How To Easily Get More From Your Blog

I’m in Scotland - the public dumps here are amazing! 

You drive in with a trunk load of memories and discard them into different skips for wood, metal, cardboard, general purpose waste and small electrical.   With separate skips for different colored glass, clothes and even engine oil, everything gets recycled and nothing is wasted.

Re-purposing - It’s your friend!

A recent article on 12 signs you’re wasting your time on content marketing got me thinking about the idea of recycling - particularly the second point where the author reckoned that a single blog post could be turned into:

• 10-15 tweets
• 2-5 Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn updates (focus on a different aspect of the post in each update)
• A SlideShare
• An infographic… even a simple one
• A short video
• A Pinterest pin
• A section of an ebook, whitepaper or case study

While the slideshare, infographic, video and ebook bullets might be a bit ambitious for most people on the list, I think Pam had a great point with the social updates.

Use tools - they’re your friends!

10 to 15 tweets and up to 5 network updates seems a bit over the top but spending 2 minutes with Buffer to highlight 3 or 4 sentences from your post and sending them out into the world seems like such an easy win.

I’m no fan of quantity over quality, but taking multiple bite size pieces from your considered blog posts to give you greater frequency and visibility in the social space just makes sense.

Need help?

If you don’t know how to do this - drop me a line.  I’ll be back next week.

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Written while listening to: The Bench - 163 - Periscope development by music2work2

Image credit: Four Rs by Bill Smith on Flickr

Lawyers, Insurance Agents, SEO and Golf!

Driving’s for show - Putting’s for dough

Ask a golfer what it feels like to hit a great drive and they’ll grin at you - there’s just something insanely pleasurable about thwacking a ball hundreds of yards into the distance.  And, if it goes in the wrong direction, well - you have a few more shots to make it right.

Putting on the other hand is a serious business.  Matches are won and lost on the green and there are no second chances.

Blogs are for SEO

Blog posts are how you generate links to your website, they are the content people find when searching for solutions and by their very nature, need to reflect your core business. 

Like driving, blog posts can be great fun!  The better you get the greater the distance they travel - multiple shares across social media and links from influencers can feel just as good as a 325 yard drive straight down the middle!

Newsletters are for dough

Newsletters however are serious business.  They’re how you convert potential customers to actual customers and by their very nature, need to be consistently interesting.

For many businesses (like mine) the content in a newsletter and blog post can be the same - if there’s always something new to tell your clients the newsletter can be educational and reflect what’s going on in your world. 

Where it gets challenging is when people don’t want to learn about your business - think the law or Insurance - this is when the newsletter becomes a lot tougher to write.

Repeat: Newsletters are for dough

If you’re operating with an opening rate around 30% it’s an indication that you need to change your strategy.  If you’re re-purposing your blog posts as newsletters then maybe you need to allocate more resource to what is potentially your biggest revenue generator.

The challenge I’m giving myself this year is to drive my opening rate from 60% to 70%.  I don’t yet know how I’m going to achieve that but I am going to allocate more time to the newsletter than I ever have.  Maybe you should do the same.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image Credit: Getting ready to kill it by Jennifer Pauley on Flickr

Small Business Owners – It’s easy to be found

So you run a small business – maybe it’s a restaurant or a store, maybe you offer a service like an accountant or a plumber. You know a little about online marketing, you might even have a website that hasn’t been updated since you paid an SEO consultant to get you on the “front page of Google!” You’re good at running your business but think you don’t have the time or budget to market yourself properly online.

HELLO – It’s 2009 – things have changed.

It is easier now for people to find your business than it has ever been – the development of tools such as blogs, texting, smart phones and yes, Twitter have resulted in a stream of information that is constantly being updated and accessed by your competitors and your customers. If your business competition is within 20 miles and you don’t have an updated dynamic website, then you are going to lose to the business owner who does.

Click here to read more on how small business owners can effectively use Twitter – this post is less about what it does and more about how you can do it. We know as small business owners ourselves that incorporating a new system into daily business operations is a challenge. If it isn’t easy to do then it gets put on the sidelines like many other things.

Kilted Chaos’ approach to social media and online marketing is to make it as easy as possible. We deliver budget conscious yet professional websites that integrate with your social media marketing. We then show you how easy it is to create a business oriented Twitter stream and encourage you to write occasionally about your business – and that’s it. That’s all you need to start with.

If you get hooked and find that investing more time in social media marketing is improving your bottom line (and we think it will) then we’ll show you how to take it further. Contact us.