t to do better than everyone else in measuring trends. It’s to get your content out there far and wide – to go viral.

What tools are available to you to help your content go viral? Essentially, the same tools that are available to the Super Bowl marketers.

You have Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

On Facebook, if you look at your page metrics, you’ll see a Virality metric. That means Facebook measures the viral output of your brand page’s content. If you create great content and share it on your page to your followers, all it takes is a handful of your followers liking it or sharing it before it can go viral. Remember, it’s got to be great content.

One of the keys to developing local content that goes viral is to develop online relationships with local clientele. Get them to follow you. But you can also push your content out in other ways. Consider:

• Your blog
• Your e-mail newsletter
• Your print newsletter
• YouTube
• Local billboards
• Local TV and radio
• Local newspapers
• Bag stuffers and flyers

And don’t forget word of mouth. Let your customers know that you have a website and a blog. Let them know that you post to your blog often. And sign them up for your newsletter. Get the word out. Your content can go viral.

Let’s face it. We live in a world where beauty matters. I have seen ugly websites get a redesign and improve visitor interaction immediately. The website’s bounce rate lowers, its unique visitors increases, and conversions increase. The same thing can happen to your website.

There are some very simple things you can do to improve the look and feel of your website. Here are 3 ways to improve your web design easily and reap the benefits.

• Associate your brand with colors – Not too many. Pick two or three colors that you want site visitors to associate with your brand and use those to design your website. Over time, those colors will be associated with your website and brand. Make sure you use specific colors by hex code and not just generic colors like “red” and “yellow.”
• Write content for the web – People don’t read the same way online. Make your paragraphs short, use bullet points and subheads, and use short and simple sentences. Make your content “scannable.” People will stop and read what they find interesting.
• Use graphics – “Gray” content might be interesting, but it’s going to be a lot more interesting with graphic enhancements. Use images on your content to break up the content and to add a visual element. Be sure to choose images that correspond to the content.

If you improve your website’s visual design, then you’ll see a huge difference in your conversions and how visitors interact with your website.

Interestingly, a new study about marketers and quality content has Marketing Pilgrim concluding that most marketers believe it is important but aren’t willing to pay for it. Sadly, we get many queries from potential clients who want quality content for a low price. The challenge for online marketing companies like ours is to maximize the quality of the content we produce with a price low enough that consumers want to pay for it.

That old adage “You get what you pay for” rings true for content. If you want quality, you have to be willing to pay for it.

But how much is the right amount for high quality content?

The graph showing what people pay for a 1,000-word article is quite telling. Besides “never outsourcing,” the amount with the highest percentage (at 17%) is between $16 and $25. The next highest (at 14%) was under $15. In contrast, only 3% of marketers earning $10,000 or more pay less than $15. The highest amount was the $26 to $50 category.

So what’s the lesson? If you want to increase your revenues, pay more for content. Choose a high quality content writer rather than a low quality writer. If you chintz, you’ll get low quality content. That definitely affects revenues.

Once again, you get what you pay for.

When I ask clients what they think the most important element of web design is, I usually get one of several responses.

• The header
• Navigation
• Attractiveness
• Usability, or functionality
• Shopping cart
• Conversions, or calls to actions
• Search engine optimization

These are generally the most often stated elements by people who don’t design websites. Even web designers will often repeat one or more of these often spoken responses. But the truth is, the most important element of web design is none of these.

So what is the most important element?

In a word, it’s content that speaks to your ideal customer.

Notice that I didn’t just say “content.” That’s because content in and of itself is just a tool. It can be effective or ineffective. It can be the right content for your target audience or the the wrong content.

If the content on your website isn’t written to attract your ideal customer and then close them, then it’s not good content. Period.

The bottom line is, you have to lead your ideal client to the sale. That means your content has to be targeted to appeal to the ideal client and convince them that you have the answer to their most pressing questions. In other words, it has to solve a problem. If your content doesn’t convince your ideal customer that you have the solution to their biggest problem, then you won’t get the sale.

