5 Steps to Building Your Personal Brand Successfully

The notion of branding has been getting a lot of play over the past few years. There are great reasons to brand: Scotch tape does not refer to all clear tape, although often all clear tape is called Scotch tape. Kleenex is a brand of tissues, not all tissues are Kleenex. Band-Aid is a brand, not all bandages are Band-Aids, but often, no matter who made them, all bandages are called Band-Aids. What does this have to do to building an individual brand? If you’re an attorney, a plumber, or an architect, you want to be the “brand” people think of for those professions. To be that “go to” person or company, you must build your brand.

How can you build Your Personal Brand?

#1 Decide What Makes You Special:

• What makes you the architect people remember? What makes you the plumber people want to call when they’re building a new hotel or apartment? Why should a business call you when they need an air-tight contract drawn up? These are questions that are important not only as an outside contractor. Branding is not simply for outside contractors or businesses wanting to get noticed in a competitive industry, branding can be a way for a cog in a big machine to be noticed in a positive way, so that cog can keep moving up and can become more important to an organization. And yes, if necessary, letting other people know what makes you special can help you get a better job.
• An important part of letting others know that you’re special and what makes you special is actually do something worth noticing. If there is a special kind of architecture that you’re an expert at, something that makes you stand out, then let people know that. But don’t just sell yourself with empty words. People know if you’re a fraud.
• Have a vision to show how that thing that you do special can help. If you are an expert in design let people know that; show them on your own website or blog.

#2 Get the Word Out

• Imagine there is a contract to install plumbing in a new apartment building. The bids that are turned in are similar, so the general contractor decides to do a web search to ensure all bidders are capable. What will search results reveal? A blog about how to do plumbing or how to choose the right bathroom fixtures to match the architecture of a building? Pictures of big jobs you have already completed with quotes from general contractors and business owners? Or will the general contractor find negative, hateful—and honest, posts about you?
• Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook are also social media options that are inexpensive and often free. They need to be full of positive and business related ideas and projects. Is your Twitter feed full of dirty jokes and double entendres? Are Instagram and Facebook full of pictures of you drinking? If so, make yourself comfortable working in the mail room, because you aren’t leaving there. Almost all prospective employers will do a web search. Pictures of you passed out in your front lawn will kill your chance of being hired or promoted, even if every other part of your reputation is pristine and perfect.

#3 Make Personal Contact and Get Noticed

• If you want to advance your career, either within a large organization, or by moving to a different company, you need to be noticed. Go places where you can meet contacts and introduce yourself and make a good impression. If there is a professional organization that meets in your city or state, go. If there is not an organization, go to alumni meetings for your university. You want to meet people and make a good professional impression. Perhaps the next time that person you meet needs an attorney with solid contract writing skills, he or she will call you.
• Another way to get noticed is to get published in a trade journal. If you have a trade journal, read it and see what kind of writing style they like and then find something interesting to write about and get published. People like to hire someone they can view as an expert.

#4 Get a Mentor

• A mentor is someone who wants to help a younger person as they begin their career. The secret about being a mentor is that most people want to help. We want to feel smart and valued, and helping someone else is a way to do that. A mentor can be a boss, or it can be a social contact who works elsewhere. The two biggest things a person can gain from a mentor are lessons about what to do and what not to do; and a mentor might recommend you for a job or promotion.

#5 Keep Information Updated

• What would you think if your neighbor’s grass was two feet tall and he or she was 25 years old? You would probably think your neighbor is lazy. When you use social media, you have an obligation (to yourself and your career) to update it if you want to continue to build your brand. There are actually two reasons to do this; 1. You don’t want to appear lazy; even if you’re so busy you don’t know how to find the time. This is your obligation and potential clients, or that potential new boss doesn’t care how busy you are. 2. The more new content you post, the higher you will be on web searches. You don’t want to be the 10th John Smith attorney in Ft. Lauderdale. You want to be the first, and that happens in part by updating social media. Rebrandly blog has some suggestions about how to improve your brand’s presence online.

Building a brand isn’t just something that businesses do anymore. It is something that almost everyone who is successful does in some way. To be successful at building your brand, you should have a plan, and then follow through. You will increase your chances for success by doing these five things to build your own brand.

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Are You Fascinating Enough to Be a Content Marketer?

If you work closely with someone with bright pink hair, you might begin to question whether you are interesting enough to contribute your thoughts to the topic at hand.

Followings on the internet are built on memorability, right?

I mean, if you don’t give high-energy talks like Gary Vaynerchuk, dress on-brand like Mari Smith, or sport a high-voltage cranium like Michael Port, how will people know you exist?
Not that I’ve ever had any of those thoughts.

Is having an indelible personal brand a requirement for content marketing success? If you don’t have that, should you throw in the towel before you start?

Building a platform around your personality

There’s a conversation I’ve had multiple times with some of the most well-known people online.
People who — if you met them — might make you a little nervous. You might feel like you were in the presence of a celebrity!

Here’s how the conversation goes:

“I know I’m well-known within this group. But my family still doesn’t understand what I do. I talk to my neighbors and they say, ‘So, you make money on the internet? How does that work?’ And if all my ‘fans’ could see me in my day-to-day life they wouldn’t get so nervous talking to me.”

The internet gives us a place to build our own mini “kingdoms” of celebrity that we reign over. This process was much more difficult to do just 10-15 years ago. But now, we can gather our tribes, build our audiences, and develop our fan bases using strategic content marketing.

It’s a valid approach to an online business. But it’s not the only one.

Building a platform around your business idea

Traditionally, brands were developed to depict a product, service, or a movement — not a person.

In this more traditional approach to brand building, you identified a group you wanted to serve and you developed a brand they could connect to emotionally. The brand represented a series of experiences that would be delivered by interacting with the business.

This approach to brand building has some distinct advantages and some challenges.

The advantages:

You can craft a brand name that markets your business

When you carefully develop your brand name from scratch, you can easily associate it with the benefits you’ll deliver.

It’s less expensive to market the business

Proper names don’t say anything about your business offering, so you’ll need to spend more time and money establishing what the business is about when you base it on a proper name.

Brands built on a business idea (rather than a name) are easier to sell

If your long-term plan is to build a business you sell, it’s easier to sell a business that’s not associated with a proper name.

There are some challenges to think about with each approach:

It’s more difficult to put a human face on a set of words

When your business is built around your proper name, all you have to do is show up and the human face of your business shines through. Not so with a more traditional brand.

You have to be relentlessly present in your business when it revolves around your name

So you built a brand based on your own name. Need a vacation? Want to take a break? The show cannot go on without you. No pressure, but … it’s all riding on you.

