Okay, so you’ve been working hard on your web content, religiously sharing updates to your social media pages, and keeping everything visually pleasing, accurate, and informative. No matter how hard you try, though, you never seem to see much growth. You might start wondering, is my audience even getting my content?
There are endless techniques and means to grab your audience’s attention. Just like different topics attract different results, different methods of approach draw different people. You know your content needs to have value, remain relevant, and be easy to access in order for your audience to care, but do you know all of the distinct ways you can get their attention in the first place?
If you think that blogs, YouTube videos, and Facebook status updates are the only way to reach your audience, then it’s time to think again.
Here are five ways to get your content to your audience:
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is often forgotten in the face of new, ever-evolving marketing methods. But if you don’t have regular email correspondence with your client base, then now is the time to consider it! By utilizing your email list and connecting with them regularly, you’ll be in direct contact with your most targeted audience. These are people that already care about your brand and want more information from you. You won’t find this anywhere else. Not to mention, it’s practically free to implement. You don’t have to worry about printing costs, postage fees, or beating algorithms and SEO strategies. Just be sure the emails you’re sending are quality and full of value and be careful not to spam your list.
2. Webinars
Hosting a webinar can sound intimidating, but there are so many benefits that they should definitely be in your repertoire! Not only will they give you and your brand more credibility as you present yourself as an expert in your field, but you’ll be able to reach many different kinds of people—other experts, potential customers, and plenty of like-minded individuals interested in all the same things you are. The more engaging your webinar, the more attention it will grab, the more people you will reach, and the more your brand will grow. Plus, you can re-purpose all of your webinar footage into beneficial web content later!
3. Speaking Events
If you have a fear of public speaking, it might be time to join a toastmasters club, because one of the best ways to get yourself and your brand in front of your target audience is to speak at events and conferences. Start by researching events where your target audience usually attends and then pitch yourself to the conference organizer. Explain your area of expertise, what topic you have in mind to discuss, and how you will add value to their event. Not only will you have the chance to speak in front of tons of potential customers, but you’ll also be able to build a relationship with the organization hosting the event—which won’t hurt your brand awareness.
4. Engage On Social Media
Now, if you’re thinking that you already post on your Facebook page with semi-regularity and so this point doesn’t apply to you, think again. Engaging on social media and posting on social media are two completely different things. Your target market is very likely to already be active on social media, but they might not be active on your business page. That means that you might have to go find them or help them find you! Add social media buttons to your website, add links to your business cards, flyers, and emails, talk to people about your social media and ask them to follow you, respond to comments and reviews, participate in groups, start conversations, ask questions, and more. Don’t expect them to start engaging first. You must take the first step.
5. Network, Network, Network!
Nothing quite influences your brand like meeting new people, talking about what you do, and creating strong, lasting relationships. Go to local chamber of commerce meetings, leave your business card places, invite people to lunch. Don’t be afraid to love what you do, tell people about it, and ask them to tag along!
If you’re looking for ways to get the most out of your content, then sign up to join my 7 day Content Repurposing Challenge! Learn how to grow your audience in less time and less work.
We all want to get the most out of our work. Ideally, we’d like to work less and get more! Luckily for you and your business, that’s exactly what we’re talking about today: repurposing content. Recycling your existing content the right way can help you reach a whole new audience, bring back long-forgotten fans, and make the most of your time and effort.
Rather than pouring valuable time and energy into a new blog post, only to have it sit idly on your website’s back shelf, you can bring out an old classic, repurpose it, and give it a whole new life. Here’s how!
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing is exactly what it sounds like: re-creating or editing old content in order to make it suitable for a new purpose. Keep in mind that this is different from content revamping. Content revamping tends to involve updating old content in order to make it more applicable, accurate, or otherwise interesting to suit today’s audience. When you repurpose content, however, you’re keeping everything that was good about the old content while giving it something fresh in order to reach brand new heights or meet a new need.
Here are 3 Tips for Repurposing Your Content the Right Way!
