Here’s a scary thought: What if your content marketing actually works? What if you get all the clients you want? Will you be able to handle them? Those are important questions every service provider needs to answer honestly because there is often a disconnect between what we say we want and the actions we take.
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Polish up your apples for another week of content marketing school. 🙂 This week combined ways you can excel as a writer and a marketer. On Monday, Stefanie Flaxman wrote about a seeming paradox — how can we be prolific enough to succeed as professional writers and continue to improve our craft at the same
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Recently, a student of ours asked whether “we” (content-based marketers who might prefer a more subtle approach) can learn anything from “those” marketers who use somewhat obvious tactics like silly quizzes or hyped-up headlines. In the course of answering this question, the phrase “orange hat marketer” occurred to me. (Don’t worry; this has nothing to
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Ready Player One has been called pure “nostalgic nerd-bait” by film critics, but that’s not the only reason it earned $300 million worldwide in just its first week. It follows some very well-worn blueprints of blockbuster filmmaking that its iconic director, Steven Spielberg, practically invented. From the high-energy title sequence to the quintessential Spielbergian finale,
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I’ve always found the goal of meeting a word count to be a bit silly. Some messages can be clearly communicated in 200 words and others need 2,000 words. But if you use 2,000 words when 200 words would perfectly suffice, your writing will likely feel excessive or even self-indulgent. That’s why I consider the
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The major heads-up today is that we have a live workshop next week (Tuesday, April 24 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time) on how to use sophisticated segmentation and automation in your email marketing — even if you have a limited budget and you’re not particularly technical. This lets you create focused and relevant messages for
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So, you may remember not that long ago — as in, last month — I was very keen on chatbots. I got a lot of inspiration from Andrew Warner over at Mixergy, who had helped me see some things that I hadn’t understood at all about the format. Fast forward a few weeks … and
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The post Having Trouble Reaching Your Audience? It’s Time to Get Radically Relevant appeared first on Copyblogger.
When it comes to building an audience that builds your freelance or consulting business, email remains the undisputed heavyweight champion. Email was the original “killer app” — everyone uses it, and that’s why it’s been the absolute best channel for digital marketing and audience building. And yes, that’s still true in 2018. The stats don’t
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I get a little nervous when I advise that you should write for a specific group of people and convey your perspective. Personal narratives can form connections with strangers almost magically, but self-indulgent writing has the opposite effect. It’s boring and a turn-off. The tricky part is that there’s a fine line between “personal” and
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We all know that creating content can be hard work. One of our goals at Copyblogger is to help you make sure you’re putting your work into the right things, so you get results and not just a fistful of disappointment. This week, we looked at three myths and mistakes that can hold writers back
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about creating content that earns your audience’s attention. Mark Schaefer swung by and left a comment — and he made a point that is dear to our hearts at Copyblogger. “Outstanding content is not the finish line, it’s the starting line.”– Mark Schaefer I told
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“If only I had all the time in the world, my blog would be perfect.” That thought has probably crossed your mind more than once. I know it’s crossed mine. I find myself lost in daydreams about how amazing my motorcycle blog could be — if only I had more time. When writerly productivity is
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Pardon our dust. Content marketing is under reconstruction right now, and frankly, it has been for years. Even when content marketing was a newer tactic online, there were naysayers. Now the naysayers point to the loads of crappy content and say, “You think that works?” But there has always been junk. Currently, it’s just easier
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You know how sometimes you see some advice that’s completely common sense, but somehow … it’s not at all what you’re doing right now? Yeah, me too. This week was about getting back to sensible solutions to business and content problems. They’re common sense, but, as my colleague Chris Garrett often says: “Common sense isn’t
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Competitor marketing is pretty much the obsession of every business owner out there. They want to know what the other guy is saying, doing and what is working. They also want to know what isn’t working, so they can swoop in and poach their customers (admit it, you do this any time you can).
But keeping up with the competition’s moves is hard and without the right tools you will never know if you are getting the full picture. Without the full picture, how can you take advantage of the data you have?
Here are ten tools to help you track, analyze and beat your competitors by gathering all the information you can and making an informed strategy that covers all the bases.
I am always amazed when I find out that these huge companies are using fake click services to drain your PPC budget. People can call it whatever they want, but we all know what it really is: click fraud.
ClickCease fights against it from the other side. Click fraud can begin to impact your brand when those bots find their way to your site and screw with your own numbers. Click Cease works by blocking those fake clicks from your site and so protects your PPC campaign.
Spyfu is often cited as the most helpful keyword tool out there. Why? Because it literally spies on your competitor’s. It allows you to download a report of the most profitable keywords they are using and ads they have put out. You can examine the metrics and compare them to other keywords they are using, or your own.
Then you can create a better strategy for your own organic and paid search campaigns to compete with theirs. When I first heard about it I was skeptical, but having used it many times now I can honestly say this is a valuable tool that I couldn’t do without.
Everyone knows and loves Buzzsumo so I won’t say too much about it. What I will say is that it is great to use for a more faceted approach to monitoring your competitors.
You can look at Most Shared, Trending, Backlinks, Content Analysis, Facebook Analyzer and Questions Analyzer. So you get more than just a basic idea of what is out there right now. You can see various angles for a better, more complete analysis.
How are your competitors build their backlinks? How do they get people talking? Is there an opportunity for you too? Or are there mistakes to learn from? Looking at your competitors’ backlinks is the best way to keep an eye on their marketing efforts and adjust your own.
Majestic is a great backlink analysis platform that also has a powerful competitor research functionality.
Sentione is a social listening platform. It works by scouring the social web for any mentions of your brand, so you can see what people are saying, interact with them and engage your audience.
Many brands will use Sentione to find complaints about products, as well. But you can go a step further by discovering what people are saying about competing brands. Do they have a need that isn’t being met? Your product to the rescue!
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could know the second your competitors made a change to their website? Or if they were announcing a new feature from their most popular product? Or they started a new marketing campaign?
Kompyte lets you monitor all of those things in real time so you know the second a change is made and can react accordingly. You can also watch their search ranking and even analyze their content in real time.
I was skeptical about this tool because it seemed a little too good to be true. I have worked a long time in email campaigns and the ability to accurately analyze the other guys without scouring over it myself? It seemed doubtful.
But I was pleasantly surprised and found that Owletter is great for monitoring content campaigns in general. Plus at only $5 a month it is a steal.
Do you have a tool that belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments!
The post 7 Tools to Track, Analyze and Beat Your Competitors appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Editorial Note: Pssst, we actually do have a real breakthrough resource for you — but doors close today, Wednesday, April 4 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time. You can check it out here: Creative Content Foundations 2018 Way back in 2014, I wrote about a breakthrough resource for your content creation. Here’s what I had to
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Before I get into what makes me scream, shout, and reach for hard objects to throw, let me be clear about my definition of “conversational copywriting.” It’s a way of writing sales copy that sounds like one friend enthusiastically selling something to another friend. Conversational copywriting is still about selling … but in a way
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The post 3 False Beliefs about Conversational Copywriting that Make Me Want to Scream appeared first on Copyblogger.
Publishing content regularly — and striving to improve with each new creation — is a proven way to figure out how to serve your audience and meet your business goals. But I have other things to do besides writing content, and you do too. Recently, I had trouble finishing a draft of a post and
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