50 Golden Blogging Tips For Business: Social Media - Brad Shorr

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Every blogger should know that social media and SEO are fast becoming one big, messy and marvellous marketing discipline. Here is a collection of 50 blogging tips from my most recent and valuable posts on topics that are essential for a successful blog marketing effort. If you’re just starting out with a blog, these tips may save you a lot of time – and perhaps a little heartache as well.

Blogging Tips For Strategy

Blogging is a powerful tool to be used in marketing as well as presenting yourself as an expert, but you need to take notice of a few simple rules to make it more effective for you or your business.

1. Headlines are just as important as the blog post, and in some ways, more. It takes a pretty good one to capture the attention of readers who are scanning scores if not hundreds of Web pages every day.
2. SEO drives traffic, but a site must be optimized for conversion in order for that traffic to turn into leads and sales.
3. Companies err by concentrating on SEO and ignoring CRO, conversion optimization. The fatal flaw of an SEO fixation is that it takes your eye off the ball. SEO is about traffic. Traffic is important, but it’s not the goal.
4. The fundamental purpose of Internet marketing, and business blogging in this case, is conversion.
5. Publish regularly. Have a calendar based plan for your blog posts. Once a week is good, twice a week even better. The important thing here is that you stick to your plan.
6. Consider hiring an SEO specialist. This is one of the most important decisions you will make in your pursuit of online marketing success. (see points below)

Blog Design And Functionality

No matter how brilliant a website’s design, no matter how elegant its navigation, sooner or later visitors will decide whether to take action because of something they read. In the end, the effectiveness with which a website converts visitors hinges on words. If a new website is going to hit all the right notes, its content must be just as well crafted as its design and programming.

1. Primary SEO keywords should appear at the beginning of headlines. This helps readers as well as search engine crawlers.
2. Use bold text for keywords; again, this help readers in addition to strengthening SEO.
3. Use bulleted lists to the attention of readers and crawlers.
4. Insert primary keywords at the beginning of Meta titles.
5. Build a strong internal link structure on your site.
6. Optimize site images – this is an often-overlooked technique that boosts SEO and user experience.
7. The biggest error in corporate website content: inward focus.
8. The second biggest error: burying the lead under a pile of unimportant words. Give readers the point first of all, and then elaborate.
9. The third biggest error: poorly optimized or non-existent Meta content. Your site will seriously confuse Google and readers without proper optimization.
10. The fourth biggest error: Too much content. If you can say it in 1000 words, you can say it more effectively in 500.
11. The fifth biggest error: Lame or non-existent calls to action. If you don’t tell readers what to do next, they won’t do anything.
12. Corporate sites tend to have weak calls to action because they don’t take the time and apply the creativity to develop them in the first place.

SEO For Bloggers

Title Tags are the Nuclear Warheads of Content Marketing.

While Title Tags contain only a very small mass – roughly 65 characters – they pack an unbelievable punch. Because of title tags’ enormous impact on SEO, social sharing and conversion, content marketers should know how they work, and how to put them to work.

1. Title tags are the most important piece of Meta information on a Web page in terms of SEO.
2. Title tags are also crucial for optimizing user experience and facilitating social shares.
3. Title tags may or may not include a branding message.
4. Title tags must always include the primary keyword phrases for the Web page it represents.
5. Title tags can be composed for conversion: snappy titles inspire social sharing. The decision whether to stress SEO or conversion depends in large part on the nature of the content.
6. Skilful use of H1 title tags boosts conversion without compromising the SEO integrity of title tags.
7. Title tags should be updated if on-page content changes relevant keywords.
8. The biggest factor in selecting an SEO partner: understanding their methodology. If the agency doesn’t have a formal one, or if the methodology is outdated, results inevitably will be poor.
9. The second biggest factor: understanding the SEO’s track record. Actions speak louder than words!
10. The third biggest factor: making sure there is a good fit. Every SEO has a sweet spot; if you’re not in it, results will lag.
11. The fourth biggest factor: the longevity and stability of the SEO. You don’t want to start from scratch after investing years developing a program with a partner who suddenly disappears.
12. The fifth biggest factor: great relationships. You don’t want to start over after investing years on a program with a partner who suddenly disappears.

Some web content writers, as well as web designers view on-page SEO as a necessary evil to an effective content strategy on the web. However, when properly executed, SEO can actually enhance a site visitor’s experience, rather than detract from it.

