The Old Man and The Pen

This is a simple story about the life of a particular writer, and how he ignored the one thing about his craft that would have given him everything he truly wanted …

A young man in his late twenties decided to become a writer.

At the beginning of the pursuit of his craft, he sought out all the writing advice he could find. He attended writing workshops, went to many parties of a literary nature, drove far into the woods seeking the wisdom of writing retreats, and read countless books on writing by countless other writers.

After several years of this, he began to despair. He seemed to have found the correct knowledge, and a few seemingly valuable contacts along the way, but he hadn’t yet written anything of consequence.

He felt very validated by a number of his very nice friends in his Thursday night writing circle, but he couldn’t keep down the horror in his gut that something was going terribly wrong.

He was having a good time. There were the parties, the drink, the pills, and the long conversations about art and writing.

Then, somewhere in his mid-thirties, the not-so-young-anymore writer looked around and realized that he had wasted many years. This confused him, because his entire circle of friends were “writers” after all.

He had a decision to make.

On a particularly starry Thursday night, the phone rang — like it did almost every other night of the week — at 11:03 p.m. Pacific Time. Only this time, he didn’t answer it. It rang again, and again, and four more times before midnight. He did not pick it up.

Instead of going out with his “writer” friends, that night he just sat at his desk and stared at a blank sheet of paper. He did manage to get 133 words down before sunrise. It was a bad feeling to have accomplished so little — while also missing out on the booze — but it was a much better feeling than anything he could remember in years.

So, he did not answer the phone on the next night, or the next. Instead, he stayed in, staring at blank pages and slowly filling them up with words. And then he just … kept going like that … for another 42 years.

A few weeks before his death, a reporter asked the old writer for the secret to a great literary career.

The old man held up a worn Bic pen and said, “If there is a secret, it’s in here somewhere, swirling around in all that black ink. It spills down on the page, and something happens, or it doesn’t, and you spill more and more of it to try to find your way.”

“What if I use a keyboard instead of a pen?” the reporter asked.

“Don’t get cute with me kid, same damn thing,” the writer said. “Slow and steady.”

The old writer had not become famous or particularly wealthy; he hadn’t won any international awards or even made a single bestseller list. Those things, he said, were not up to him, not in his control, or yours. But, over the course of many years, he had built an unimpeachable reputation, a vast audience, and a very good living.

He could not say what had become of his old “writer” friends, but he was grateful that they had eventually driven him straight into the arms of his chosen craft.

“You can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.”
– Seth Godin

Image source: Eli Francis via Unsplash.

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How to Know Exactly What Content to Deliver to Convert More Prospects

Back in the 1940s, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted an experiment. They showed study participants an animated film consisting of a rectangle with an opening, plus a circle and two triangles in motion.

The participants were then asked to simply describe what they saw in the film. Before you keep reading, take a look at it yourself. I’ll be here when you come back.

So, what did you see? Out of all the study participants, only one responded with “a rectangle with an opening, plus a circle and two triangles in motion.” The rest developed elaborate stories about the simple geometric shapes.

Many participants concluded the circle and the little triangle were in love, and that the evil grey triangle was trying to harm or abduct the circle. Others went further to conclude that the blue triangle fought back against the larger triangle, allowing his love to escape back inside, where they soon rendezvoused, embraced, and lived happily ever after.

That’s pretty wild when you think about it.

The Heider-Simmel experiment became the initial basis of attribution theory, which describes how people explain the behavior of others, themselves, and also, apparently, geometric shapes on the go.

More importantly, people explain things in terms of stories. Even in situations where no story is being intentionally told, we’re telling ourselves a tale as a way to explain our experience of reality.

And yes, we tell ourselves stories about brands, products, and services. Whether you’re consciously telling a story or not, prospects are telling themselves a story about you.

Are you telling a story? And more importantly, does that story resonate with the way your prospective customers and clients are seeing things?

This is the key to knowing what your prospect needs to hear, and when they need to hear it, as part of your overall content marketing strategy. And in a networked, information-rich world where the prospects have all the power, this is your only chance to control the narrative.

What kind of story to tell?

You need to tell a Star Wars story. And by that, I mean you need to take your prospects along a content marketing version of the mythic hero’s journey.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell identifies a “monomyth” — a fundamental structure common to myths that have survived for thousands of years. Campbell’s identification of these enduring myths from disparate times and regions has inspired modern storytellers to consciously craft their work following the monomyth framework, also known as the hero’s journey.

Most notable among those inspired by the hero’s journey is George Lucas, who acknowledged Campbell’s work as the source of the plot for Star Wars. As a content marketer, you can also consciously incorporate the monomyth into your launches, funnels, and general editorial calendar.

The image above shows the general elements of the hero’s journey, which can be broken down into much more detail than presented here. It’s important to note that not all monomythic stories contain every aspect, but the original Star Wars faithfully follows almost every element of the hero’s journey.

Let’s focus on the first two steps of the journey, in the “ordinary world” before the journey truly begins. Here’s how those elements occurred in the original Star Wars.

• Luke is living in the ordinary world of his home planet, working on the family farm.
• The “call to adventure” is R2-D2’s holographic message from Princess Leia, the classic princess in distress.
• Luke initially refuses the call due to his family obligations, until his aunt and uncle are killed.
• Luke meets his mentor and guide, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who convinces Luke to proceed with his heroic journey.
• Obi-Wan gives Luke a gift that determines his destiny — his father’s lightsaber.

How does this apply to content marketing? Simple. As I mentioned last time:

Your prospect is Luke. You are Obi-Wan.

The mistake most often made in marketing is thinking of your business as the hero, resulting in egocentric messages that no one else cares about. The prospect is always the primary hero, because they are the one going on the journey — whether big or small — to solve a problem or satisfy a desire.