Can you build a brand that’s the best of both worlds?

Yes, you can. And this is where content marketing comes in.

If you decide to avoid the sticky challenges that come with building a brand around your name, you can go the traditional route and build a brand around what you’ll deliver to your customers.

Examples:

Wellness Mama: Simple answers for healthier families
The Creative Penn: Resources to help you write, publish, and market your book
No Meat Athlete: Runs on plants
Copy Hackers: Convert like a mofo

These brands state exactly what they deliver in their names. And they back that up with consistent, high-quality content marketing that delivers on the promises made by the brand names and taglines.

That’s the way to have the best of both worlds: create a brand name based on a promised experience, then use content to deliver your promise today, tomorrow, and next year.

How to 10x your fascination quotient in one easy step!

You may not have vibrant pink hair on the top of your head. And you may not be beautifully bald, either.

Those qualities help your audience pick you out in a crowded room. But online, you know what really stands out?

Content that’s in tune with what an audience needs. Content that consistently serves the people who read it. Content that delivers time after time.

Feeling like you’re not quite fascinating enough to make it as a content marketer?

Find a way to be of service. Create useful, engaging, high-quality content. Go above and beyond to stand out from the crowd with your in-depth, helpful information.

That’s the brand of fascinating we need more of online.

PS: I just finished writing a book called Master Content Marketing: A Simple Strategy to Cure the Blank Page Blues and Attract a Profitable Audience. It will be released next month. Until then, I’m going to share excerpts and ideas from the book so you can start benefiting from it now. Watch this space.


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Activate Your Fanbase With User-Generated Content

 In the digital era, everyone is a content creator, and that’s great news for marketers. Brands are boosting awareness by encouraging the public to share their customer experiences on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Just to name a few notable examples, Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” hashtag marketing campaign asked fans to snap Coke-themed photos of themselves, and Charmin solicits toilet humor from its Twitter followers. But this kind of user-generated content (“UGC”) isn’t limited to social media interactions between a brand its customers. Savvy marketers are starting to mix UGC into their email marketing campaigns — and it’s working. Recent studies have shown that UGC delivers a 73 percent increase in email click-through rates.

UGC is simply content about your brand that is created by your business’s customers or fans, whether that content is photos, videos, product reviews, or testimonials. One obvious benefit of incorporating consumer content into your email marketing is that it saves you time. Instead of having to constantly come up with new content ideas on your own, your customers are the driving creative force.

But the real key to the power and popularity of UGC is that it humanizes your sales pitch. You aren’t the one telling your subscribers how wonderful your products or services are; real customers do it for you. UGC is authentic, and when used as a part of an email marketing campaign, it builds trust in your brand.

One of the best forms of advertisement is a satisfied customer. As amazing as your email content-crafting skills may be, consumers are more interested in what their peers say about your business. In fact, 70 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations and reviews over professionally written content. Zulily takes advantage of this statistic with a “Customer Picks” emails that feature some of their best-selling products, along with a few brief but enthusiastic customer endorsements:

So how can you start integrating UGC into your email marketing? You can put out a call in your newsletter for subscribers to email photos or stories of their experiences with your products or services. Or you can come up with a brand-specific hashtag, ask customers to submit to you via social media, and feature your favorite responses in your next email. You might consider a theme for the submissions that is tied to an upcoming promotion or event.

To celebrate Star Wars Day and promote a Star Wars merchandise sale, Hot Topic asked its customers to submit photos of themselves in Star Wars gear. The best submissions were included in an email photo collage:

Of course a theme isn’t necessary. TeeFury’s emails showcase photos of happy customers wearing the company’s apparel:

To give your subscribers an extra push to submit, you can hold a contest, with a gift certificate or other prize going to the most creative submission. However you go about incorporating customer content into your emails, make sure that you’ve obtained permission from the original creator to use their content and that you’ve articulated exactly how that content will be used.

Once you get the go-ahead, don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of UGC. Photos might work well for one brand, while testimonials work better for another. But if content development is one of your email marketing pain points, then UGC could be the solution.

Read more about email content development here. 

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10 Ways to Grow Instagram Followers and Engagement

“Instagram Famous” is a term that has worked its way in to social media lexicon.
Forget the YouTube stars of the past – it’s all about how many followers, likes and comments everyone can garner from the endless recesses of the internet. And claiming your favorite celeb as another member of your own personal fan club is now cooler than a Grammy, just sayin’.
But you can’t buy fame.
There’s plenty of hacks and shortcuts and “sketchy” companies out there claiming to be able to double your following in seconds or share a delicious secret to instant Instagram fame that everyone else just happened to overlook.
Don’t believe any of it.
When Momma said there’s no substitute for an honest day’s work, she was actually right.
Here’s 10 ways to grow your Instagram following and engagement the new old fashioned way.

1. Keep your photos consistent with your brand

Your Instagram is an extension of your business and your brand, so make sure that the photos you post stay true to what you’re all about. People that follow you chose to do so because there’s something they like about your brand. They want more of it, so give it to them.
Think about what your brand is all about. What words best define and describe it? Keep your images aligned to those core traits.

For instance, a high-brow interior design company would want to focus on modern, minimalist photos of chic living spaces that exemplify good taste and clean lines. If an account like that were to include images of the mess after a crazy office party or someone’s fabulous-looking salad the overall theme would be completely disrupted.
Consistency in photos will keep attracting the right kind of followers, ones who appreciate your brand and who will thoughtfully engage. It also demonstrates professionalism and your authority as an expert in your space.

2. Focus on liking and commenting on photos within your niche

When someone gives you a compliment, you want to give them one back, right?
It’s kinda like that on Instagram, too.
One of the best ways to get people coming to your Instagram and seeing what you’re all about is by liking or commenting on a photo on their page so they can follow your handle back to your account. And hopefully, like or comment on your photo or maybe even follow you.
Carve out the time to find accounts within your niche market and like 5-10 photos and leave a comment or two. Every day.
Why is focusing on accounts within your niche so important? Because they’re managed by the people most likely to be interested enough in your brand to like or comment back.
Think about it – if you’re a beverage brand and you go liking and commenting all over a footwear designer’s Instagram, chances are that followers on that page are more interested in something to add to their closets, not their refrigerators. So your chances of engaging with the right people on there would be slim.

