Reading and consistency are both critical to maintaining an intelligent blog. In this week’s episode of “Over Lunch,” Chief Content Architect Angie Sanders explains how reading industry news and the blogs of other thought-leaders helps her generate ideas for the aiellejai company blog. Check out her “old-school” method for digesting and interacting with the vast amount of online content she consumes.
Permalink to (Over Lunch) Blogging: Reading is Fundamental
(Over Lunch) Blogging: Reading is Fundamental
Permalink to Why Auto-Tweeting Blog Content is Completely Okay
Why Auto-Tweeting Blog Content is Completely Okay
WHAT HE SAID. RT @doomzto I hate when people use WordPress plugins to auto-spam old content. It’s just clutter. #AskAngel
— Angelique (@afmarcom) January 22, 2013
Let us start by saying that auto-tweeting blog content is completely okay, but there are some purists out there that frown upon automatically and repeatedly sharing “old content” on Twitter.
Okay, what are we considering “old content”? Unless our blog content falls into the TENS category—time, event or news-sensitive—we let it live for months. When we’re compiling research for an industry-specific e-book or white paper, we stick with content that’s been written in the past year, but of course, we’ll take a more recent article or blog post over one that was published earlier in the year.
The reason we, along with everyone else, auto-tweet our blog content is because the Twitter sphere is a never-ending vacuum of content. When you look at your timeline, you’re only capturing a snapshot of all the content the people you follow have published. Auto-tweeting ups the chances that our content will be seen by more members of our audience.
So which auto-tweeters irritate us the most? Two types: people who auto-tweet the same content every 30 minutes and people who do this without any other engagement with their followers.
The top three functions Twitter serves for us is sharing content, consuming content and interacting with others. Although I can see why some are annoyed by the auto-tweet function, sharing content automatically doesn’t take the place of engagement.
What suggestions do we have for bloggers and other content creators on how to use the auto-tweet function correctly? First, continually evaluate your content. The auto-tweet tool you use should allow you to pull posts from the rotation. Remember the TENS rule—any content that’s time, event or news-sensitive should probably be taken out of rotation a few weeks to a month from its original publication date. Or else your audience will be wondering why you’re still talking about that when they’ve clearly moved on to the next hot story.
Second, you should continue to share content that provides how-twos and strategy. If there have been any updates or changes to the advice you’ve given, write an update post, link back to the original post, but replace the original post with the new post in your auto-tweeting rotation.
Third, Twitter isn’t a set-and-forget medium. Read others’ content and share it. Ask them questions. Respond to others’ questions to you. Thanks folks for re-tweeting your content. And follow through on your social media strategy.
Wait, you do have a strategy, don’t you?
@iancleary @goldasich Sadly, old=bad content to a lot of people.And we all have diff definitions of ‘old’ when it comes to content.
— Mack Collier (@MackCollier) January 23, 2013
Share with us: Do you auto-tweet content? How do you decide which content to continually share?
Read 6 Myths Blocking Your Social Media Engagement, our special report that addresses misconceptions that are keeping your company from investing time into tools that will can help increase two-way communication with your customers—current and potential. Print this report. Read it on the train ride home. Highlight key points. Share it with your colleagues. And please, jump in the social media marketing game and get started.
Permalink to How to Use Content to Build Thought Leadership in 6 Steps
How to Use Content to Build Thought Leadership in 6 Steps
At a Washington Network Group entrepreneurs roundtable event last Wednesday night, speaker Angelique Rewers, also known as The Corporate AgentTM used two terms during her talk that caused some audience members to look at her like she’d sprouted eight arms: Content marketing and thought leader.
She explained that content marketing involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable information to attract, acquire, and engage your target audience and lead them to a desired action. “You want to be a thought leader,” she said.
“But the challenge is how do you provide good content without giving away all your strategy, right?” asked an audience member.
You may remember that I wrote a blog post a while back that reassured you that you can afford to give away some of your ideas without fearing that a potential client will run with them and never give you or your business a second thought.
The keys to content marketing and framing yourself and others in your company as thought leaders are to: 1. Give your audience simple information that they can either act on right now or that answers pressing questions and 2. Plant a seed in the audience’s mind that you and your company are the leading authorities on this subject.
Face it. If your audience doesn’t get this information from you, then they’ll perform a Google search and find someone else who’ll give them the answer.