Writing For Web

Web writers are a special kind of breed. Their jobs include writing AdWord ads, corporate bios, blog post titles, calls to action, display ads, Facebook fan page posts, landing pages, Meta descriptions, taglines, testimonials and tweets.

1. Writing AdWords ads requires more precision than perhaps any other form of Web writing.
2. Corporate bios require genuine creativity to be readable and relevant.
3. The art of writing brochures should not be lost, because it’s still a highly valuable business skill.
4. Landing page composition is too important to be a sideline job: great landing page writers are made, not born.
5. Several important (and not always understood techniques) go into writing a truly persuasive sales proposal.
6. Taglines are the most all-around demanding form of business writing there is. There’s a reason why brilliant taglines cost a fortune.
7. Twitter may seem like a frivolous medium, but great writing skill is required for effective business tweets.
8. “Different from” is universally accepted, but “different than” is not.
9. Avoid the expression “if and when.” Not even experts understand its meaning.

Social Sharing And Blogging

Twitter is a feast-or-famine marketing tool. It can help you achieve important business goals, or it can be a monumental waste of time.

Social Sharing is the latest ‘add on’ in blogging and Twitter has become one of the most important social sharing platforms. Here are some practical tips how to make Twitter perform better for you.

1. On Twitter, define your purpose clearly before launching your page.
2. Make sure you have adequate resources to support your Twitter program. Many firms grossly underestimate the time and effort needed.
3. Select the right Twitter interface platform to support your program. They all have strengths and weaknesses.
4. Vet your Twitter followers and clean them up to avoid being buried under a mountain of spammers.
5. Learn the basic types of tweets and best practices for writing them before you start tweeting.
6. Don’t tweet on one or two themes all day long: variety helps attract followers.
7. Although you have 140 characters to work with, tweets at 100 characters or less can be very effective and draw retweets.
8. Avoid jargon and exotic abbreviations in tweets – the longer it takes someone to get your drift, the less likely they’ll be to pay attention to you.
9. Schedule certain types of tweets in advance to save time and make sure you’re getting the full message out.
10. Always respond to people who retweet your material and ask you questions.
11. Always be ready to lend a hand to fellow tweeps – giving to get works well on Twitter.

I hope these 50 tips will help you in your blogging endeavours. If you have any blogging tips of your own please share with us.

Brad Shorr works for Straight North, a Web development, Chicago-based agency concentrating in B2B, with clients in specialized niches such as credit card processing for gas stations and truck tracking systems. via socialmediarevolver.com

 

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a leading Strategic Management and Innovation Consulting Firm in Denver, Colorado. He is an author, speaker, and a strategic innovation and hypercompetition expert to profit, non-profit organizations and municipalities. He advises clients with an objective view of their competitive capabilities and defines a clear course of action to maximize their innovation return on investment to achieve profitable growth. Build a capability for ongoing competitive innovation across your company. Call 719-649-4118 or complete our form: contact us for more information on hiring Jim to advise or speak for your next event.

 

Russell Blackmore: Top ten mistakes online entrepreneurs should avoid

Are you new to the e-tail game? Just started selling products and services over the web? Well, avoid the mistakes made by countless entrepreneurs before you. Heed this advice from Russell Blackmore, co-founder of photography e-tailer Sonic Editions.

1. Don't try to fit in

Good companies disrupt the current market. Made.com and Dollar Shave Club are both magnificent examples of this. Don’t try to fit in with what else is out there – create a new experience and you’ll carve yourself a niche in a crowded market.

2. Don't do it all yourself

Utilise the power of others. Partnerships help to build traffic and brand equity. If credible brands are working with you, chances are others will too.

3. Keep an eye on stock management

Our prints are made to order, which means we don’t get caught with a lot of excess stock that we need to store and pay for its upkeep. If you have to pay to keep stock that you’re not using, it’s a waste of money.

4. Be mindful of over-selling

Connect with your audience regularly but do not over sell. Use social media to reach out to your audience, rather than pushing a hard sell. You need just enough exposure but not to the point of overkill.

5. You are your product or service

Brands should be reflective of their products. If you’re selling something with a premium price point, your customer experience must reflect that. The service is just as important as the product. Do your research and know what experience you want to create – then live and breathe it in everything that you do.

6. Always answer consumer enquiries

Ignore a consumer enquiry at your peril. Some of the best leads come through social media, so make sure you check who is getting in touch and what they’re saying. Responsive customer service will mean repeat business.