That’s why content that speaks to your ideal customer is the most important element of web design. It’s what gets the sale.

If Google Panda and Google Penguin taught you anything, it should have been not to chase the algorithms.

A lot of search marketers spend the bulk of their time trying to figure out search engine algorithms and playing to those. They’ll test this and test that, then implement a new search strategy or link building strategy based on guessing what’s important to Google or Bing. This is a waste of time.

I’m not saying don’t run tests. But don’t rely on tests as a final authority on accurate search ranking. Algorithms can change. And they often do.

Instead, focus your content on your end user. Who do you want to attract to your website? Well, then write your content for that person. If you write your content with one person in mind who serves as the ideal customer, then you’ll get a lot farther in terms of marketing your website. Search rankings generally take care of themselves if you write your content with the end user in mind.

I’m not saying don’t optimize your content. You should use your keywords, write good titles and subheads, include alt tags, and take care of the basic SEO elements. But don’t make them the most important elements on your page.

The most important thing to good search engine rankings are your site visitors. What do they want? Give it to them.

Matt McGee shares that he recently published a blog post on Sunday, a time when most experts say is the worst time to publish a blog post. But is it really?

I have to concur with Matt’s conclusion. There’s no best time to publish a blog post.

Well, actually, there is. It’s when you publish it. There’s no better time than the moment you get the idea, write the post, and hit Publish. Why wait?

You can spend all your time thinking about the best time to publish your content, or just write it and publish it. Planning doesn’t involve second-guessing when people are going to share your stuff, bookmark it, send it to their friends, or sit on the pot with their tablet and take it all in. They’ll share, send, read, and retweet when it’s convenient for them. Your job is to simply write and publish – on your own time.

I fully believe in editorial calendars. You can plan a month out all of your content – and you should. Plan to publish your material at the most apropos time in conjunction with important events and in sync with your community’s goings on. But be flexible. Allow it to change if necessary.

But quit thinking your blog posts have to go out on a certain day or at a certain time each day to be most effective. It’s not true.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, often takes questions from people and answers them via video. WebProNews featured one of these questions from Cutts recently regarding synonyms in your content.

Regarding the use of synonyms in your on-page content, Matt Cutts makes the following comments:

• Use both words, “without sounding artificial or stilted or spammy”
• “Make sure that you mention, in a natural way, that you are good at both of those”
• “Maybe once it’s a USB drive, and the next time it’s a USB stick, and at the bottom of the page it’s a flash drive”
• Read the text aloud and ask, “Does it sound stilted? Does it sound artificial?”
• “Try to use the words in a natural way as long as it doesn’t go too far, and people start to notice that it sounds weird”

Notice how many times he used the words “natural,” “artificial,” and “stilted.” He even used “spammy” once, and “weird.” The idea is to use natural language writing techniques to cover the topics you write about online. That is, write as if you were writing about your topic and search engines didn’t exist.

If you use the same keyword phrase over and over again in your content, then it will likely sound artificial or spammy. You don’t want that. So you do want to substitute your keyword phrase a few times with something that is synonymous. You want to do that so that your writing does come across as natural and not stilted. But here’s the catch – if you replace your primary keyword phrase too often and use too many synonyms just for the sake of using synonyms, then it will sound unnatural.

So the key is to find that balance, that in-between place, where you focus on your primary keyword but substitute it for a synonym in certain places so that your content flows smoothly from beginning to end.

I’ve heard more than a few arguments about whether or not long or short content is best for online marketing. To tell the truth, I think it’s a losing argument no matter which side you’re on.

The advocates of short content take that approach because they believe that people won’t read long form content. The truth, however, is that people will read long form content if it is good. They won’t read it if it is not good, but they won’t read short form content if isn’t good either.

Advocates for long form content argue that search engines have more to feed on with long content. The more content you have the more queries you can rank for. That’s true. But if the content isn’t worth reading, ranking well for it won’t matter. You’ll get a lot of bounces if you get traffic at all.