Business owners think that being a thought leader means that you have spout Confucius-like, life-changing tidbits that no one else is close to even thinking about. If you can do this, then congratulations. But there’s not much new under the sun. It just has to be new to your audience.
So here are six steps toward establishing yourself and your team members as thought leaders online.
- Think about the pillars on which you operate your business.
What are your company’s top business offerings? Why do you offer these services? Why should your audience come to you for these services? - Define who you’re serving with those pillars.
This is an important one. Who is your audience? Who usually buys the services you offer? Be very specific with this description. What do these people do for a living? What do they look like? What do they read? Even better, identify actual points of contact at your client organizations and use them to create a detailed profile of your target audience for each of your services. - Determine what questions your audience asks.
When potential clients approach you, or your ears perk up after meeting a potential client, what is it that they’re seeking? What problems do they tend to come to your company to solve before they become a client? What are their pain-points? - Consider how you can help your audience answer these questions quickly and the best ways to present the information.
Now that you’re familiar with your audience’s common questions and pain-points, how can you address these in succinct and interesting ways? Should your company start a blog? Which team members should contribute? Perhaps you should begin shooting short videos? Is there information that could be presented in infographics? Do you have PowerPoint presentations that you can upload to Slideshare? - Create an editorial calendar.
This step is tricky, but helpful. Determine all the channels through which you’d like to share content (blogging, video, e-books, etc.). Then create a calendar that details when these items will go live and be available to share. For example, you may decide that your company will publish four blog posts and create four short videos per month, release one e-book per quarter, and curate content via social media on a daily basis. Your editorial calendar should provide a brief description of subject matter for each piece of content, estimate when each will be completed/posted, and how all content will be shared. - Be consistent.
I realize that we live in an instant-results kind of society, but this process takes time. Be consistent with your content creation. Monitor what kinds of content resonate best with your audience and keep giving them what they want.
Share with us: How do you define thought leadership? How are you using content to raise your/your company’s professional profile in your field?
Read 6 Myths Blocking Your Social Media Engagement, our special report that addresses misconceptions that are keeping your company from investing time into tools that will can help increase two-way communication with your customers—current and potential. Print this report. Read it on the train ride home. Highlight key points. Share it with your colleagues. And please, jump in the social media marketing game and get started.
Permalink to Four Reasons Why You Can Afford to Share Your Ideas
Four Reasons Why You Can Afford to Share Your Ideas
During a local chamber of commerce networking event, an ambitious and interesting older gentlemen told me that he was looking for an entertainment lawyer to help him pitch a game show to Hollywood gatekeepers.
“Oh really?” I asked. “What’s the premise of the show?”
“Well, I can’t tell you,” he said. He was saving all his ideas for the entertainment lawyer and the bigwig producers to whom he’d one day persuade to give him the green light on this show.
I then joked that if he told me the particulars, then he’d have to shoot me.
This got me thinking about which ideas require such top-secret protection and which ideas should be shared.
Truthfully, there’s nothing new under the sun. And ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s execution that’s rare. Not to mention that executing is hard work. So I believe it’s a good idea to share a good deal of our ideas publicly and strategically.
Now you may be thinking, “My ideas are how I make my living. I get paid for my ideas.” Yes, that’s true. However, when I say ideas, I don’t mean the engineering plans for your new product. Instead, as a communications professional, I’d share best practices for how to communicate the particulars for how your new product works. So by ideas, I really mean information. I could hold my input until I get you to pay me for what I have to say. However, if you don’t get the information from me, you’ll just Google it.
Here are four reasons that I think that as business owners, we should be a bit freer with our information and ideas:
Most people need a sample before buying. Have you ever met a person at a networking event he asks you for quick advice upon learning what you do for a living? What do you say? “You better pay me”? No. Most likely you engage that person in conversation. It’s only natural because you’re an expert and are passionate about what you do. That’s okay. The best part of this situation is that not only do you reinforce in his mind that you know your stuff, but it gives him an incentive to pay you for your services.
It establishes you as an expert. Before social networking, a lengthy client list on your website stood as evidence enough that your business is good at what it does. Now, potential clients expect to see us sharing information online and through seminars and speaking engagements. Sharing information about your craft frames you as an expert. And who do potential clients want to pay to help them through their business challenges? Experts.