1. Don’t just repurpose any old content.
It might be tempting to go back and find your personal favorite blog post to repurpose, but you have to do better than that. Utilize your Google Analytics to determine what content has been the most popular and choose based on numbers, not simply which one you like best. Figure out why that content performed so well and come up with some ways to repurpose it for your current campaign or goal.
2. Only repurpose content that is still relevant.
Even information that was once incredibly useful can lose its relevance. There’s no point in repurposing outdated information. Before you begin a content repurposing project, make sure that the content is evergreen in nature, meaning that it will continue to be valuable to readers for months on end (or years, if that can be managed!).
3. Get creative!
Not all content comes in the form of blog posts. There are videos, powerpoints, social media posts, and so much more! If you’re stuck in the brainstorming stage of content repurposing, or you don’t even know where to begin, consider some of these snazzy repurpose ideas:
Make video tutorials out of webinar footage. If you’ve ever hosted a webinar, you know that not everyone interested in your information made it. Months after the webinar, you’ll start noticing recurring questions from site visitors who missed out on all the glorious information entirely. Rather than letting that hard work and delicious content go to waste, repurpose your webinar footage into video tutorials. This will add value to your website, encourage interaction, and help drive new visitors.
Turn interviews into expert advice ebooks. Interviews are very popular content for blog posts. They’re easy to create, easy to edit, and often get a lot of traction when done well. They can also be easily re-formatted to fit an ebook. Since some people even prefer ebooks to blog posts, you open the doors to a whole new audience.
Make infographics out of slideshows. If you’ve ever put effort into a PowerPoint presentation, then you know the graphs and charts you end up with are stunning. Rather than letting these sit on your hard drive unused, try turning them into infographics. Not only are they fun to look at, easy to read, and tempting to share, but they work as great opt-in incentives for your site.
Take your best blog posts and make them into podcasts. This one can be a little intimidating if you have no experience recording yourself, but with all the Bluetooth in cars and an ever-growing love for audio books these days, you should make your content easy for people to listen to. Podcasts are one of the best ways to make your content even more convenient to access.
Do you want to reach a wider audience with your content…for free? Are you not sure how to do that on your own? Join my 7-Day Content Repurposing Challenge and learn how to attract more customers in less time.
Have a great week!
Robyn
P.S. if you want to drive more traffic using content you already have and look like an authority in your niche, this challenge is for you! Sign Up Here Now!
Content is king, you’ve heard it a million times. However, creating good content isn’t just about good writing, it implies a broad spectrum of technical elements that businesses need to take care of, in order to get better results from their content marketing efforts.
To better address the technical aspects of content writing, business owners can use a broad spectrum of tools that will help them take into account SEO, readability, and a host of other essential elements that come with content writing. In this article, we’ll look into 5 top writing tools that small business websites can use to get a better effect from their content.
If you’ve been researching the interdependence of SEO and content writing, you must have come across the Flesch-Kincaid scale or the concept of readability score.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale is a quantifiable score can give you some insight into how readable your text is, based on a predefined set of metrics that include the number of words per sentence, paragraph length, adverb density, and so forth. The truth is that in order to calculate a text’s score manually, you have to use a fairly intimidating formula. The good news is that Hemingway is there to help you out with that and give you content-related suggestions in real time that will help you make your text more readable.
This app will allow you to make your text less intimidating by eliminating unnecessary words, expressions, and other linguistic obstacles. It’s up to you to decide what score is optimal for your particular niche or industry. Obviously, if your website sells very niche and highly technical tools and devices, it’s unreasonable to expect that you can adjust the readability score to the level of an eighth grader’s. However, if your niche allows it — make your texts informative and straightforward.
As a freelance writer, you’ll very often have to abide by the latest SEO standards, which also implies that you have to keep an eye at the structure, word count, and other essential parameters that search engines like Google and Bing take into account when they index
After you’ve written the first draft of your text, paste it to Yoast’s content analysis tool to receive suggestions on how to improve it, based on the latest search engine optimization standards.