• The prospect starts off in the ordinary world of their lives.
• The call to adventure is an unsolved problem or unfulfilled desire.
• There’s resistance to solving that problem or satisfying the desire.
• A mentor (your brand) appears that helps them proceed with the journey.
• You deliver a gift (your content) that ultimately leads to a purchase

By making the prospect the hero, your brand also becomes a hero in the prospect’s story.

And by accepting the role of mentor with your content, your business accomplishes its goals while helping the prospect do the same. Which is how business is supposed to work, right?

8 core steps in the buyer’s journey

I’ve been using the hero’s journey to teach marketing and sales since 2007. I’ve found that just the act of thinking of the prospect as the hero makes you a better content marketer.

When you think in terms of empowering people to solve their problem by playing the role of mentor, you’re naturally performing better than competitors who take an egocentric approach.

This is also the exact way we come up with content marketing strategies for our own launches, funnels, and general editorial calendar. After years of using this strategic process, I’ve found that every buyer’s journey contains key points where you must deliver the right information at the right time to succeed at an optimal level.

Remember, each journey is tied to a particular who that you have documented. Some people create content journeys for multiple personas, but my advice is that you pick one at first and focus. Even Apple stuck with one target persona for the entirety of the Get a Mac campaign.

You’ll notice I use the word “problem” below, rather than “problem or desire.” An unfulfilled desire is a problem in the mind of the prospect, so it works on its own.

1. Ordinary World: This is the world (and worldview) that your ideal prospect lives in. She may be aware of the problem that she has, but she hasn’t yet resolved to do something about it. You understand how this person thinks, sees, feels, and behaves due to the empathy mapping process.

2. Call to Adventure: The prospect decides to take action to solve the problem. It could be a New Year’s resolution, a longstanding goal, or a problem that rears its head for the first time.

3. Resistance to the Call: At this point, the prospect starts to waver in her commitment to solving the problem. Maybe it seems too hard, too expensive, too time consuming, or simply too impractical. As we’ll discuss in a bit, this is a key content inflection point.

4. The Mentor and the Gift: This is the point that you are initially accepted as a mentor that guides the buyer’s journey. The prospect accepts your offer of a gift, in the form of information, that promises to help her solve the problem.

5. Crossing the Threshold: This is the point of purchase where the prospect believes that your product or service will lead to the problem being solved, which will lead to transformation. The most important thing to understand is that, unlike flawed funnel metaphors, the journey does not end at purchase.

6. Traveling the Road: The customer begins using the product or service with the goal of achieving success in the context of the problem. Who cares if the customer stops the journey right after purchase, right? Wrong — too often this leads to a refund request; plus you miss out on the huge benefits that accompany a happy customer.

7. Seizing the Treasure: The customer experiences success with your product or service. What does this look like for them and you? How will you know when it happens?

8. The New Ordinary: The customer has experienced a positive transaction with you, and yet we’re just now getting to the really good stuff. This is a perfect time to prime them for repeat or upsell purchases or referrals. At this point, deliver content that aims at retention for recurring revenue products, and make savvy requests for direct referrals, testimonials, and word of mouth.

Of the eight, only Traveling the Road isn’t universal — if you’re an electrician, you show up and either fix the problem or don’t. But if you’re selling software-as-a-service, for example, content that gets users engaged with the platform is critical to reducing churn.

These core steps can provide you with a beginning framework for a detailed map of the buyer’s journey. The next step is to add the touchpoints that are unique to your product or service.

Your unique journey map

You may be thinking about how exactly you’re supposed to map this out. Fortunately, there’s already an established procedure for this, just as during the who phase.

An experience map is a visual representation of the path a consumer takes — from beginning to end — with your content, and then with your product or service.

By mapping the journey, you know where the additional crucial touchpoints are, and what content can empower the journey to continue.

Here’s an example from Adaptive Path for Rail Europe:

This map demonstrates the journey a consumer would take while riding the trains in Europe. It follows her from the early stages of research and planning to the end of her trip.

You see what she is doing (searching Google, looking up timetables), what she is thinking during each action (do I have everything I need, and am I on the right train?), and what she is feeling (stressed: I’m about to leave the country and Rail Europe won’t answer the phone).

Do you see the correlation with the empathy mapping exercise you did back when developing a snapshot of your ideal customer? It’s no coincidence that we’re now applying what the prospect is “Thinking,” “Seeing,” “Doing,” and “Feeling” in their ordinary world to the journey they need to travel.

In a piece called the Anatomy of an Experience Map, Chris Risdon at Adaptive Path suggests your experience map should have these five components:

1. The lens: This is how a particular person (or persona) views the journey. Keep in mind, this journey will not be the same for everyone. You will more than likely have more than one experience map.
2. The journey model: This is the actual design of the map. If all goes well, it should render insight to answer questions like “What happens here? What’s important about this transition?”
3. Qualitative insight: This is where the Thinking-Seeing-Doing-Feeling of an empathy map comes in handy.
4. Quantitative information: This is data that brings attention to certain aspects of your map. It reveals information like “80 percent of people abandon the process at this touchpoint.”
5. Takeaways: This is where the map earns its money. What are the conclusions? Opportunities? Threats to the system? Does it identify your strengths? Highlight your weaknesses?

You can find more detailed information on creating a customer experience map here. Like empathy mapping, it can be done solo, but works even better as a collaborative process, so that everyone on your team understands the journey from the perspective of the prospect and subsequent customer.

Mapping the 7 key influence principles

When you consider influential content, you may naturally think that it’s about how your present the information. While that’s true from an engagement standpoint, which principle of influence to apply and when to emphasize it is an exercise in what as well.