3. Captions matter, seriously

Of course Instagram is image-based. Everyone knows that.
But how many times have you gone to like or comment on that hilarious cat photo…only to be so annoyed by the lack of wit in the comment that you can’t even bring yourself to like it. Because if one’s brand is all about hilarious cat photos, then one better have some equally hilarious comments to go along with them.
Captions help solidify a consistent tone to tie together your theme of images. They also help you connect to your followers and show that you put thought into what you do as an expert in your field.
Treat your captions as though you’re speaking right to your best customers. What’s important to them? How is what you say a reflection of your brand?
Careless captions turn away knowledgeable people within your niche and confuse your brand message.
Thoughtful captions inspire thoughtful responses and genuine followers.

4. Ask for action

Duh! Just ask people to like you, right? It’s just that easy!
Well, almost.
When you’re posting to your account, think about adding a call to action into your caption to solicit a response from your viewers and/or followers.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just something short and sweet. For instance, under a photo of a massive ice cream cone with a text overlay that reads “Ice Cream Cures All,” you could add the caption, “Like if you agree!”
This incites a no-brainer action by the viewer vs. just adding the caption, “I love ice cream!” which doesn’t necessarily incite any active response.
Make it easy for your followers to engage by telling them exactly what to do.

5. Use and create relevant and thoughtful hashtags

As on all social media platforms, hashtags help build community and bring together people with similar likes and interests.
The people you want liking and following you.
So with hashtags consistent with your brand and tone, you’ll be attracting people within your niche who will be more likely to engage and help build your following.
Focus on hashtags that are highly relevant within your industry, such as #motivation and #fitness if you’re a personal trainer or #organic and #cleaneating if you’re a vegan chef.

You can even create your own hashtags pertaining to perhaps a social campaign you’re currently running. When your followers start using it, you can then like or comment on their photos, repost them and create a dialogue.
Combine hashtags with thoughtful messaging to caption your themed photos and you’ll be well on your way to Instagram stardom. Or at least more engagement and a larger following.

6. Don’t forget to geotag

So simple, yet so often forgotten.
When you post your photos, remember to geotag them with your current location.
Doing so helps build camaraderie with followers who may also have a connection to that particular city, restaurant, gym, etc. or share common sentiment toward the place you’re posting from.
Because kinship breeds commentary.
For example, say you’re a food critic and you’re visiting a highly acclaimed restaurant in San Diego.
When you share a photo of your exquisitely crafted meal, be sure to geotag that restaurant as a location in your post.
This way, others who have eaten there or who live locally will be inspired to perhaps share what their thoughts were on their meals, like your photos or follow you thinking that by doing so they’ll get more insider scoop on great restaurants in their hometown.

7. Ask people to follow you via your other social accounts

Believe it or not, having additional social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook can actually help you build your following and engagement levels on Instagram.
Generally, any avenue to get your name and brand out there online will help generate interest around your brand, and thus, interest in your social channels.
But you can also use your other social channels to ask your current followers there to also follow you on Instagram.
Think about it. If they already like you and your brand enough to follow you on one account, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll be more than willing to follow you on another one.
And you can even give them a little sample of what they’re going to get on your Instagram by linking it to your Facebook page. So whatever you post to Instagram will also show up on your Facebook page.
Asking followers on one social account to follow you on another is a smart way to earn more of the “right” followers who have a genuine interest in your brand and who will be more likely to comment and create a thoughtful dialogue.

8. Consider mixing business with pleasure

In most areas of business, combining your business and personal accounts isn’t always a recommended activity.
But if your daily life can somehow compliment your brand, or vice-versa, it may be a smart idea to incorporate your personal photos into what you’re posting for business purposes.
For instance, say you promote an energy-boosting green drink, made of organic, locally harvested produce. Along with posts of your bottles as part of a well-balanced breakfast and of customers drinking it at their local gyms, you may consider posts of you harvesting your own vegetables in your home garden or shopping at a farmer’s market.
Not only do images like this reinforce your embracing the essence of your brand in your everyday life, but doing so helps potential customers and followers better connect with you, as a person. And when that happens, it leads to a deeper connection with your brand.

9. Research and learn from other successful accounts

The cool thing about social media is that the whole purpose of it is to share.
Share posts, share pictures, share copy, share…ideas.
There are tons of people out there just killing it when it comes to earning a constant stream of new followers and above-average levels of engagement. So they’re doing something right.
What?
Do they run awesome campaigns? Have a really solid brand message exemplified throughout their photo stream, hashtags and captions? Are their photos done off-the-cuff and spontaneously? Or are they highly orchestrated down to the last detail?
You definitely want to make your brand your own and stay true to your own persona and voice.
But looking for ideas that have been successful on other top accounts and applying that general framework to your overall strategy can help you take your efforts to the next level.

10. Start using Iconosquare, Schedugram or InstaEasy

Using various social tools to help you better manage your Instagram account can help you save time and strengthen your efforts to build your following and boost your engagement.
Iconosquare can help you better manage your account by offering you an easy-to-use dashboard with more detailed search and engagement capabilities involving other Instagram accounts.
Schedugram is a great tool to use if you’re looking to schedule out future posts in advance. You can set times and stay organized with what you’re featuring and how it plays into your greater brand initiatives.
InstaEasy allows you to grow your Instagram following on autopilot. You can follow by hashtags or another user’s followers. Plus you can automatically like images based on hashtags and unfollow users. Did I mention that once this is setup, it runs automatically?
If neither of those tools give you what you are looking for, you can browse this list of over 500 social media tools – many of which work for Instagram.

Growing your following and engagement isn’t an overnight achievement

Rome wasn’t built in a day.
We’ve all heard that one before. But in today’s world of instant gratification, patience is at an all-time low. For everything.
If you’re looking to work your way to Instagram fame the right way, by earning followers who really care about your brand and who want to contribute to intelligent conversations, the investment of your time and energy is an absolute must.
You’ve got to regularly engage with people within your niche, upgrade your caption copy, seek out popular hashtags, ask people to take action and to follow you – and don’t forget to geotag.
At the end of the day, your potential to gain a mass following and high engagement depends on the kind of effort you’re willing to put into each one of these tactics. Of course, you can choose to use an automation tool like InstaEasy to help you skip the mindless and redundant necessities of you Instagram account.
And with the right amount of work and the right amount of patience, you’d better start planning what you’re going to do with all that newfound fame.
Because in the right amount of time, you’ll have Instagram success in the bag.
Ready to become “Instagram Famous”?
Let me know how you plan to do it in the comments below. Or if you are already a star, why not spill the beans on how you did it?

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How to Use a Facebook Contest to Promote Your Business

FACEBOOK has emerged as one of the most influential social networks in the world.  It has also become a platform for companies to increase their reach and promote their business. However, one of the most highly interactive ways to do so on Facebook is also one of the most under-used: a contest.