7. Start small, think big

Offer your product in a variety of key currencies. Only when you’ve built up the sales base in a different country should you consider translating into a different language. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Not at the start, at least.

8. Poor delivery is a no-no

Find a trusted and reliable delivery partner. Poor service will come back and reflect badly on you. Remember the video of the USP deliveryman throwing the monitor over the wall? There’s no point in your company being let down at the end of the line.

9. Hone your IT skills

Update your website every day. You will have to understand basic simple rules. For example, lots of traffic will crash your site. This is something that you’ll need in all aspects for your role. You cannot simply depend on smart interns to keep your tech side running.

10. Banks are not your friend

Don’t over rely on the bank. Make sure you know where your finances are coming from!

via managementtoday.co.uk

Want to increase growth and avoid more losses? Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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How Social Media Is Fueling the Food Truck Phenomenon

The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. For more information on the scoop truck and where it stops, click here.

Sitting at the window table of Rickshaw Dumpling Bar‘s Flatiron restaurant, it’s hard to see why they need a food truck. The restaurant is nice, well-located (they have another in Midtown Manhattan) and the food comes out quick and tasty. Why ruin that with what is essentially just fancy-pants street food?

The answer is, because it works. Food trucks experienced a boom just as the economy started to tank. Restaurateurs who were hesitant to drop serious cash on launching a restaurant turned to mobile trucks as a less expensive way to sell food in a down economy. Social media has played a large role in not only making the trucks more accessible, but allowing them to cultivate the crucial element of community.

“It’s the social aspect,” says Kenny Lao, Rickshaw’s co-founder. “It’s really about shared experiences around food. I think what we’re doing with Twitter is an electronic version of that share.” He sees his restaurants as an older, established sibling living uptown, while his truck is like the younger brother fresh out of college and living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — different energies toward the same purpose.

But Lao, like other food truckers, is hesitant to give social media too much credit. We spoke with the proprietors of four prominent food trucks — Rickshaw in New York, Dante’s Friend Chicken in LA, Kogi BBQ in LA, and Grill5 Taco in South Korea — about how social media helped drive the mobile food revolution, and what to look for next.

Why Trucks? Why Now?

Food trucks popped up in a perfect storm of low-cost marketing. Restaurants are extraordinarily expensive businesses to open and maintain. Food trucks, however, are far cheaper and carry far less risk. The barrier to entry is cheap, and the location can change daily (not selling well in Midtown? Move to Brooklyn or the Financial District.)

The real problem was trust. Food trucks have been around forever, but people naturally have an aversion to “roach coaches” and “street meat,” thinking it of a lower quality and lower standard than a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The influx of high-quality restaurant brands to food trucks timed well with the social media boom.

Not only were trucks striving for higher quality tastes, but they were talking to their customers, building what digital marketers call “brand loyalty.” That brand loyalty also played into the food truck ethos of “community first.” Each successful truck is a community unto itself. Social outreach helped to grow these communities and make them feel more participatory.

Still, no amount of social media can do the cooking and design work necessary to make a successful food truck. Much of the “social media” narrative is driven not by the trucks but by social media advocates themselves. Here’s what we learned from these mobile entrepreneurs.

Rickshaw Dumpling — New York City, USA

 

 

The Rickshaw Dumpling Truck serves a pared down version of the restaurant’s fare. Lao, a bit of a social media skeptic, acts as a begrudging social media manager, tweeting out the truck’s daily locations. “If everyone stopped doing it tomorrow, I would be the first one leading the charge,” he says. For him, the food — and not the marketing — is the first priority. He’s frustrated by businesses that start tweeting before they own a truck, have a permit or have cooked their food. “You can’t make a shish-kebab with an iPhone.”

Lao sees sites like Twitter as a way for food trucks, especially ones without a physical location, to feel like they have a stronger sense of permanence amidst an inherently transient business model. Building that base of followers has helped Lao seal partnerships and sponsorships while also giving a voice to the brand.

To that end, the account is a place to talk not just about dumplings but things that his audience also cares about: new songs, interesting links and cool bikes Lao sees on the street. Timing is also important. Lao likes to tweet in the morning — he figures people like to look forward to their lunch and want to track down the truck. He says sweet trucks, on the other hand, can tweet later in the day as people are wandering back to the office looking for a snack.

Now, Lao is proud of his truck and its followers. He regularly bikes to the truck to check up on it and rides along when scouting new locations. And as for social media? Nearly 10,000 followers can’t be wrong.