In other words, beyond the raw information of the what, you’ll also want to identify the order of emphasis for things like reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, commitment and consistency, unity, and scarcity.

Every successful digital marketer I know purposefully applies those seven principles in their content and copy, because they all treat Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini as their bible. If you haven’t read it, you should — but in the meantime check out this six-page PDF that explains the original six principles, and here’s an article by Sonia Simone on the all-important 7th principle of unity.

At Rainmaker Digital, we think in terms of four different types of content when mapping the buyer’s journey. Keep in mind that great marketing content contains all of these elements; you’re simply selecting a category based on the primary aim of the individual piece at the appropriate time.

First up we have Attraction content, otherwise known as “top of funnel” information. This corresponds best with the Resistance to the Call point of the journey — it addresses the problem while also addressing common objections to moving forward. In addition to creating the feeling that “you’re reading their mind,” you’re also invoking early influence through reciprocity, social proof through share numbers, and establishing authority.

Next up, you have your cornerstone influence principle thanks to Authority content. The important thing is that you demonstrate authority, rather than claim it. Your Attraction content sets the stage, and your Authority content should be gated behind an email opt-in. At this stage, you’re establishing clear authority, continuing to leverage reciprocity and social proof, and adding liking, plus commitment and consistency thanks to the opt-in.

Affinity content solidly positions you as a “likable expert,” but it goes beyond that. This is where you let your core values shine. You reflect the prospect’s worldview back to them in a completely authentic way, prompting the powerful principle of unity. Never underestimate how often people choose to do business with people they like, and who also see the world like they do.

Finally, it all comes down to Action. Unlike Phil Connors, you don’t look for ultimate action at the beginning of the journey. But you do rely on smaller actions along the way, especially at the bridge between Attraction content and Authority content. That said, the key influence principle at this stage is scarcity, which you’ve earned the right to employ thanks to the other six principles. People fear missing out more than they desire gain, so make sure to use it ethically.

This is the outline of your story

It’s tempting at this point to try to imagine how you’re going to execute on your strategy, but you’re not quite there yet. Soon, I’ll share with you a “real world” example of how this looks in action.

For now, map the journey experience. In addition to your character, you’ve now got the plot points in the narrative you’re weaving.

All that’s left is to figure out how to tell the story. That’s up next week.

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How to Repackage Webinars Into Lots of Awesome Content

Webinars are an excellent way to connect with users, directly engage, promote services, generate leads, and build authority.

Webinars are among the most effective promotional tactics out there providing you with lots of opportunities from marketing to sales.

A single webinar can provide benefits for years to come.

There is no doubt that webinars are incredible resources. But they don’t end at the webinar itself. You can repackage that content into new content, which will stretch even further.

As you may know, I am big fan of repackaging and writing productivity and I see webinars as the huge opportunity to try the tactic.

Here are some ideas to get you started..

Offer It As A Video

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The easiest way to get more from your webinar is to offer it to people who couldn’t be there for the live version. You just take the recorded video, stamp on a title card and ending card, enhance it for your chosen video platform, and post it. You can see how SEMrush is doing it masterfully turning their webinars into valuable content (including videos and downloadable Slideshare files) and using it to collect leads.

You have a couple of options here. First is just to put it somewhere like Youtube, but I would hold off on that. The same with platforms like Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. You will get there eventually, but think of it as your secondary form of promotion.

Another option is to host it directly on your site. For the first few months, put it behind a sign-up wall. Ask people for their email addresses to access the video. Sites like Hootsuite use this method, and it is an excellent way to build email subscriber lists.

Ask them during sign-up if they also want to subscribe to your newsletter. Never make it mandatory, or start sending them newsletter just because they gave you their email address. You will get on their nerves. Just asking will still give you plenty of addresses, so you will have a double tier benefit from the collection.

Once you have had the video up this way for awhile, you can re-release it for people on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. This has the added benefit of making those who go to your site to sign-up to view feel like they are part of an exclusive group.

If you do a series of webinars, you can also consolidate them into a Udemy course.

Break It Into Blog Posts

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Everyone is always looking for regular ideas for blog posts, right? Your webinars will provide you with plenty, if you look hard enough.

Think outside of the box and go for a stream of consciousness association. Turn your webinar sub-sections into separate blog posts. If you have any questions during the webinar, cover them in separate blog posts too!

Don’t forget to link to your video (and / or Udemy course) from each blog post you publish. That’s how you’ll generate more views and engagement.

Create A Downloadable Tutorial

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You are already going to (presumably) offering step by step advice of some kind. You can create a tutorial by breaking down these steps into even more basic ideas, and offering them on their own.

How you do this will be up to you. If you have published a series of blog posts (see the step above), you can easily turn them into one complete pdf file and offer your readers to subscribe to download.

If you have the skills, or know someone who does you can ask/hire, you can even make an infographic showing it off. Those are viral fodder for websites like Pinterest, so you would be doing yourself a real favor there.

Re-Use Your Presentation

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Slideshare is a great platform with a very active community, most of them professionals. But it isn’t overly crowded, so with a bit of meta data optimization you will get plenty of views.

You are most likely to have had your presentations ready for the webinar, so just optimize it a bit for the Slideshare and upload it there!

Be sure to take a look at the top presentations on Slideshare to get an idea of what works.

Use The Q&A For A FAQ

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Most webinars have a portion that is dedicated to Q&A’s. If your own doesn’t, it should. Either this will be done in real time by connecting through a tool like Hangouts/Tweetchats/etc, or you can take questions ahead of time and read them out during the Q&A with credit to the asker.