Contests provide a great opportunity for businesses to generate a buzz, and increase brand recognition. Here, we will outline the process of hosting a contest on Facebook to promote your business.

Step 1. Preparation

Using a contest requires preparation, but first and foremost, you should review Facebook guidelines for organizing a promotion. Knowing the rules and guidelines set forth by Facebook will allow your contest to be completely legitimate. This is vital to your success so we recommend you read the guidelines in their entirety. To summarize, any promotion on Facebook (such as a contest or sweepstake) must contain:

• Official rules
• Terms and eligibility requirements
• A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant

Once you are familiar with Facebook’s rules, spend some time researching other contests that have been successful. Explore feedback, review what participants have said about previous contests and take note of which contest posts had the highest engagement.  This will help you establish some best practices for organizing a Facebook contest, and be informed about current contest trends.

Expert tip: Optimize research by seeking out competitors in your niche. Targeting preparation by investigating your competition will help maximize results.

Finally, establish a method for hosting the contest. While a Facebook page may be used for this purpose, you may find a hosting app to be more suitable. Hosting apps often feature contest management tools, quantifiable insight and reporting components, branding capabilities and more. Fandom Marketing recently published a top 10 list of the Best Social Media Contest Apps, which is a great reference to get you started.

Expert Tip: Contests may be administered on Fan Pages, Business Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Profiles may not be used for sponsored promotions.

Designed by Freepik

Step 2. Planning

Once you have finished preliminary research and preparation, move onto planning your specific contest. Every social media marketing strategy needs a solid plan, but not every marketer knows where to start. If this is your first Facebook contest, here are some important things to keep in mind:

• Budget – Will your contest require hosting, traffic/advertising? How much will be spent on prizes?
• Promotion – How will participants learn about your contest? Ads, Emails, Social Media Posts, Etc.
• Contest Length – What are the start & end dates? What is the length of time allowed for entries? When are winners announced?
• Entry method – How do participants join? What information is required to do so?
• Participants – Who can participate? Amount of entries allowed (total, and per person)?
• Prizes – What are they? What value do they bring?
• Winners – Number of winners? How they are determined?
• Legal Documents – Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Etc.
• Goals – What quantifiable results do you want to achieve? What is your baseline for success?
• Tools – Does your hosting app cover the basics? Do you need other solutions to track statistics and measure goal achievement?

Each of these components will be important when it comes time to take action. Be sure you set yourself up for success and plan accordingly.

Expert tip: Planning sets the stage for your entire promotion, and can make or break your contest. Don’t skimp on time or effort with this step!

Step 3. Take Action

With a defined plan, you are ready to take action. Begin by implementing the contest strategies outlined during the planning phase.

Compile your prizes, sign up for your hosting app, and create the content needed for your contest. For example, if your advertising plan centered around using your email list to reach previous customers, design an effective series of messages that will help you reach these subscribers and urge them to participate.

Then, up your engagement! Since Facebook is a social network oriented towards user interaction and social relationships, connect with participants.

The end goal here is to promote your business, right?  So, take this time to really interact with Facebook users who are interested in your contest. Use the research compiled during your preparation phase and post some targeted and highly engaging updates.

Expert tip: Engagement matters! Ask questions. Answer questions. Like. Share. Post pictures and spread the word about your contest. 

Step 4. Monitor

Planning and hosting a Facebook contest is great for promotion but don’t stop there! We also recommend that you closely monitor performance metrics.

By carefully monitoring your contest, you have the opportunity to notice if an ad doesn’t convert, if a link is broken, if a follower posted an inappropriate comment or anything else that could be having a negative effect on your promotion.

Observing statistics during your contest allows you to recognize issues and, more importantly, adjust accordingly. For example, if paid advertising for the contest is not resulting in conversions – quickly pause your campaign, revamp your ad to increase the click-through-rate and encourage more Facebook users to join your contest.

Crisis (and wasted funds) averted.

Step 5: Analyze

You set out to host a contest, so once the contest is over and prizes have been awarded, you’re done, right?

Well, kudos on the follow through, but since the real goal was to promote your business your work is still not quite finished: The final stage of organizing a Facebook contest involves analyzing the results.

Analysis is important because it helps you determine:

• If you met your planned goals
• What worked and what did not
• If this type of promotion is worth repeating

The best way to analyze your results? Compare the before and after.

Use trackable links and other marketing tools to compile data and make comparisons based on standard metrics. If you chose an application for hosting, this is a great opportunity to review the data, and analyze the efficiency of your Facebook contest. The more information you gather before, during and after the contest, the better.  When it comes to analysis, you want to have a well rounded set of data to reference and draw conclusions from. This information will help you set standards for future marketing efforts.

Wrapping It Up

Facebook contests can be a viable marketing strategy to generate results for your business. A successful contest goes beyond just having participants and giving away prizes; requiring preparation, planning, action, monitoring and analysis. These steps offer a guide to building a contest that will promote your business to a larger audience and with real, tangible results.

Over to you! Take a minute to post comments or share any ideas you have about Facebook contests. Have you used them before? What worked, and what didn’t?

We’d love to hear from you!

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8 Essentials For An Effective Win-Back Email Campaign

For any marketer, we feel a sense of excitement when we are able to convert a visitor to a customer.
However, only the first half of the battle has been won. The other half is trying to retain those customers by probing them with email newsletters and offers over the span of a few months to a year.
This part is more difficult and usually results in them going inactive and not engaging with your brand as a whole.

The are many reasons why people would go inactive:

• They only bought your product as a gift (it was a one-time purchase)
• They had a bad experience
• You changed your product and they’re just not into the new thing
• Your emails may be getting sent to their junk mail inbox
• Circumstances have changed
• They took a great promotional deal you had on offer, but was never really into your brand

Retaining customers is an important yet challenging task. Don’t worry, many email marketers face this problem too.

Customers will naturally decrease by about 22.5% every year.

So why do we bother trying to retain customers when we can just find new customers?

1. First, it’s a lot easier to sell to existing customers than new ones – 50% easier to be exact. This is because your brand has already done the hard work of establishing a level of trust, so convincing them requires little work.
2. Second, it’s a lot cheaper. It costs between 4-10 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

This is why win-back email campaigns are so important. But how effective are they?