So, it’s important to take into account that Google and other major search engines analyze reading ease, so bear in mind that your writing shouldn’t be too complicated because, at the end of the day, it needs to suit a broad spectrum of readers.
WOWGrade is a very handy tool that allows you to delegate content creation to professional niche writers. The tool is also a lifesaver if you need to find high-quality editors that would go through the content you wrote and consult you on the stylistic and structural improvements you need to make in the future.
The company has been around for quite a while and have quite an impressive list of corporate and individual clients.
Cliché Finder is really helpful if you’re looking for stylistic consistency. Whether you’re writing a white paper, a blog entry, a press release — clichés can always find their way into our text. The problem with clichés is that they’re commonly useless lexically and they don’t really sound good either.
You can just paste a text into the cliché finder, and it will highlight the clichés it has identified.
Everybody knows about Grammarly. This service has been around for quite a while and has been continuously improving over the years. Basically speaking, Grammarly is there to ensure that all the texts that we write on a device are worded impeccably, from a syntactic, lexical, and stylistic perspective. Grammarly uses Machine Learning to gradually improve the service and also make better suggestions to the people using it.
The technology behind this tool is designed to analyze millions of documents online and compares them to your semantic choices, which is how Grammarly is trained to give you suggestions on how to improve your text. The tool also scans your text for a broad spectrum of structural issues, which are fairly problematic.
Grammarly is vital for the development of your business’s presence online because having grammatically sound is an indispensable component of search engine optimization, which in part defines your commercial success.
Honorable mention
Writefull — a fantastic tool that you can use for both article writing and interface copy. The tool accesses data from Google Web, Google News, and Google Scholar and provides you with the number of times a certain expression was used. If you’re not sure what the best choice of words is — you can always opt for this tool to check how often people have used a said expression or combination of words.
Conclusion
Many of us are talented when it comes to writing, but in the current business ecosystem, competition is fierce. This is why we need these writing tools to improve our style, word choice, and grammar at times.
Author’s BIO:
Linda Grandes is a full-time blogger at Studyton.com and a true expert in writing. She is interested in a variety of topics starting from education and ending at modern art. That`s why the idea of her blog cannot be narrowed to one topic as well.
We all want (and need!) to reach our audience in such a compelling way that they engage with us in return.
There are few things as discouraging and detrimental to you and your business as putting yourself out there, expelling a ton of effort, implementing painstaking strategies, only to hear crickets chirping in response to your hard work. Am I right?
A decrease in audience engagement is a sign that something is malfunctioning. Whether there’s an issue with the products or services you’re offering, the marketing strategy you’re implementing, or the particular audience you’ve targeted, consider these tips for getting over the hump that’s keeping your audience engagement from growing.
4 Tips for Increasing Audience Engagement
Learn Your Audience! Why would you expect someone to engage with you if you haven’t spent some time to engage with them first…in the way they respond to well? It’s possible that you’re not seeing a lot of audience engagement because the particular audience you’re attempting to sell to isn’t overly interested in what you’re marketing or the way you’re attempting to market it. You need to learn who your audience is, what they like, and what makes them more inclined to engage. This might mean narrowing your audience substantially from “everyone” to a more specific group. Once you’ve done this, you’re better equipped to create and market specially for them in order to increase engagement.
Now, it might sound counter-intuitive to narrow your audience in order to increase engagement, but keep in mind that “everyone” will not be interested in what you’re offering, no matter how perfect your product or service. You must identify your audience, dedicate time to learning what they like, and then engage with them in order to grow your engagement!
Examine Your Product/Service. It’s perfectly normal to love your business and believe everyone should want what you’re offering. To an extent, if you didn’t believe this about your business, then you might want to be in a different business altogether! However, often times we think our products or services are perfect and irresistible when, in fact, they could use some improvement. Don’t hesitate to examine your products or services for defects, mistakes, or weak points. Look for places to improve and then do so. You want people to engage with your business because it’s valuable, you’re worth it, and your product or service is actually good.