These are so helpful for content. Not only do they show you the questions people have so you can make fitting blog posts/videos/tutorials/etc. in the future, but you can make something from the Q&A itself. It also offers a chance to link to the video, hidden behind that sign-up wall.

Here are some tools to find even more questions people tend to ask when they discuss your webinar topic (In case you didn’t get enough during the event).

Conclusion

Webinars are the best, period. They are a great way to connect with your audience. They are a means of asserting your authority on any given topic. They are even a way to build email lists, which remain among your most crucial weapons in marketing. Everyone should be creating them.

Everyone should also be creating other content from them. Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas. If you have others you should post them below, I would love to hear about them. You can never have too many tools at your disposal.

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WebmasterWorld’s Top Discussions of 2016 And More: Weekly Forum Update

Greetings once again, SEO fans! We’ve got a big t-bone steak of an update for you this week. WebmasterWorld’s administrator, engine, was kind enough to put together a “Best of 2016” thread which I’m dying to share.

If you know the caliber of discussion that happens on WebmasterWorld, then the idea of a “best-of” thread should already have you salivating. We also have threads about Google news, like Google’s new AdWords report about bad advertising practices.

On Cre8asiteforums, Kim and the gang have an eye-opening thread about Google’s new interstitial penalty.

Finally, I wrote up a little post on SEO Chat to help SEO newbies understand the difference between being indexed and ranking for keywords. Let’s dive in!

Top WebmasterWorld Discussions and News of 2016

Whatever your feelings are about 2016, negative or positive, it certainly brought a lot of change to the world. The world of SEO was no exception! WebmasterWorld admin engine’s list of top discussions from 2016 proves that it was an eventful year.

He’s broken it down to the top stories and discussions from every month, which is quite a feat! You can start in January with the very first announcement about AMP and go all the way to November, when it was revealed that publishers were giving “mixed reviews” to AMP’s progress.

Along the way, make sure to dip into great discussions like “Making Links Usable Again,” “I’m Tired of The ‘Is SEO Dead?’ Question,” and “The Problem With SEO ‘As Usual’.” If you ever wanted a textbook for advanced SEO…this is pretty close!

Chrome 56 Arrives With “Not Secure” Notices and 28% Faster Reload Capability

Here it is! This is the version of Chrome that Google has been warning about – if you have password or credit card forms and they’re still HTTP, Chrome 56 will mark them as “Not Secure.”

As WebmasterWorld’s admin engine describes,

“Google says it offers 29% faster reloading and 60% less validation requests.”

Neat!

YouTube – Quality or Quantity?

If you’ve ever taken a break from the SEO world, then you know how tricky it can be to get back in. Things change so quickly that if you aren’t following the daily or weekly updates, you can lose your edge in a hurry. In this SEO Chat thread, a new member is returning to the SEO world with a few questions.

Their colleagues have a peculiar idea about YouTube:

“Their idea is that quantity is everything! However,” writes the member, “back when I was doing SEO the first time round, this was very much wrong!”

Basically, this member’s colleagues believe that to be successful in the world of YouTube, they need to post dozens of 10 – 20 second long videos which,

“…to put it politely, are absolutely terrible!!”

Senior SEO Chat members affirm that, yes, this is a bad idea!

Google Reports on AdWords Bad Advertising Practices 2016

Google had its hands full of spam and malware last year, it seems. Their recently released report about bad ads, practices, and actors indicates that

“…in 2016 Google took down 1.7 billion ads that broke its ad policies, which the company says was more than double that of 2015,” writes WebmasterWorld’s admin engine.

The report details the different kinds of bad ads and actors that were taken down, which is quite interesting. As engine puts it,

“It begs the question, are there more bad ads, or is Google getting better at catching them, or both?”

Surprisingly, click fraud in AdWords and AdSense was a topic that received no mention.

Pulling Your Hair Out Over Google and Demoting Pages With Interstitials

On Cre8asiteforums, some members are finding it difficult to convince clients to take Google’s interstitial penalty seriously. And even if you do take Google seriously, there are a lot of questions about when and how the penalty might be applied!

Cre8asiteforums member iamlost has some very interesting musings about how to test interstitials and how to analyze what they’re for and if they’re worth the annoyance. You can always find a technical discussion on Cre8asiteforums!

Up to 350,000 Fake Twitter Accounts Discovered in One Network

Twitter has a fake account problem. Researchers who study Twitter have known about that for a while, but they’ve only just now discovered the extent of the networks that fake accounts have created. These accounts are sometimes run by bots which are programmed to

“…help boost follower numbers, to tweet spam messages, and promote specific interests, amongst other reasons.”

WebmasterWorld member Dimitri writes that

“…that’s only 0.10% of the total number of Twitter accounts, if I don’t make mistake. However, I wonder how they managed to create that many accounts. I thought that now, you needed a phone number to open an account.”

Burner phones are one solution – and other members of WebmasterWorld write that, sometimes, you can link multiple accounts to the same number. Twitter is a useful tool, especially for journalists and artists. But if these bots are able to manipulate conversations and create a false impression of authority for certain users of the platform, Twitter’s value goes soaring out the window.

The Difference Between Being Indexed and Ranking

Oftentimes on SEO Chat, a newbie member will post that their site hasn’t been indexed. Sometimes they write that it has been months, and still not a single page has been indexed! But when I or a senior member do a simple “site:” search, we’ll find hundreds of pages turning up.

It’s a common mistake – they aren’t ranking, and they’re under the mistaken impression that they aren’t indexed either. You can find plenty of great resources for how to get indexed faster, as well as tips for link building and on-page SEO, in this thread! Tackle indexing and ranking as their own unique issues. As Ann writes,

“Crawl = spider links; Index = save in database; Rank = decide where to show in search results.”

Simple, right?