It draws people into your sales funnel. People I happen to meet and cultivate into clients don’t just learn that aiellejai creates content and throw money at us. They usually consume our content. Or they’ve heard me speak. Or they’ve liked something I’ve shared via social networking. Sharing information draws people in, much like a fishing hook. We can’t throw out naked hooks and expect the fish to bite. We have to cast out some juicy nuggets to get the fish to school and be intrigued. Not to liken potential clients to fish, but you get the message.
You want to be your audience’s first resource. If potential clients have questions, and I don’t answer them—especially if it’s simple for me to do so—then they’re going to get the answers somewhere else. And by doing so, they’ll most likely jump into someone else’s sales funnel. Even if I share information with someone and they don’t commit to becoming a client right away, the idea that I’m an accessible expert has been planted in their head. When they do decide that they need some paid help, hopefully aiellejai will be the first company they think of.
Share with us: Are you guarded with sharing information about your business or industry online or via social networking? Are you afraid someone will steal your ideas?
Permalink to Akismet: That Super Nice Comment on Your Blog Could Be Some Bull
Akismet: That Super Nice Comment on Your Blog Could Be Some Bull
Email spam and blog comment spam are totally different.
Email spammers want to sell their products—Rolexes or male enhancement drugs—to you. Comment spammers want to use you to sell to your audience.
These spammers sell links from your website to their clients. And by flattering you and pretending to gush over your blog posts, spammers use your comments section to promote links to their clients’ products.
You may have noticed a decrease in the amount of email spam you receive, thanks to two spam-fighting organizations, Spamhaus and CERT-GIB, taking down Grum botnet, the third largest spam bot responsible for 18 billion spam messages per day. However, blog comment spam is a bit harder to defeat.
More comment spam is generated by humans, whether they are low-wage workers or viral marketers trying to use your blog to promote their products.
So how do you fight back?
When I started this blog and began to get the weird but unbelievably nice messages, I discovered Akismet, a WordPress plugin that automatically detects comment and trackback spam. As new comments sit in the queue on the backend of my blog, waiting to be approved, Akismet gives me the option to scan the comments and determine if they’re spam or if they’re legitimate.
After scanning, the plugin kicks spam messages out and keeps the good ones. I’m then free to approve the legitimate messages in bulk. Once a commenter is approved, then Akismet will recognize their future posts and automatically approve them.
Akismet even provides a report of how many spam and legitimate messages my blog received in a given amount of time.
There is a small cost for using this plugin, but it’s totally worth it to not have to guess if a blog comment is the real deal or if it’s smelly spam.
Tell me, are there other plugins out there that you use that help fight back blog comment spam?
Permalink to What a Weight Watcher Can Teach You About Blogging
What a Weight Watcher Can Teach You About Blogging
Five months before my 31st birthday in 2010, I launched operation 30 x 31, a personal mission to lose 30 pounds by my 31st birthday. I’d read that I should tell everyone about my decision to keep me accountable, but I work best when I keep my plans closely guarded. If I fail, no one is the wiser. If I succeed, everyone is caught off guard by my triumph.
I gave up what I referred to as FCS—fries, chips, and soda. (I actually chanted in my head: “NO fries! NO chips! NO soda!) I tracked my eating online with Weight Watchers. And I worked out no less than three times a week. I’d also read that it takes 21 days to start a habit. Once I’d gotten through one month of my mission, I figured I was home free.
By the time I turned 31, I’d lost 25 pounds. I eventually hit my goal of 30 pounds a month or so later.
I was reminded of this goal a few weeks ago while talking with a woman I met at the April Executive Women’s Roundtable luncheon in Tysons Corner. She explained to me that her colleagues saw a need to start a company blog, but no one had the time to devote to it. Blogging, like weight loss, has also been a lingering mission taunting me to accept its challenge. Once I saw the parallels between both goals, I was able to apply the same nuggets that helped me lose weight to maintaining a blog.
Determine a blogging frequency that’s reasonable for you.
One reason why resolutions to lose weight fail is unrealistic goal setting. Don’t say, “I’m going to hit the gym every day this year.” Because you won’t. And when you don’t, you’ll feel bad for not hitting that goal—a goal you were destined not to reach. When I started working out, I told myself that if I could get in the gym twice a week, then I’d be winning. I began there and eventually added one or two more days. You’ll catch the “experts” saying you should blog every day, but you should start with a weekly goal that’s reasonable for you. With my blog, I set the same goal that I set for my exercise. If I post twice a week, then I’m winning.