Consider Your Marketing Strategy. Understanding your audience and your product or service is key to developing a stellar marketing strategy. For instance, if your product is meant to help elderly people, then you might not want to expend a ton of effort in creating Facebook ads (since the majority of your audience might not use Facebook). In the same way, if your target is business owners, then your Facebook ads need to be targeted in such a way to identify people owning a business rather than any and every Facebook user.
For online marketing, keep in mind that the day of the week and time of day also have an effect on your engagement!. Different industries tend to be “online” at different times. For instance, desk-job employees tend to be more active on the internet during business hours (between 9am and 5pm) on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and social media accounts tend to be more active in the afternoons and evenings. For a different industry, these “popular” times might be different, so learning what’s accurate for your particular audience is valuable for increasing audience engagement online.
Look at Yourself and Be Genuine! It will be easier for people to relate and engage with you if you’re as true as you can possibly be to yourself and your brand. Don’t try to be someone else (people will see through it and consequently not engage)! Now, genuineness can be hard to manage sometimes, especially through website content where we want to remain professional, social media posts we want to keep catchy, or webinars where we’re trying to educate others. Nevertheless, it’s so important that you remain true to yourself and your brand so that people who will click with you can do so easily.
Remember that not everyone will like you and your business, but that’s fine! You just want the engagement from your desired audience.
Improving your marketing strategy is far easier than you may expect. Mostly, it’s all about considering which aspects of marketing are the most worthwhile for your business. So, this short guide will walk you through some of the key things we believe you should focus on, while also touching on some areas that maybe aren’t worth your time or attention.
Create A Strong Digital Strategy
Arguably the most important thing to do is to create and build a strong digital marketing presence. The world has pretty much gone full digital, which means the majority of your customers are online in some capacity. To reach them, you must think about things like search engine marketing, SEO, social media, web design, and so on. If you click here, you can learn a lot more about all these digital methods and how they can be applied to help your strategy and create more leads for your business. If you think your business isn’t a digital business, then you’re probably wrong. Even small local companies benefit from digital marketing in the form of local SEO.
Inbound and outbound marketing are like two brothers that strongly dislike one another. This is because one is nice and perfect, while the other doesn’t really get along with anyone. Inbound is the perfect brother as it represents a strand of marketing focused on grabbing people’s attention and getting them to notice you. This is in stark contrast to outbound marketing which is pretty much a case of just forcing your business in peoples faces, usually by a bombardment of ads, cold calls, or spam emails. If you want to improve your marketing strategy, then you need to use inbound marketing techniques, with a firm focus on content marketing. Let your content do all the talking as it sparks people’s interest in your business, and they stumble upon you without having anything forced down their throat. This tends to lead to a much better conversion rate.
Build Specific Campaigns
The last piece of advice is to ensure you build specific marketing campaigns as part of your overall strategy. What we mean is that you should have a marketing campaign to promote a new product, and then one to promote certain offers, and so on. Each one should be built around certain themes and ideas that help grab the attention of your target market. You can also create your campaigns around specific events as well. One very easy example is season-themed marketing campaigns. Companies will alter the way they advertise and promote themselves at different times of the year – summer marketing is vastly different in its town to winter marketing. So, create your specific campaigns to help generate interest when the time is right.
It’s not rocket science, and keep in mind there are many marketers out there right now who can help you! All it comes down to are three simple rules; go digital, focus on inbound marketing, and build campaigns for specific product launches, services, or events. Do all of this, and your marketing strategy will be improved.
The digital age has brought with it an unprecedented number of ways to make it as an entrepreneur, not to mention a virtually limitless number of fields that an entrepreneurially minded person can choose to specialise in.
Of course, the other side of that coin is that the digital age has also brought with it a large number of ways to make unfortunate business mistakes and hamper your professional progress via your own inability to effectively handle and adapt to the nuances of your field.