Effectiveness of win-back emails

ReturnPath conducted a study where they analyzed 33 different win-back email campaigns by different ecommerce stores to see how effective they were at turning a non-active customer into an active customer.
Results showed:

• 92% of the emails made it to the customer’s inbox – this means inactive users were receiving win-back emails
• Open rate was only 12% – A respectable number as customers have not interacted with the brand in a long time

However, results showed that slow and steady wins the race:

• 45% of recipients who received a win-back campaign read a subsequent message after the first email
• 75% of re-engaged subscribers had read a subsequent message within 89 days (after the first email), with the other 25% still opening emails 300 days after receiving the first win-back email

image: http://marketingland.com/email-win-back-programs-work-81574

Overall, three quarters of inactive customers could still re-engage with your brand within 90 days

8 Tips to creating an effective win-back email campaign

1. Personalize your emails

Personalization is a must in email marketing and here’s why

• Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10% (Campaign Monitor)
• 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement (eConsultancy).

Customers will appreciate you using their name instead of “hey you”. It creates more of a personal connection than a retailer-customer interaction.
Here are some ways on how we can personalize our win-back emails:

• Say their name
• Show previous purchase history
• Personalized product recommendations (upsell and cross-sell) based on past purchases

Netflix does it right with their personalization: using the first name, effective copy (note how they use pronouns, e.g. “you” and “your”) and a list of devices they can view shows on. The email also includes a strong call-to-action personalized to the customer, “I’d like to come back”.

Source: allthatiknow

2. Provide a solution

There are many reasons why your customer hasn’t purchased from you in a long time.

Understanding your customer is super important in the world of ecommerce. If we do not understand why they are going lapse, we will just repeat the same mistake over and over again, hoping to get a different result every time.

So Instead of trying to guess the answer, a better way would be to ask them directly.

Inbound adopts for a personalized message request. Maybe Inbound is sending too many emails or irrelevant ones. They provide an opportunity to let the customers decide what kind of emails they want to receive so it’s more personal and targeted. They also send a feedback request at the end to learn what they could do better.

Source: Audienceops

Dollar Shave Club anticipates that customers may not want their razors every month. That’s why they ask their customer if receiving a razor every second month would be better and shows them how this could be done.

Source: Flexmail

3. Segmentation

It’s a fact that your customers will appreciate your emails if it’s related to them.
We can segment our email list to subcategories. This could include:

• How long since their last purchase
• Low, medium and high-value customers – average order value
• Number of orders per year
• Customers that had negative experiences

By segmenting your email list, you can deliver more relevant win-back email messages to each group.

4. Highlight the benefits

Win your customer’s back by reminding them of the value and benefits of your product
Here’s a win-back email by Dropbox to users that have not added or uploaded any files to their account. They remind users to start reusing their service by highlighting the features of their product.

Source: Betaout

Warby Parker sends out an email whenever someone places an item in their shopping cart but abandons it. They know the customer has enough interest to add the product to their shopping cart, so a simple email may be enough to make them purchase the product. They use the copy, “want a better look?” to let customers know the benefits of their glasses – looking great!

Source: essenceofemail

5. Send more than one email

There’s no magic email that will engage every inactive customer. That’s why you should develop a win-back email campaign comprising of several emails. Send different win-back emails over a period of time to try engage your inactive customer. Hitting them from different angles is better than relying on sole email – also great for split testing and gathering data!

Here’s Adidas’ third email in their 3-part win-back email series. They opt for the urgency tactic, reminding them that they have a limited time before the discount offer expires.

Source: Omertia

6. Give them an offer

Why not try to engage your customers by giving them something – maybe a discount or a gift.
Study shows that win-back emails that contained a “$ off” discount performed better than emails with “% off” discount.

A great way use this tactic is to include the discount in the subject line.

Tip: Don’t send your discounted emails in the first email of your win-back email campaign series (e.g. send on the second or third email). Sometimes customers are willing to purchase from emails with no discount so maximize your revenue by saving these for a later series.

If a customer doesn’t respond to your offers, you can maybe send them an even better offer than before. However, this may be risky as customers may catch on and wait intentionally for the better offer – so use it wisely!

Here’s Crocs’ win-back email containing a $10 off discount.

Source: wisepops

Here’s another discount offer – 100% free discount that is. Pinkberry, adds a free yogurt to customer’s account when they have not bought for a while. By offering a bonus or a free gift, you can encourage a person to come back to your store and start buying from you again.

Source: Business2Community

7. Know when to give up

It’s better to have a small but reliable mailing list than a large inactive list that delivers inconsistent results. That’s why part of the aim of our win-back emails are to opt out people that won’t buy from you.

If you tried everything, but your customer won’t budge, sometimes you just have to let them go. You don’t want to keep sending them emails over and over again as it may appear spam-like and may give your brand a bad reputation.

Here’s Fab’s unsubscribe email where they opt the customer out of their mailing list, but leaves them an option in case they still want to stay on. They know the receiver will never buy so there’s no point having them on their mailing list.

Source: Hubspot

Here’s the clothing company, Free People, acknowledging that their customer has not engaged with their emails in a long time and ask if they still want to receive them or not. This may encourage them to engage again, but also make the customer unsubscribe. Either way is fine as there’s no point having a customer that’s never going to buy. 

 

Source: Hubspot

8. A/B Test

Don’t assume one headline copy is going to be better than another. Let data guide your campaign instead of using your own opinion.

The best marketers are the ones that continuously test and optimize their campaigns based on data. Tests could include but not limited to:

• Design
• Copy
• Frequency
• Timing
• Offers

The 33 ecommerce stores that participated in ReturnPath’s study split tested different subject lines like, “we miss you” and “a note from the CEO”. These had read rates of 13%.

What to do next?

Trying to get your customers to re-engage with your brand is never easy as they stopped engaging for some reason. However, with these tactics, you will increase the odds of them re-engaging and buying from you again.

What success have you had with your win-back email campaigns? We’d love to hear in the comments below or if you have any other extra tips, pop it down below too!


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What Is Content Marketing?

Listen. If you are even remotely connected to the business, marketing, and advertising world, then you’ve probably heard the phrase “content marketing.”
You’ve at least been exposed to it through:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Search engine optimization
• Email autoresponders
• White papers
• Copywriting
• Social media
• Landing pages

But what exactly is content marketing? Glad you asked, because I’ve got answers for you. One short answer, and one really long. Here’s our official definition:

Content marketing means creating and sharing valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.

Which brings us to another question: how do you actually use content marketing?
Well, even if you consider yourself a seasoned practitioner or you’re a fresh-out-of-the-box beginner, this handy, systematic, and exhaustive guide — loaded with 100 articles that cover content marketing essentials for building a viable money-making platform — is at your finger tips.

How to use this content marketing reference library

Content marketing can be simplified into the convergence of three spheres: your audience’s interests, your brand story, and your unique perspective or content medium. Combine these three to achieve content greatness.