New Bing Ads Automation to Import Google AdWords

This should make it easier for any Google AdWords users to get involved with Bing Ads! You can now import your Google AdWords campaigns right over to Bing Ads automatically.

This Threadwatch notice links to a WebmasterWorld discussion, where forum member buckworks has an important clarification:

“A word to the wise: in another thread, Ogletree [another member] cautioned us to be very careful with broad matches in AdWords-to-Bing transfers. On one of his keywords Bing wasted a painful amount of money with broad matching that was a lot broader than AdWords had been doing.”

Just like any other automated SEO tool – remember to step in and use your own experience and sense of context to be safe!

DuckDuckGo Reaches Past 10 Billion Searches – 4 Billion Were in 2016

The “plucky duck” search engine has hit another major milestone! As one of our Threadwatch members writes, it’s

“…good news for those of you who support search engine alternatives to Google and Bing…”

Of course, Google claims to handle around 2 trillion searches every year. So DuckDuckGo still has a lot of catching up to do. But the increase in searches from 2015 to 2016 is still worth celebrating!

Bravo, DuckDuckGo!

The post WebmasterWorld’s Top Discussions of 2016 And More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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‘What Kind of Content Should I Create?’

Last week, we talked about how to really understand who is in your audience.

This week, we’re shifting into what kind of message they want and need from you. Brian kicked off on Monday with a piece of classic marketing advice (exemplified by a classic American comic film):

It’s not enough to just know your audience. You also need to put their interests and desires ahead of your own.

That might sound impossibly idealistic — but in fact, it’s pure pragmatism.

On Tuesday, Beth Hayden gave some specific thoughts on how to do it, by creating extraordinarily generous content that can open all kinds of doors for your business.

The Copyblogger FM podcast this week talks about your customer’s path to purchase and how to make it a little more appealing (and effective). I talk about the right places to ask for a sale and how you can discover what kinds of content to create.

In Wednesday’s post, I continued that theme of the content marketing path — taking a winding road through a new persuasion “formula” I’m calling ECUBED. I’d love your thoughts on how you’d tweak or add to that formula — drop by and leave a comment?

Last chance to get an exceptional price on the Rainmaker Platform

By the way, I wanted to remind you that this Friday (that’s tomorrow), January 27, 2017 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, the price of the Rainmaker Platform is going to rise significantly.

Sign up at the current lower price and we’ll lock that in for you as long as you keep your site on Rainmaker.

Get started here.

In February, we’ll be holding a special series of educational webinars tailored to Rainmaker owners. So if you do decide to join us on the Platform, you’ll have some very specific, tactical business help to get traction and get your business moving.

Catch you next week!

— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Catch up on this week’s content

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The Art of Seductive Content Marketing

by Brian Clark

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3 Ways to Become More Generous and Grow Your Audience

by Beth Hayden

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Don’t Get Flattened on the Attention Superhighway

by Sonia Simone

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3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

by Sonia Simone

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Enhance Your Freelance, with Jennifer Bourn

by Brian Clark

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How Screenwriter and ‘All Our Wrong Todays’ Author Elan Mastai Writes: Part One

by Kelton Reid

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A Crash Course in Copyright for Creators

by Brian Clark

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One Podcast, One Audience, or One Topic (Two Attempts)

by Jerod Morris & Jon Nastor

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Don’t Get Flattened on the Attention Superhighway

When we talk about content marketing strategy, it’s amazing how often people think that means:

Can I Haz Moar Peoples!!!

(English translation: How can I get more traffic to my site?)

That’s not new — the quest for eyeballs is as old as online business.

And it does matter. It’s important to have a critical mass of folks who know you exist. Ask anyone trying to get a business off the ground with an email list of 34 people, 8 of whom they’re related to.

You need a big enough audience to allow for a meaningful response when you try out a new content idea, or craft an offer for your product or service.

But there’s no shortage of online publishers with big audiences and tiny businesses. If all you do is stand on the Information Superhighway trying to flag people down, you’re going to get flattened.

Instead, craft a thoughtful, well-designed path. Lead prospects from the noise and clutter of the larger web to a sustained and valuable connection that solves the problems they care about.

Smart business isn’t about gaining a massive amount of attention. It’s about gaining the right kind of attention from the right people … and continuing the journey from there.

Copywriting formulas

When you want to persuade, it’s useful to take a look at the classic “formulas” of copywriting — because copywriting is simply persuasion that takes place (partly or completely) without the help of an individual human salesperson.

Most of these formulas begin with the letter A — which stands for attention. And that’s what most marketing strategy tends to focus on: how to get the attention of all those distracted folks zooming around the web.

The granddaddy of persuasion formulas is AIDA. That stands for:

Attention — Interest — Desire — Action

Back when copywriting was very, very hard, you had to do all of those steps with one piece of content, often something printed on paper and delivered by post.

Today, we get a lot more shots. We can handle each of those elements with individual content. Even better, we can craft multiple pieces of content to serve different functions.

So if you need to spend more time addressing a topic that interests your audience, you can craft a content series, or even an entire content library.

Another time-tested formula is P-A-S.

Problem — Agitate — Solve

This one doesn’t start with A, but it does kick off with a compelling audience problem, which inherently tends to grab attention. Agitation means getting into the problem in a deeper, more emotionally resonant way … and then the business can step in to solve the problem.

These are good formulas, and they still have their place. But in a content marketing environment, they tend to dramatically underestimate the complex role of those middle letters.

What happens in the middle?

Attention strategies are fun to learn about. Potent headlines, exciting images, killer hooks.

But when you’re working on a landing page, a video sales letter, an infomercial, or a 15-second radio ad, the middle can be the toughest part.

The middle starts to look like actual work.

