I’ve discovered a sad truth.
It’s impossible for small business owners to do content marketing.
No matter how driven or passionate or smart you are, you only have 24 hours a day. Content marketing is a proven way to get customers. But it’s exhausting because it takes time and creativity.
You don’t have enough of either on a regular basis.
But surely, after showcasing the Top 11 Most Powerful Content Marketing Examples By Small Businesses, I must be wrong?
Native advertising.
It’s the latest craze.
I can’t go anywhere without hearing people talking, tweeting or blogging about it. There’s even an annual Native Advertising Summit dedicated to it.
While the definition varies depending on who you talk to, native advertising is simply advertising designed for a digital media channel, in terms of content and format, that doesn’t interrupt our experience as users and customers.
Simplified?
It’s branded sponsorship. Or digital ads we enjoy.
Sponsored Editorials. Promoted Tweets. Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon. Promoted Videos on YouTube. Sponsored Blog Posts. FourSquare Promoted Updates…
These are all forms of native advertising. But what’s missing from the conversation isn’t what it is or best practises – it’s one big decision. Should small businesses use native advertising? More importantly, should you?
Blogging is one of the fastest and easiest ways to create content online, and therefore one of the fastest growing channels for marketing your business online. I imagine many of you blog or are considering starting one, but most of you will stop for one reason – your posts won’t convert customers.
This is easy to change.
I’m assuming you have a blogging strategy to create the right content to attract qualified leads, that you’re promoting your content on a regular basis, and you’re capturing leads via email campaigns, so you can build relationships with potential customers overtime.
If you need a refresher on how to capture emails via your blog and convert them to customers, Chris Hexton (co-founder of email marketing software Vero) does a fantastic overview of the entire process.
When you’re ready, we’re going to explore 3 additional things you can do to write blog posts that convert readers to customers.
I’m a huge fan of blogging.
Blogging has increased our unique visitors by 624% and our leads by 245% – it’s among the fastest growing inbound marketing channels because it’s one of the most effective ways to attract qualified customers online.
Even though we’re obsessed with blogging (we’re even building a platform to make it easier for you to create engaging posts), we recognize it’s not for everyone.
If you don’t do it right, blogging can be harmful to your business. Not only will you waste resources, you can damage your reputation when you create poor content. And as a small business owner, reputation is everything.
So, here are 3 times when I believe blogging can be harmful to your business.
If you don’t like writing, don’t blog.
Besides the obvious (you won’t enjoy it), it will be hard to create remarkable posts on an ongoing basis. And you’ll start to feel like this guy…
No Passion = No Readers = No Customers
One of the challenging parts about blogging is sourcing big, beautiful and relevant pictures that you can legally use on a regular basis.
Yes, you can publish without photos.
But you’ll be missing out.
Images are an easy way to increase your readership because they tell your story better than text:
So, don’t let finding the perfect image stop you from creating great content. Here is everything you need to know to create beautiful blog posts, every time.
But first…
Big + Beautiful + Relevant
Use images to capture my attention, so you can tell me your story. If the image is small or boring, you’ve lost me. If it’s cool but doesn’t relate to the rest of the post, you’ve confused me.
Confused about the socks?
Twitter is a great way to increase your online reach, so you can drive more potential customers to your website.
Social media mentions of your business help you increase brand awareness, credibility and the likelihood that someone will follow you, allowing you to drive even more traffic to your site.
There are a lot of obvious ways to increase mentions of your business. We’ve shared 5 below. But we wanted to have some fun – so we’ve included 6 creative ways for you to increase social media mentions on Twitter.
We hear it time and time again – create good content.
But what is good content?
The biggest misconception around content is that it has to be great.
This is wrong because it forces you to believe everything you create needs to be an opus, which prevents many of us from saying anything.
While I hate to say it, you just need to be a little better than the average business in your niche. If you’re focused on learning, it’s easy to rise to the top and provide real value to your customers.
Here are 9 rules to creating good content that will help you rise above the noise.
Using keywords can be confusing, but it shouldn’t be.
Sometimes as marketers we go over the top naming things, which can make them seem more complicated than they are.
Keywords are simply the words and phrases you type into Google when you’re looking for something. They can be anything.
So, why should you care about them?
If you understand what your customers are searching for, you can figure out what type of content to create (like blog posts, ebooks and videos) to capture their attention and answer their questions by providing value. You can read more about keywords here.
But we’re not perfect. Here are 5 common mistakes using keywords in your blog that you should avoid.
While you’re trying to rank for multiple keywords, each post should focus on one.
Your goal is to optimize each post, so you have the highest chance of being found in Google for that keyword.
If you put too many keywords in a post (aka the same phrase of certain words over and over again), you won’t optimize for anything, your post will sound fake, and worst, your blog will get lost among the sea of 150,000,000 blogs that are online today.
Solution: One post, one keyword.
You track the obvious using Twitter: how many followers you have, how many times you’re getting retweeted and how many of your tweets are being favourited.
But it’s easy to get distracted by vanity metrics, which are highly visible metrics that are easy to track but don’t indicate real value.
Community isn’t about size – it’s about the strength of the tribe.
Here are 4 things every small business owner should track using Twitter to avoid vanity and grow a strong community.
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![What is good content? Follow These 9 Pillars [Hint: It's easier than you think]](http://getspokal.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/wpid-7a1f0b69c98643c8b4fc9402a658650e.jpg)