The 100-article list below reaches back to November 2008 and goes all the way up to the present. It contains 10 categories:

• Content essentials
• Content strategy
• Content research
• Idea creation
• Content creation
• Content promotion
• Traffic generation
• Content marketing case studies
• Content auditing
• Content business building

Yes, I read all 100 articles. It took me 15 hours over six days. I recommend you do the same — but work through it at a pace that’s right for you!
First, bookmark it. That way, it’ll be easy to find when you need to answer a question or reference one of our articles in your own content.
Then, you could:

• Study one of the 10 categories each week, creating your own 10-week content marketing course
• Read one-to-three articles each day
• Identify the categories you need to brush up on the most, and make a note on your calendar to review them when you have free time

Side note: This list makes for perfect Twitter content … drip out just one article each day to your followers over a 100-day period, and you’ll look like a content marketing genius. 😉
This guide will fill in the gaps in your knowledge. It will help you become a content marketing expert in your industry or company.
And with that, I give you Copyblogger’s Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.

Content marketing essentials

The Future of Content Marketing
New York City should have been destroyed 33 years ago. Because of massive amounts of horse manure. Here’s the lesson you can draw about the future of content marketing from that failed prognosis.

What’s the Difference Between a Professional Writer and a Content Marketer?
Five elements that separate high-quality content marketing from material that’s well-written but might not deliver the same business value.

What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Digital Commerce?
We’ve been talking a lot lately about “digital commerce.” This article for is anyone who’s wondered: “I thought content marketing was digital commerce: what’s the difference?”

The 3-Step Journey of a Remarkable Piece of Content
Remarkable content takes a three-step journey. If we keep this journey in mind, we can craft a profound experience for our readers. Pamela Wilson walks you through you each step.

Agile Content Marketing: How to Attract an Audience That Builds Your Business
How do you create a content marketing strategy that actually works? The first step is to get your head right.

The First Rule of Copyblogger
Great content marketing begins here. Those who obey this rule share content that’s worth reading with an audience who is hungry for it. Long-term gains in traffic, leads, and profits follow. Those who break this rule might experience short bursts of traffic, leads, and profits — but not for long.

What’s the Difference between Content Marketing and Copywriting?
When you combine great content with great copywriting, you end up with a powerful marketing platform that can launch you into the realm of the world’s greatest content producers.

The Three Essentials of Breakthrough Content Marketing
The glut of content on the web means that the market is crowded and cluttered. Your content needs to rise above that confusion. Here’s how to do it.

Why Content Marketing Doesn’t Suck
As the saying goes, “Haters will hate.” Don’t let them talk you out of the benefits that content marketing can deliver over a long period of time. This episode of The Lede (when it was still hosted by Robert Bruce) will show you what Procter & Gamble, soap operas, and content marketing have in common. And then some.

The Two Vital Attributes of Quality Content
Ever wondered what makes some blog posts funny, vigorous, and meaningful? You know, the types of blog posts you not only share — but save. Print out. Study. Wonder no more.

Everything You Need to Know About Creating Killer Content in 3 Simple Words
Try this sticky formula — one that basically consolidates what every guru, expert, and pundit has been saying about persuasion, usability, and web marketing — that will make creating compelling copy easy.

Content marketing strategy

Content Marketing: A Truly Winning Difference
A simple lesson about learning how to accentuate the positives in your marketing from a little story about Claude Hopkins and Schlitz beer.

10 Content Marketing Goals worth Pursuing
What do you want your content to accomplish? You do have goals, right? If not, start with these 10.

How to Build an Agile Content Marketing Team
Eric Enge provides nine tips on how to build an agile content marketing team in a way that might just make the size of the task a lot more manageable.

A Content Marketing Innovation Cheat Sheet
Successful content marketers often have deceptively simple cheats for churning out effective online publishing on a regular basis. Let’s take a look.

Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy
We’re professional content marketers — not subsistence farmers — and our work doesn’t involve 12-hour days in grueling conditions. So, is sharecropping still dangerous? Yes.

A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks
How do you display your work while making it easy for prospective clients to learn about who you are? The conclusion is simple.

A Quick-Start Guide to Measuring Your Content Marketing Efforts
Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay. Mike King talks about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts.

5 Steps to Revising Your Content Marketing Strategy to Attract and Retain Future Customers
Whether you already have a product or are just getting started, here are five steps you need to take now to attract and retain future customers of your product or service.

How to Use Customer Experience Maps to Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
Eighty percent of businesses say they are delivering an excellent customer experience. But only eight percent of customers believe these companies were actually delivering. That’s a huge discrepancy. Why such a big gap?

13 Simple Questions to Help You Draft a Winning Content Strategy
Square away an afternoon, ask yourself these questions, and document the answers in a notebook, on a whiteboard, in Evernote, or in the handy PDF we’ve created for you.

How to Create a Visual Brand and Fight the Dark Forces
What can we learn about building a visual brand from Star Wars? Grab these top visual branding tips from Rainmaker Digitals’s Lead Designer Rafal Tomal.

The 5 Keys to Content Marketing Mastery
If you’re happy being an average content marketer, then you can ignore this post. But if you want to be a content marketing master, tap into these five strategies of “deliberate practice.”

The Old-School Content Marketing Strategy that Scores Freelance Writing Clients
While the Internet is more effective and efficient in many ways, you won’t want to throw this approach to getting more freelance clients in the marketing dustbin — it still works. And marvelously.

Content marketing research

Research Ain’t Easy (But it’s Necessary)
What good research does for you and your readers. The first article in a three-part series by Beth Hayden.

A 6-Step Content Marketing Research Process
What should your research process look like? What steps can you take to gather the best possible data on your target audience? Beth Hayden answers those questions.

Become a Content Marketing Secret Agent with Competitive Intelligence
Using slick online snooping techniques and a little sweat equity, we can all find out what our competitors are doing well, what they could be doing better, and how we can adapt their best techniques to improve our own businesses.

A 3-Step Process for Painless Keyword Research
How to stay focused when doing your research and how to avoid getting bogged down in the stuff that doesn’t matter. Because you will.

How to Find the Keywords that Work for Your Content Marketing Goals
Accurate keyword research helps you optimize your website for the search engines, and it also allows you to shape your content strategy. So it’s vitally important that you use smart tactics to help you do your research in a fast, efficient way.

5 Ways Listening to Community Data Can Expand Your Content Marketing Strategy
When talking about content marketing, discussions often focus on decisions about topics, headlines, platforms, and distribution. But how much do you consider the data that supports these decisions?

Why Content Marketing is a Long Game (and How to Play It)
Whether or not you know it, you’re playing a long game with content. Let’s take a look at just a few ways to improve your online strategy.