Dante Fried Chicken — Los Angeles, USA

 

 

Dante Fried Chicken started out as an underground dance and dinner party in New York. It quickly built street cred and uprooted to LA where the crew — lead by the brand’s eponymous chef — cooks up chicken for the masses. Joey Rubin is Dante’s CMO and friend. We caught up with him between innings at a Milwaukee Brewers game to talk shop.

Social media was a way for Dante to break into the food press. They reached out, tweeted and built a following, quickly drawing in top journalists. “Through Twitter and Facebook — through creative campaigns and the tools that we have — we made it from being completely underground New York kids throwing really awesome innovative parties … to being on the cooking channel in a matter of a few days,” Rubin said.

The truck went from a humble Gmail account with a few hundred messages to more than 2,600 followers on Twitter. The tone is still off-the-cuff and erratic, but it matches the brand perfectly. “Social media is just an extension of your brand and your persona,” Rubin says. “You can use it like you use any other tool. It’s like the tongs that Dante uses to put stuff in the fryer.”

The account stirs up the feeling of a backyard cook out, an atmosphere their fans have embraced. “Our social media is tied directly back into the experience for us,” he says. “Meet Dante, you’ll get it. Meet any of us hanging out around the truck, you’ll get it.”

Grill5 Taco — Seoul, South Korea

 

 

Korean fusion is all the rage right now, and well, the team at Grill5 can say it seriously pre-empted the curve. The South Korean truck specializes in, you guessed it, Korean-Mexican offerings. We got in touch with Ban, one of the truck’s originators.

Right now, the truck only uses Twitter to stay up to date with its followers. However, after having the cops called on them several times for causing a scene, they’re now considering a traditional storefront. “At first, I [used Twitter] to tell people just where we will be, but soon I recognized that people unfollow if someone is [talking strictly about] business or is boring,” Ban says. “So I started to tell people about my daily life, talk about movies and introduce quick recipes that I know, just like normal Twitter users.”

Social media played a huge role in the truck’s inception, and Ban doesn’t think he could have had the same success without it. Still, while Twitter was a revolutionary way to market, it has become just another tool in Ban’s belt: “I’m not saying it became less important, but social media itself became just another tool to let them know about our food. The people who communicate through it are more important for us.”

Kogi BBQ — Los Angeles, USA

 

 

Kogi BBQ has seen huge social success on the West coast with 87,000 followers and five separate trucks to do its bidding. Fittingly, it serves up Korean-based Mexican food with a healthy dash of social media. Alice Shin is Kogi’s creative director and chief tweeter. Kogi, like many of the trucks, has a website where fans can look up truck locations by day and hour. This takes some of the social media load off. Still, Shin uses Twitter when there’s a last minute change or for privately reaching out: “Twitter is great for the private DM, ’cause I don’t want to blast people with a bazillion replies a day,” Shin says.

She breaks down the strategy into sections. “WordPress for blogging, Twitter for scheduling/emergencies, Facebook for running a temperature check and just interacting with beautiful strangers.” Having so many outlets has also narrowed Kogi’s Twitter use. It is mostly for updates on the truck, while the blog is home to more general (read: esoteric) updates. One, for example, was a post about a joke tin of “Unicorn meat.”

Much like Lao, Shin says the social strategy ultimately came down to the food: “Social media does not put meat on the grill, it does not chop over a hundred pounds of onions a day or guarantee that people will be happy with our food or help us with calculating orders or cleaning down our stations and throwing out the trash.” Instead, it is a tool to spread awareness about the fundamentals of running a kitchen, whether or not that kitchen is on wheels. “Look, if you don’t have a great product to sell, if you don’t have a deep love for your work, no amount of retweeting, hashtagging or following will help you grow your business,” Shin adds.

It’s important to listen, to find out what your specific audience wants. Some may want to know your favorite band, others may just want to find your food and that’s it. But has social media actually helped Kogi? “I don’t know. I mean, I get the feeling that when asked this question, people want me to either trash social media or praise it. But when you ask a cook, ‘After all that, has your chef’s knife actually helped you?’ Sure it has! But the knife is not the food. The knife is an important, integral tool for a serious cook, but it does not imagine or create the dish itself,” Shin says.

As she put it: “Food is my business. Culture is my department. And social media is the bridge that allows for me to let those two worlds talk to one another.”

What food trucks have you seen? And why do you think social has become an important part of the mobile revolution? Let us know in the comments below.

Series Supported by Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck

 

via mediasharkllc.com

 

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.