Be consistent.
With any goal, only a few stand by to cheer you on. But a whole heap of folks wait patiently for you to fall off. If you tell yourself you’ll post to your blog twice a week, try to post on the same days each week. Once you get into your rhythm and you have readers checking for your posts on those days, you won’t be the only one noticing that you’re winning!
Keep your blog in the forefront of your mind. Always.
Just like I chant to myself, “NO fries! NO chips! NO soda!”, I’m constantly thinking about my blog while reading anything online, while watching TV, and while in conversation. Blog topics pop up in everyday life. You just have to recognize them and assess their value.
Plan blog posts ahead of time.
A physician friend recommended James Orvis’s Weight Training Workouts that Work instead hiring a personal trainer to encourage me to pick up a dumbbell. I’ve worked through volume one twice and am starting volume two. If I work out four times a week, then I’ll focus on cardio two days and weight lifting the other two. Plan your blog posts the same way. When ideas pop in your head, jot them down. Write 10 or more blog posts even before you launch. This head start will buy you time to think of and write 10 more posts. You want to prevent that weekly “What will I write about?” internal struggle.
Keep yourself accountable.
Now that I’ve gotten accustomed to exercising throughout the week, I beat myself up a little when I don’t. You want to have this same feeling about blogging. Remember, there is a hater(s) waiting to take pleasure in your flaky blogging. Don’t give her the satisfaction.
Reward yourself.
Weight Watchers is designed to give me a cheat day once a week if I choose to use it. And if I work my points just right, then I get little cheats throughout the week. You should reward yourself, too! What will you allow yourself to do or have if you put in a whole month’s worth of consistent blogging?
5 Ways to Not Look Like a Lunatic in the Blog Comments Section
Back in April, I read 9 Grammar Mistakes That Can Make You Lose Readers, by Tracy Sestili {@tracysestili} on Social Strand Media’s website. As she admits in the comments section, the post is a risky one. We writers have confidence in our written work, but we all share a secret fear that some English language beat cop itching to make detective is going to call us out on some bullshit rules that have more to do with style and less with grammar.
And sure enough, ambition in a blue uniform showed up in the comment section and went all the way in on Tracy’s post. He itemizes the post’s flaws and punctuates his list with: “Wow! Ten grammar mistakes in an article entitled ‘9 Grammar Mistakes That Can Make You Lose Readers.’ New league record. Oops, wait. Eleven.”
Blog commenters should foster healthy debate, provide constructive criticism when necessary, and present new ideas and viewpoints. Here are a few tips I’ve come up with to do just that:
If the blog post’s subject matter really gets you hot under the collar, don’t post a comment right away.
You don’t want your biting comment to incite a back and forth fool match for all of the World Wide Web to see. Close the browser window. Think about the content that’s got you fuming. Why did it prompt such a reaction from you? How can you respond in a rational way that presents you as the intelligent, thought-provoking adult you are? Jot down your thoughts. After a few hours, write out your response and review it before posting it to the blog site.
Address the blogger as if he/she were sitting right in front of you.
In a past blog post about foot-in-mouth tweeting, I addressed our propensity to blast out to the social media universe the first thing that pops in our minds. This is undoubtedly because we’re not sitting face-to-face with the people who are listening or the people to whom our words are directed. Think about how you’d feel if some lunatic blog reader attacked you verbally on your own website.
Make valid points, not character attacks.
Rejecting a person’s argument simply based on their character, actions, or circumstance is fallacy. Ad Hominem to be exact. There’s no use offering a weak rebuttal to an argument you don’t agree with. Think a little deeper and present thoughts and ideas that will actually warrant the blogger’s attention.
Support your claims.
Remember the Verizon commercials with all the people in the background representing the strength of the company’s 3G network? Your opinion against the bloggers is just her word against yours. But when you find supporting evidence to back up your points, your argument grows in strength.
Write your own damn blog post.
Instead of going loco in the blogger’s comments section, use that topic to write an interesting rant on your own site. Follow all the tips above, post your piece, and post a link to it in the blogger’s comments section. Then sit back and say, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”