The key to any and all content, whether short or long, is to make it good. Quality content is the best content.

So does that mean that size doesn’t matter? Not really. Size matters if you want to increase your chances at ranking for more search queries, but you have to take the time to do your research and write content that deserves to rank well. That means writing content that people want to read. If you can consistently produce high quality content in long form, then you should do well online.

More and more, I’m seeing top-notch SEO experts – people who have been the top leaders in SEO and Internet marketing for more than ten years – saying that chasing keywords is no longer an SEO best practice. That just doesn’t seem right, but I’ll have to agree with them. If you want to rank well in the search engines going into 2013, I recommend focusing on high quality content without the keyword spam.

What do I mean by that?

Jill Whalen has an article at SiteProNews listing 18 former SEO best practices that could now work against you. I think this is a very important list.

Right in the middle of her article, however, is this paragraph:

Today, and for the foreseeable future, SEO is much less about optimizing for specific keywords, and much more about technical issues, social signals, and the overall trustworthiness of a company and its website.

Pay attention here because this is real important. The emphasized phrases are mine.

Trust: The New SEO

If you aren’t optimizing for specific keywords, then what are you optimizing for? Answer: Trust. That’s it. Your new buzzword going forward is trust. That’s the new SEO.

Does that mean you can’t use keywords? No, not at all. It does mean that your keywords should not be the focal point of your content. The needs of your readers should be the focal point of your content with the end goal of earning and building trust at the forefront of your thinking process.

In reality, this is the way it should have always been. Keywords can get your site ranked, though going forward this is questionable, but they won’t build trust in your brand. Only high quality content that meets the needs of your readers can do that.

Forget about stuffing keywords into your content, building back links with anchor text, and other manipulative SEO tactics. Just write great content. That’s your new SEO strategy.

Not all content is created equal. You can produce or create content that has temporal value. It can even have intrinsic value. And of course, even content that is temporal can have tremendous value even if for a short time. But there is no value quite like eternal value. That’s what evergreen content can do for your business.

So what is evergreen content? I’ve identified 4 very important qualities of evergreen content that every online marketer should know. If you know these qualities, then you can create evergreen content on a regular basis and keep visitors coming to your website over and over again.

1. Search engine optimized – Evergreen content is content that can be found through a simple search query. It has to have some SEO value and be searchable.
2. Valuable to a large variety of people – The content itself must have some intrinsic value. That value must crossover to people from a variety of backgrounds and achieve some sort of cross-appeal to multiple audiences.
3. Must be shareable – Evergreen content is content that people want to share with their friends.
4. Lasting value – As its name implies, evergreen content is content that has lasting value. It isn’t trendy or fashionable one day and unnoticeable the next. News is rarely evergreen because it by nature is transient. But informational content that has the same value next year or next decade as it has today will always be searchable and shareable. It’s truly evergreen content.

Are you looking for content that appeals to a broad audience and will be valuable for a very long time? You should be. It’s the most valuable content you can produce.

Are you familiar with the term “persona marketing?” Probably not. I just made it up. But there is such a thing as using personas to market your products and services. It’s nothing new.

Marketers have been using personas for years. It’s your voice. You can create a character with its own persona and write from that character’s point of view or you can use your own natural voice and make that your persona. The key is to create a memorable character, real or imagined, that people can relate to and respond to.

If you create a great persona for your marketing efforts, your content will be unique. And that’s the most important thing your content online should be.

When your content is unique and your target market responds favorably to the persona you’ve created to promote your brand, you’ll increase your visitors, your unique visitors, and your conversions. That’s what marketing is all about – making the most of your marketing opportunities to present your message in a unique manner using a voice that is unique to you and your business. That’s persona marketing in a nutshell.

There’s never been a better opportunity to succeed with persona marketing than there is right now. No matter what business or niche you are in, use your persona to entertain, enlighten, and sell to your target market.