While some of these issue and stumbling blocks are, indeed, rooted in the internet and digital technologies themselves, a good number of others are simply the result of timeless mishaps that have dogged entrepreneurs and small business owners for just about as long as people have been working and earning money.
One of the classic blunders that afflict many entrepreneurs — digital and otherwise — is an inability to outsource, or the overwhelming desire to micro-manage every aspect of the business to the point where any other team or staff members are essentially left unable to do their job.
As it so happens, learning to outsource effectively might be even more essential for digital entrepreneurs as for others. So, if you notice a tendency in yourself to try and “do it all yourself” to the detriment of your business, consider hiring a company like Scarlett Group to take care of IT and other branches of your business, so that you can focus on your core competencies.
Here are some reasons why knowing when to outsource is essential for your success as a digital entrepreneur.
The business world is more complex today than ever before
One undeniable feature of the hyper-connected digital world which we all currently inhabit, is that things are simply more complicated than they’ve ever been before, across a wide variety of measures.
Whereas it was once the case that virtually every job was constrained by certain practicalities, borders, and technologies, virtually everything is up in the air now in this age of never-ending innovation, lightning-fast global communication, and the endless flow of information that characterises 21st Century living.
If you don’t police your productivity and your attention ruthlessly, you could spend all day, every day, fruitlessly trying to identify and apply different business strategies, new technologies, and so on.
Likewise, if you run a moderately successful business of almost any type, you could easily spread yourself far too thin by going above and beyond the call of duty in order to act as a fully-fledged team, all by yourself, while seeking to perform all the increasingly nuanced and specialised roles of a full team, all with the time and likely energy levels of any other normal person.
To put it simply, the digital age has made the business world more complex than ever before. It’s absolutely essential for any entrepreneur who wants to be successful, to know how best to spend their time in any given moment, while also having a good understanding of where their time is only wasted.
Outsourcing can be the key to ensuring that you don’t get swamped trying to do an endless number of jobs that you’re not specialised for.
You only have as much time in the day as anyone else
Tied in to the point above, is the clear and evident fact that you simply don’t have an endless amount of time. In fact, it’s one of those weird and wonderful facts of life that every single person who lives today, and who has ever lived, and who ever will live — the most ludicrously productive, and the laziest and most prone to procrastination alike — all have the exact same number of hours, minutes, and seconds in a day.
It may seem bizarre at first glance to think that you have just as much of this vital resource as someone like Richard Branson or Warren Buffet, but there’s something empowering in this fundamental understanding, too.
That is, it’s empowering if you understand the fundamental lesson of this. Which is that you need to treat your time as the most valuable and essential resource you could ever possess, and then you’ll be able to appropriately handle it, by doing the most essential thing you can with each moment you have available.
This is pretty much the same as saying that you really need to learn to outsource and defer tasks to others as and when it’s appropriate and expedient to do so.
If you waste this vital resource on tasks that are not very important, or that you’re not very good at, while neglecting those tasks that really need your attention, you’re setting yourself up for a disastrous failure down the line.
Other people can do things that you can’t
This point should be self-evident, but a large part of the reason why many entrepreneurs try to do it all themselves, is often that they’ve convinced themselves that no one else can do anything for their business quite as well, and with quite as much attention to detail, as they can.
While it’s certainly likely to be the case that no one will be as invested in your business as you are, it’s a complete fallacy to think that no one could do a better job in handling a particular aspect of your job than you can.
It’s highly unlikely that you will be a brilliant administrator, an excellent marketer, a superb IT specialist, a product development pro, a logistics maestro, and be otherwise proficient to a high degree in everything that goes into running a successful business.
If you put your ego and paranoia aside and are willing to explore outsourcing as a feasible option for various “departments” of your business, you can benefit greatly from the expertise of people who have developed their careers around becoming proficient in one or two specific areas, which in all likelihood are going to be different from the areas in which you’re proficient — no matter how much of a renaissance man, or woman, you might be.