How to Determine the Potential Size of Your Content Marketing Opportunity
Are readers already displaying a passion for your space? Are they looking for the type of content you’re producing or want to produce? Are they sharing it? Eric Enge explains

Don’t Create Your Content Strategy Until You Research These 6 Things
Here are six areas you should research to avoid a content strategy that’s DOA (Dead on Arrival), so your content marketing gets — and holds — your audience’s attention.

Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head
The media you create can attract an audience. As that audience grows, you must learn their needs, wants, hopes, and fears. That information helps you learn about a customer’s worldview.

Tap Into This Psychological Driver to Create the Ultimate Message
Want to overcome content shock? Then you need to understand your audience’s outlook. In other words, you need to tap into their worldviews.

Idea creation

Surviving “Content Shock” and the Impending Content Marketing Collapse
You and I both know that there is a hell of a lot of content out there. Here’s why Sonia Simone is not worried about it.

Conquer Content Shock with Illegitimate Ideas
An illegitimate idea is one that is unnatural — a mongrel. We don’t know its origins. It comes out of left field and is so surprising and disruptive that we halt and pay attention to it.

49 Creative Ways You Can Profit From Content Marketing
Build a membership website. Yellow page ads that look like a blog post. Address popular objections. And 46 more ideas to help stoke your content creativity.

How to Use Content to Find Customers
What do birthday cakes and content marketing have in common? More than you think.

The 10-Step Content Marketing Checklist
Sonia calls this blog post a “checklist” for building a solid content marketing platform. I prefer “law” or “commandment” because if you break one of these rules, you’ll pay.

The Powerful Resource You’ve Always Wanted When Presented with Creative Challenges
Avoid producing copycat content and discover how to create not-to-miss, valuable, unique online content that helps you achieve your business goals

Zen and the Art of Content Marketing
Content marketing in the 21st century might seem like an endless high-speed car chase. But it doesn’t have to be. Not when you apply the simple principles of quality used by this world-renowned Japanese sushi chef.

Why Content Marketing Is the New Branding
Your content defines you. And it becomes the vehicle in which you communicate promises and expectations to your customers. Check out the nifty infographic from PRWeb on different options for sharing your brand online.

How to Brainstorm Brilliant Ideas for Your Blog
You probably know what brainstorming is. But do you know how to do it correctly? Do you know what you need to do before, during, and after the event to make it actually successful? I didn’t. Not until I read this article.

How to Write 16 Knockout Articles When You Only Have One Wimpy Idea
Are you struggling to write articles for your blog? It’s time to get creative. Stefanie Flaxman describes 16 different types of blog posts that you can apply to any niche.

Content creation

Is Content Marketing a Hamster Wheel You Can’t Escape?
Here is a technique that — in exchange for some bursts of intense hard work — will bring you long breaks from the content creation hamster wheel.

The Unstoppable Rise of the Digital Content Creator
Software and digital content creators have become a powerful pair.

3 Components of a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar that Works
Are you strategic about your content creation? Or do you wing it, publishing content with a short-term view? One will help you be successful for the long-term. The other will stunt your growth.

A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week
Want a beautiful four-step procedure for creating a drop-dead gorgeous blog post each week? One that draws out the process leisurely over four days? And lets you do it in your slippers? Read on.

58 Ways to Create Persuasive Content Your Audience Will Love
You want to be a great writer. Seduce readers. Climb above the competition. If that’s you, then start with this step-by-step guide to creating ridiculously good content. Henneke doesn’t disappoint.

The Copyblogger “Secret” to Creating Better Content
Content marketers use content to advertise a product, service, or idea. You want to attract attention. Create desire. Stoke interest. But you also want readers to actually do something. Here’s how.

22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue
It happens to the best bloggers and content marketers. Idea dry spells. After dipping into the well every day for months … you come up empty. This infographic is a fast and helpful tool that jump-starts the content creation process.

A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories
Stories are easily the most powerful tool in the content marketer’s arsenal. People love good stories. Stories communicate complex ideas simply. And stories stick in people’s minds. But if you don’t know how to write a good story, then they won’t help you.

How to Constantly Create Compelling Content
Where are you supposed to get all your ideas for content? The answer can be found in a little-known intersection that artists, scientists, and songwriters have been crossing for centuries.

The Simple 5-Step Formula for Effective Online Content
Effective content marketing comes down to two things: education and personality. The right combination of these two elements will lead to leaps in traffic, subscribers and — ultimately — customers.

The 3-Step Cure for Boring, Useless Content
If your business could benefit from content marketing, the worse thing you could do is avoid it. The second worst thing is to create lame content. Geoff Livingston tells you how to make sure that never happens.

The 7 Essential Steps to Creating Your Content Masterpiece
Johann Sebastian Bach — one of the greatest composers who ever lived — had one of the most grueling production schedules one could imagine. And that, my friends, is one of the reasons he cranked out so many masterpieces. Mark McGuinness explains.

How to Craft a Marketing Story that People Embrace and Share
Storytelling isn’t limited to a blog post or a sales page. Storytelling works for your overall position in a market. So, how do you write a story? Use these three steps.

Master This Storytelling Technique to Create an Irresistible Content Series
Since your competitors are likely writing about similar topics, storyboarding is a technique you can use to craft a special experience readers won’t find anywhere else. Check out this storyboarding tutorial.

Content marketing promotion

The 7 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing
Here are the seven essentials that will turn your social media marketing from an annoying time-waster to an effective bottom-line booster.

Launching a New Product? These 5 Tips Will Get You the Testimonials You Need
If your content, product, or service is new, then you’re likely wondering how to get testimonials. I show you a smart way to gather proof with these five tips.

Content Marketing Is Easier When You (Partially) Delegate These 12 Tasks
These are partial delegation workflows you can assign to someone else that will either give you back the most time or help you with activities you’ve been meaning to do but don’t get to.

How to Create an Agile Content Marketing Strategy (and Stay Sane Doing It)
Pamela Wilson admits: “I spent so much time this past year creating content that I didn’t make enough time to read. And reading is important when you’re a content creator.”

The Proper Way to Automate Your Social Media Activities (and 5 Other Best Practices)
Automating some of your content may be beneficial for both you and your audience. Keep these six automation tips in mind as you set your social media strategy.

Why Content and Social Media are a Powerful Match
It’s not enough to create jaw-dropping content. You need to take that content to your audience members, who are sitting around those digital campfires (think social media). They’re waiting for you.