You’re cultivating the relationship. That means a significant part of the “middle” of your content marketing is about offering value generously and being a decent human.

You nurture the relationship with the audience by offering:

• Interesting educational material that helps them do things they want to do
• Content that shows your audience who you are and what you believe
• Opportunities for small, low-risk commitments, to test the waters and experience what you have to offer

Where are the rough patches?

Most paths have some rough spots — places that aren’t as easy to navigate.

When we’re talking about your content marketing path, these include the objections your audience will have to moving forward with your offer. These are things like:

• It seems expensive.
• It seems complicated.
• It seems like it only works for other people.
• It seems hard to get started.
• It seems like a long time before I’ll see results.

A smart, well-structured content path will include work that speaks directly to these objections.

You might tell stories that show the audience how someone else wrestled with the issue. Or offer clear, simple explanations of product features — perhaps an infographic or explainer video — to show how your solution overcomes the problem.

If I were going to write a persuasion formula

If I wanted to craft a persuasion formula for the 21st century, what would it look like?

I’d need to start by knowing who I wanted to speak with. What do they care about? What kinds of problems could I help them with? So the first letter might be K for Knowledge or E for Empathy.

From there, I think I’d go to Connection rather than Attention — simply because attention today is so fleeting. I’d try to spark a moment of connection instead, to have some chance of a more enduring relationship.

In my experience, building connection usually combines speaking to a problem the audience cares about and speaking from a position of shared values.

That kind of principled problem-solving constructs a content path that is marked by Usefulness. What kinds of content could I create that my audience would find valuable? What problems could I solve? Is there some “low hanging fruit” I could help my audience pick?

What Objections could I address? What risks could I manage for my audience?

Along the path, I’d try to craft some introductory Offers that helped people try my ideas out for themselves. In other words, some inexpensive ways they could pick up products or services — maybe even free products or services — that would help them get something they want.

If there were key Beliefs, assumptions, or convictions that the audience needed to adopt to go further, I’d also talk about those. For example, at Copyblogger, we believe it’s unacceptably risky to put your entire business on a platform someone else controls, like Facebook or Tumblr.

I’d use my useful content path to make the Case for my solution to my audience’s problems — keeping an eye open for the audience’s responses and desires, not just my own assumptions about what they need or want.

Along the path, I’d remember to Ask for the audience’s action on a more significant offer and Measure how they respond.

Put another way, I’d measure their Engagement by seeing if there’s a product or service they feel ready to buy.

Did they like the offer a lot? Did lots of folks complete the transaction? I’d Iterate and craft more offers like that one. Did they hate it? Did just a few or no people take me up on the offer? Again, iteration would lead me to put something together that was better aligned with the audience’s desires.

Finally, I’d work on Sustaining the relationship. It’s great to do business once — but it’s more satisfying (and makes better business sense) to create long-term relationships in which the audience and the business grow together.

To that end, I’d make a commitment to Delivering value over time and keep looking for new ways to serve that audience.

That leaves me with something like ECUOOBCAMEISD. Hm.

ECUBED?

OK, how about ECUBED?

• Empathize
• Connect
• Useful, make myself (Yoda-talking I am)
• Beliefs, speak to
• Engage audience action by making an offer
• Deliver value over time

I definitely had to massage a few things to come up with a decent acronym. So, how would you tweak it?

Let us know your thoughts and suggestions on what this kind of “formula” might look like in the comments.

The post Don’t Get Flattened on the Attention Superhighway appeared first on Copyblogger.

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3 Ways to Become More Generous and Grow Your Audience

Giving to your audience is one of the foundations of any smart content marketing strategy.

To grow your audience and get better results for your business, it might be time to expand your content beyond blog posts, podcast episodes, or newsletters and find more ways to be truly generous.

The idea is:

Don’t hold back, don’t be stingy, and don’t cut corners. Just give, and give freely.

Looking to become a “giver,” rather than a “taker?” Let’s talk about why generosity works and how you can give your audience more value.

Why giving generously works

You might be thinking:

“How in the world does giving generously help my business grow?”

Generosity works when you’re marketing your business because it:

• Pulls people toward you and your message. Instead of chasing down prospects and begging them to pay attention to you (with advertising or other traditional marketing methods), you attract your perfect customers and clients to what you give away. They come to you.
• Establishes you as a go-to expert and trusted advisor in your field. When people know you are a giver — and they like what you give away — they recognize you as someone who can be trusted and relied upon.
• Helps you get more referrals. Giving generously puts you in front of your audience regularly — which means they will remember your company name when they need (or someone they know needs) a product or service like yours.
• Gives you the opportunity to interact without pitching. This one is big. If you don’t give generously, your options for conversations with your customers are limited to one extremely limited theme: SELL, SELL, SELL. That’s boring and aggravating for your audience members, and uncomfortable for you, too.

What to give away

Wondering what you should give to your audience?

There are the usual content marketing possibilities, like blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, webinars, and ebooks. These are all great choices.

Also consider giving:

• Live presentations, or hosting group discussions and Q&A sessions
• Short consultations, if you’re a service provider
• Introductions to other helpful people in your community (or in your strategic partner network)
• Advice and support in social media groups, like Facebook or LinkedIn groups
• Lists of recommended resources, tools, websites, and blogs

Think about your perfect client or customer and ask yourself:

“What could I give her that would really improve her life?”

With some creativity, you’ll be able to create high-value resources that don’t hurt your business model.

The three methods below will help you become extraordinarily generous.

1. Don’t err on the side of caution

Chris Garrett’s article, How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free, answers a lot of common questions about this topic.

The entire article is helpful, but what I like best about the post is that Chris advises content marketers to not be concerned about giving away too much:

“People worry about this issue of which content to sell and what to give away for free.

