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The personal weblog of Stephen P Smith

Posts Tagged ‘social media strategy’

Learn How to Use the Sales Funnel from this Experience

Justin McCullough at Leader 4 Hire shares a recent experience with a newsletter and a sales push: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

This is a detailed look at trust, marketing, and execution on an online sales push from some of the biggest names in Social Media – the good and the bad and how you can learn and apply this to your sales and marketing efforts.

Follow every bit of this through (except the last part) and you will succeed in your next email sales push. The sections I call “What’s Happening Here” should provide the key elements for you to model in your online campaign and sales efforts.

Nearly everything here is actually a success story other than the fifth area below.
First – Chris Brogan eNewsletter

Subject line of email from Chris: “Email marketing and the folks at Blue Sky Factory

This is a great little sales piece from Chris. It clearly identifies his role in the email, why I (we) received it and who it benefits and why. On top of that, a nice bit of positioning and display of influence by offering an exclusive ebook download and discount to use Blue Sky Factory as a benefit to loyalty with Chris. Well done. This is the right sort of email marketing and who would expect less from Chris?

McCullough goes on to analyze the components of the newsletter, the links and sales pages, and the offers that are made. Pay attention to his description of how “marketing information” is captured when he has an opportunity to download a free e-book.

The big lesson in e-mail marketing

picture of woman holding business cardThe email marketing campaign that McCullough details is a good one, executed well, until the the final part – where Sales and Customer Service fail mightily. I urge you to read the entire post, and the comments – they are a textbook example of how to manage a situation like this. Before you go, however, consider this:

No matter how good your email marketing program is – no matter how professional your copy or how well-structured your subsequent contacts – the ultimate success of your sales effort rests with the structure and performance of your company, your customer representatives and your salespeople.

Read the whole thing here: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

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Concrete Steps Toward Integrated Virtual Marketing

I have a new post up at the SOBEvent blog: Concrete Steps Toward Integrated Virtual Marketing

The old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:

…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

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Style Guide for Re-purposing Your Old Content

One of the first questions that people ask when they are setting up a blog for their website is, “Where do I get content?” The answer is often right in front of their faces, in the form of their existing press releases, brochures, and other printed materials. Mequoda.com has published an excellent style article for turning this printed content into a blog post or page. I am going to elaborate on some of their points:

Titling, categorization and tagging rules for online publishing with WordPress blogs

When publishers pull apart their archived content and start putting it up on their blog, they have a variety of style options to choose from when posting.

We recommend taking a little extra time to optimize your old articles (whether they are evergreen or not) in order to make that content as valuable to your blog (and audience) as possible.

The following style guide for unleashing your print archives into a blog is specific to WordPress in terms of folksonomy, but can be applied to any type of blogging platform.

Rule #1: Include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase in your blog titles and subhead.

Why? Because blog titles are so specific, you might choose to use a secondary keyword in your title (like “repurposed content” in the case of this article) and a primary in your subhead (like “online publishing”). If you want to get ranked on a keyword in search engines (and you do), this is your prime real estate to display them.

Keywords are very important, and the search engines parse your posts looking for the most important words in the text. It is important to highlight them. Which leads to:

Rule #2: Make sure your blog is set up to define your title and subhead in H tags.

Why? H1, H2 and H3 are highly regarded by Google as defining what a page is “about”.

In your “writing page” in WordPress there is a button in the menu bar titled “Paragraph”. In the drop-down menu you will see Heading 2 and Heading 3. I recommend that you use Heading 2 no more than once per page, and Heading 3 for your sub-headings. Edit your CSS to make these headings “pop”.

NOTE: Never use H1 in your content! That tag is reserved for the title of the page and you will be penalized by the search engines.

Examples:

This is H2/Heading 2

This is H3/Heading 3

Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content.

You should also keep in mind that your blog should have a few, very focused categories. If you write about cars, for example,you might use categories like Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, then use Tags for more specific topics like Corvette, BMW, and so on.

This is really great information for people that are looking to optimize their online content, and for more information like this, including audio and video with step-by-step instructions and real-life examples, see Writing for the Web, Inside and Out, by myself and Brad Shorr.

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Work-Life Transition

Sorry for not posting in a while, I have taken on a new gig as a restaurant manager at Wolfe’s Tavern in Wolfeboro, NH. I have been in the hospitality industry for 15 years, and was not looking to go back to it, but they needed some help.

The good news is that my GTD system has survived the transition and I am pretty confident that I will be able to get back on track with posting and finishing up my productivity e-book by the end of the month.

Right now I am pretty busy training some new staff, getting expenses in line, and creating a community for the restaurant (follow us on Twitter at @WolfeboroInn), we will be Tweeting about our specials and other cool stuff.

Thank you for your patience and support, I am looking forward to having some good, real-world examples on productivity in the workplace for you shortly. Have a great day, and let me know what kind of tips you might be looking for in your own work-life situation.

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