The Must-Have Social Media Tool Every Content Marketer Needs
Introducing the ultra-powerful, infinitely flexible social media tool that allows you to publish effective content without holding you to any arbitrary rules. It’s not what you think. Promise.

Are You Someone’s User-Generated Content?
The dangers of failing to build a digital asset that you own are real. Casualties abound.

Traffic generation

The Right Way to Think About Google
Google is going to shift. Sometimes abruptly. You don’t need to go along for the ride. Develop a sustainable approach, and leave the panic attacks behind.

5 Ways to Get More Traffic with Content Marketing
We all want it: more traffic. But how do we get it? It’s the most common question new bloggers ask. And it’s the question seasoned bloggers never stop asking. Try these five strategies for solid, proven results.

No Blog Traffic? Here’s a Simple Strategy to Seduce Readers and Win Clients
Do you have the right building blocks in place to seduce readers and win clients? If you want to create a simple blog plan that will help you win more readers, fans, and clients, answer the five critical questions in this post.

How to Make Winning Infographics Without Risk
Research suggests that publishers who use infographics grow in traffic 12 percent more than those who don’t. This is because an infographic, unless it’s completely awful (and they exist), will more than likely go viral. Discover the best ways to create them for your content marketing.

8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content
Most content marketers are fighting a losing battle with obscurity. They write, publish, and promote — and get nothing out of it. That’s painful. To make matters worse, this goes on day in, day out. Follow Pamela Wilson’s advice and that will change.

Should Your Content Aim for Traffic or Conversion?
Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker approach content marketing in two entirely different ways. Both approaches are super-successful. And anybody can combine and use these approaches to create killer results.

Content marketing case studies

Our monthly Hero’s Journey feature taps the collective wisdom of our community members to bring you reports from the front lines of the content marketing world. Here are five inspiring case studies:

• How One Entrepreneur Grew a Digital Business to Fit Her Life
• Guiding Online Dreams (and Dreaming of a New Community)
• From a Hidden Niche, an Empire Is Born
• How to Play the Long Game to Bring Your Idea to Life
• An Advocate Who Helps People Change the World with Content Marketing

What The New Yorker Magazine Can Teach You About Content Marketing that Works
In a few moments, you’ll know how to not only write content that engages but that also positions you as an authority in your space and dominates in the search engines.

How Chris Brogan Built His Content Platform
Look at Mr. Brogan now and you might think he’s a “master of social media.” He rules over one of the most recognizable independent content publishing empires. But life was not always easy for him. In fact, he struggled for eight years to get 100 subscribers. Here’s his story.

5 Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from a Weird “Real World” Business
Ideas are good. They are even better when they actually work. Here’s a content marketing case study of a business that creates high-end beauty products — for dogs. Weird, but true.

What to Do When You Absolutely, Positively Must Know if Your Content Will Rock
Predicting what content will resonate with readers is tough — if not impossible. You simply cannot know unless you do this one thing. Indie band Wilco did and discovered the truth. So will you.

The Grateful Dead 4-Step Guide to the Magical Influence of Content Marketing
I can hear you now: “Are you serious? An elderly, endlessly touring hippie band can teach me something about effective content marketing?” Yes, they can. Jerry Garcia was a genius. Or should I say “guru?”

Content auditing

5 Powerful Ways to Keep Building Authority Once Your Content Has Matured
In order to keep the early momentum of your blog launch and deepen that influence, you’ve got to adjust your content strategy to reflect the new demands of your audience.

8 Conversion-Boosting Ways to Personalize Your Content
People love to get personalized content. Sadly, that message doesn’t seem to be getting through to marketers fast enough.

4 Ways to Identify Site Visitors (and Why It Matters)
“With adaptive content we are supposed to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. But how do you even know who is on your site?” I asked. In his exquisite English accent he said, “You could start with cookies.”

A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content
There are a number of good reasons why you shouldn’t ignore old, broken, and neglected sections of your website. Here are three benefits of attending to expired content.

Is Content Marketing Worth the Effort?
Let me be frank with you: content marketing is work. It is hard work. Hard work like laying bricks or teaching middle school children. But for the practitioner who loves the work? It’s a turn on.

Why Nobody Cares about Your Content (and What to Do About It)
Glen Allsopp of ViperChill explains how to build your personal brand and authority by giving your readers everything they want — and never once talking about yourself.

Are You Creating Meaningful Content?
Ever think to yourself, “What does this content mean? Does it even matter? Is it significant? Do my readers care?” Those are good questions to ask yourself. And here’s the five-step framework to help you answer them.

How to Beat “Invisible Content” Syndrome
I’ve got some bad news for you: every new blog is born with a disease. Professionals call it Invisible Content Syndrome — or ICS. Others call it obscurity. The good news is you can conquer it. Here’s how.

The Foolproof Cure for Weak Content: 4 Ways to Get Some Perspective
You have a sweet idea for a blog post. You pop out of bed and hammer out the first draft. When you are finished, you read what you wrote and think that sucks. Don’t worry. That happens to all of us. And there are four great ways to fix it.

The Force that Powers Persuasive Content (And 3 Ways to Intensify It)
Bet you didn’t know this, but character building and content marketing go hand in hand. There’s a person behind every piece of content. Is that person honest, credible, and an authority? If not, then here are three ways to improve those essential components.

Content business building

How to Build a Business Using Paid and Free Content
Sonia will tell you how to raise your content marketing game by creating a platinum version of your content.

How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free
Not sure how much you should give away for free? Chris Garrett helps you find the line between freely available content and content that is locked behind a paywall.

The Key to Innovative Business Ideas: Cross-Pollination
No content marketer is an island. We all know this. But we don’t always take the initiative to strategically collaborate to generate the best content marketing ideas. Pamela Wilson reveals how you can get started.

Why Content is No Longer King (And Who’s Taking His Place)
Why would a novelist claim that content is not king? I mean, come one, this guy makes his living off of huge chunks of content. Check out his surprisingly good argument.

How to Use Ebooks Strategically and Reach Your Content Marketing Goals
Have you written an ebook yet? Some of the most respected content marketers have embraced ebooks for marketing their businesses and as a source of income.

Educate to Dominate Your Competition
Want to spark the buying process in your readers without resorting to a hyped-message? Dream of making your products so irresistible that customers hardly notice your sales offers? Then use the six psychological shortcuts of influence.

How to Succeed at Content Marketing Even if Your Content Skills Suck
Still a little weak in the knees about this whole content marketing thing because, well, you just don’t have any confidence in your skills? No sweat. Half the battle is doing this one thing.

Your ultimate guide to content marketing

Remember to bookmark this post and keep it as a resource to answer all of your content marketing questions!

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