And yes, it involves a lot of subjective judgment.

But the good news is that I have yet to find someone who has given away too much.

I don’t believe it is possible to be too helpful or too generous … provided you manage your time and energy, and that people know you are in business.”

Don’t be afraid to give generously on a regular basis. No matter how much you give away, there will still be people who need implementation advice or additional products and services.

Before you sell to your prospects, they must see you as an authority — and giving freely helps you achieve that.

2. Try content curation

Your prospects — regardless of what niche or industry you’re in — are most likely swimming in a giant river of content. They need someone to help filter out the noise and gather the best resources, tools, and content on a particular topic.

That’s exactly what smart content curators do. They pick the most useful articles, videos, and podcast episodes on the web and compile them together into an easy-to-consume format (like a blog post or email newsletter).

When you publish your curated content regularly, people will learn to count on you as a reliable source of up-to-date, useful information, and you’ll become their go-to person for that topic.

Ryan Hanley’s weekly newsletter is a great example of how to practice smart content curation. Each week, Ryan sends his subscribers seven important articles on content marketing that he’s selected, along with a little insight of his own to help people understand and integrate the information in the articles.

For more advice on curated email newsletters (and a decision tree that helps you assess if curating content is right for you), check out this Copyblogger article and infographic.

3. Adopt a policy of generosity

Adam Grant, author of the extraordinary book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, said:

“Givers see interdependence as a source of strength.”

The way I look at it, we all want our businesses to grow stronger. If you adopt an attitude of generosity with your prospects, you’ll be positioned to grow stronger and more profitable.

Seek out opportunities to improve your prospects’ lives.

Always ask yourself, “Is this something my community would find useful?”

For example, you can shine the spotlight on a community member who is making great progress or collaborate with a strategic partner on a project that benefits your audience.

Gather your ideas in a computer file or notebook, so you always have a list of content options to pull from.

Become a radically generous content marketer

As content marketers, we already provide value for our audience members. But taking your giving game up a notch could help spark new breakthroughs for your business.

So ask questions. Pay attention. Stay open. And keep giving, over and over and over again.

Your prospects lives will improve dramatically, and so will yours.

Ready to discover what a winning content marketing strategy actually looks like?

Check out our new series that walks you through the Who, What, and How of focused and effective content marketing:

The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

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5 Easy-to-Digest Resources to Finally Understand Site Speed Better

Making your site faster has been a hot topic for many years now. It started with Google announcing site speed a ranking factor and it’s got hotter with the mobile search traffic getting more and more discussed.

Sadly, it’s also one of the most complicated topic to discuss. You are unlikely to handle speeding up your site yourself: You’ll need good developers to rely on. However you also want to understand the topic well to be able to discuss this with those developers and make sure everything is done right. Here are 5 easy-to-digest resources to understand site speed better:

1. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Mobile user experience is a problem not to be ignored these days, now that mobile Internet usage exceeds desktop.

Accelerated Mobile Pages project aims at making websites much faster on mobile devices. This article explains AMP, its pros and cons, very well. Basically, AMP project is:

• A restriction on the slow parts of web technologies (like javascript)
• Integration of <amp> tags filling the restricted functionality
• Caching (provided by Google for free) ensuring AMP pages are served faster from all over the world (basically, Google provides all participating publishers a free CDN)

It’s obviously much wiser to improve your website performance than impose a set of restrictions to optimize for mobile-only experience.

2. Leverage Browser Caching

Covering all caching methods, benefits and common issues, this guide goes into leveraging browser caching and setting different caching times for different file types as well. It’s a great help in understanding what (not) to do and how to hand in your developers.

While you are on the topic, don’t forget to read Google’s own guide on the topic. There’s also a great guide on WordPress site caching here.

3. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

If you find that your site is particularly slow in some parts of the world (which may prevent it from converting), consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a globally distributed network that of web servers storing cached files of your site.

When you are using Content Delivery Network, your site is visitor is served files from the server which is located closest to them. This means, your site users are able to enjoy your site all over the world without interruptions.

4. Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

A somewhat geekier topic, this one requires some technical help to set up, but if you want to know what you are talking about this guide will be a lot of help.

1. Browser: Hey, can I GET index.html? I’ll take a compressed version if you’ve got it.
2. Server: Let me find the file… yep, it’s here. And you’ll take a compressed version? Awesome.
3. Server: Ok, I’ve found index.html (200 OK), am zipping it and sending it over.
4. Browser: Great! It’s only 10KB. I’ll unzip it and show the user.

5. What is an Optimized Image?

This guide from Google gives a very easy-to-digest overview of image formats, optimization types and what to stick to designing your web pages.

It’s a good help for you to create image usage policies for your digital marketing and design teams: Which image formats to stick to when creating content, working on logos, banners, etc. and how to optimize each digital asset to allow for faster page load without sacrificing on quality.

Are there solid site speed optimization resources I’ve missed here? Please share in the comments!

The post 5 Easy-to-Digest Resources to Finally Understand Site Speed Better appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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The Art of Seductive Content Marketing

Phil Connors is having a bad day … over, and over, and over.

The arrogant Pittsburgh weatherman has once again been sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He soon discovers that visiting once a year wasn’t all that bad, given that he’s now living this particular Groundhog Day again, and again, and again.

It all begins at 6:00 a.m., the same way each day. The clock radio clicks on with Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe, followed by the declaration, “It’s Groundhog Day … and it’s cold out there!”

After the initial shock wears off, Phil (played by national treasure Bill Murray) realizes he’s in a time loop. No matter what he does each day, there are no lingering consequences for his actions, because he wakes up and starts over again fresh the next morning.

This initially leads to hedonistic behavior, such as binge eating and drinking, manipulative one-night stands, and criminal acts. Eventually despair sets in, and Connors repeatedly attempts suicide.

No dice — he still wakes up the same way the next morning. It’s not until Phil commits to bettering himself and serving others that he achieves redemption and breaks out of the loop.

The film Groundhog Day is regarded as a contemporary classic. In 2006, it was added to the United States National Film Registry and deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Further, the movie has been described by some religious leaders as the “most spiritual film of our time,” in that it represents the concept of transcendence.

Buddhists and Hindus see the repeated day as a representation of reincarnation on the long path to enlightenment. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the time loop can be thought of as purgatory.

Don’t get me wrong. Groundhog Day is a hilarious film, and Bill Murray considers it his finest performance. But it’s also seriously deep. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review said, “… we have what many believe is the best cinematic moral allegory popular culture has produced in decades.”

Groundhog Day also contains an example of marketing gone terribly wrong. This travesty happens all too often in the real world, which means it’s what you want to avoid at all costs.

A tale of a data-driven marketing fail

In between his hedonism and subsequent despair, Phil decides to achieve a different goal. He begins romantically pursuing his news producer, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell).

He starts by being uncharacteristically kind to her, and then asks her to describe her ideal man. Through day after day of similar encounters, he amasses an amazing amount of information about her.

Phil finds out her favorite drink, and her ideal toast to drink it to. He knows she hates white chocolate and loves Rocky Road ice cream. He even quotes from Baudelaire after finding out she majored in 19th-century French poetry.

Through his unique situation, Connors discovers all the right information in order to arrive at the “perfect” romantic evening with her “ideal” man. It takes weeks, but as far as Rita knows, Phil has simply transformed from the jerk she works with to an amazing person in a single day.

Talk about marketing research, huh? He’s got his “who” down cold.

Except there’s one problem — Phil’s only goal is to have sex with Rita. There’s literally no tomorrow for him, so he has to close the deal on the first date, or not at all. Hence, he can’t contain his insincerity despite all the valuable intelligence he has on her.

Phil even stoops so low as to tell her he loves her when she resists his advances. Each evening invariably ends with Rita slapping Phil’s face, and what she says to him is especially telling:

“I could never love you, because you’ll never love anyone but yourself.”

Content marketing as seduction

In marketing and sales circles, there’s a running joke about losing a prospect thanks to the equivalent of trying to propose marriage on the first date. And yet, it doesn’t stop it from happening, even with people who should know better.

Phil has a treasure-trove of data about Rita, just as modern marketers have big data about you. And yet Phil tries to fake authenticity, engagement, and connection, which Rita sees right through.

The same thing happens every day at all levels of the marketing spectrum.

Think of it this way — Rita reveals her core values, and Phil tries to reflect them back to her. It works, up until the point that Phil’s desire to close the deal on his terms, based on his own desires, tramples all over Rita’s core values.

I’ve described content marketing as a story you tell over time. If that story places the prospect at the center of the story and delivers the right information at the right time, you have a courtship.

If you take it a step further and deliver the information in a way that delights the prospect at each step, you have something even more powerful. You have a seduction.

The word seduction can certainly have a manipulative connotation. But when you truly know your prospect, and your core values truly do align with theirs, and you truly do communicate based on their needs first, well …

They get what they want, and you get what you want. That’s not manipulation; that’s just good business.

Empower the journey

Before the internet, inadequacy marketing ruled. Without access to alternative perspectives, prospects were targeted by marketers with messages that positioned the brand as the hero, which promised to save the poor prospect from the anxiety manufactured by the message.

The imbalance in access to information favored the seller. Now, prospects are empowered to self-educate, which means the buyer’s journey is well underway before any particular seller is even aware of it.

Today, prospects face a different form of anxiety. The abundant access to information from thousands of competing sources threatens to overwhelm the prospect. That’s where you come in.

Your brand becomes heroic in the sense that you arrive to further empower the prospect to solve their problem. You help them make sense of the relevant information. And in the process, you demonstrate — rather than claim — that your product or service is the perfect solution for that particular person.

So yes, your brand can become a hero. As long as you never forget that the prospect is the main hero, or protagonist, of a journey that they are at the center of.

This is why Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, or hero’s journey, provides the perfect metaphor, and map, of a content marketing strategy that succeeds. It forces you to keep your focus on empowering them, with you and your content playing the role of the mentor, or guide.

The easiest way to understand this is to look at the character relationships in some of the best-known examples of Campbell’s hero’s journey in popular culture — films such as Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Wizard of Oz.

• The prospect is Luke Skywalker; you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi.
• The prospect is Neo; you’re Morpheus.
• The prospect is Dorothy; you’re Glinda the Good Witch.

Structuring your content marketing strategy in this way leads to success. By understanding your prospect as well as possible, you’re now in a position to guide and empower her to solve the problem with you.

What you say matters most

“What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.”
– David Ogilvy

It might come as a surprise to hear that from Ogilvy, a famous “Mad Man” and copywriter who made millions by finding just the right way to say things. But he’s right … if what you’re saying is wrong, it doesn’t matter how well you say it.

Next week, we’re going to get into actually mapping the buyer’s journey, so that we know what to say, and when.

The key point of this article is for you to understand that because we’re guiding the prospect on a journey, when is an inherent aspect of the what.

You can choose to rush things and lose, or travel alongside the prospect and eventually win.

Phil Connors does end up with Rita, but only when he actually becomes her ideal man instead of trying to fake it. The time loop ends thanks to an authentic seduction.

Here’s to not making the same mistake over, and over, and over again … at least with your content marketing. Mapping the buyer’s journey is the next step in getting it right sooner.

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