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Be honest.

How often do you actually enter your email for a chance to win?

Or click a friend’s referral link for a fantastic discount – and complete the purchase?

How often do you share a promotion or referral link on your social feeds?

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Enter now for your chance to win…..…blah, blah, blah.

Who cares?!

Not me.

The problem with online contests is you have to enter to win.

To enter, you have to want to win.

The traditional contest model of ‘enter and share to win!’ is dead.

The point of a contest is to attract potential customers.

Potential income.

And you can only do that if you offer the right prize in the right way.  

Contests Fail Because Prizes Don’t Have the Right Value

Usually, the prize is too:

• Cheap: Nope, I don’t have time to read 10 random books that you’re giving away for free (and that you got for free).
• Broad: I have an iPad, thanks.
• Specific: I do not need a free course or consulting session (unless it’s REALLY valuable and you’re REALLY well-known).
• Expensive: Yes, your product sounds cool, and I’d love to win it…but I still have to buy [insert additional product or software] to make it work. That costs money. 

Business owners and entrepreneurs throwing out the ‘hey, let’s run a contest!’ line are better off handing out cash out to strangers on the street.

At least giving money away would make people smile.

After you convinced them you weren’t filming an episode of Punk’d.

Contests should an easy strategy for list-building – but they’re not.  

Give something cool away and the contest will sell itself, right?

Wrong.

Good contests, promotions, and giveaways can be expensive, time-consuming, and tough.

Traditional contest models make me want earplugs to drown out all the ‘tweet to share!’ chatter. 

You’re Fighting A Battle You Can’t Win

Unless you have a rabid fan base that shares your content like crazy and you enjoy a 70% email open rate, a plain ol’ contest just won’t work.

(If you have a 70% open rate, teach us, oh wise one.)

If you don’t, listen up.

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Ahh email marketing.

It’s a lot more than just sending out dozens of spam emails and hoping someone, anyone clicks a link.

Now, you may have read our overview post, The Beginners Guide to Email Marketing that covers the basics on email marketing. It’s a great start, and we’re going to build on the foundation of that here.

In fact, email marketing is one of the best tactics any brand can employ to generate leads, build connections with potential customers, and of course, make more sales.

But first, let’s take a look at how important email marketing can be in growing your business.

Need proof?

We thought you’d never ask. 

Check out some of these email marketing stats:

• Salesforce found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25
• A study by McKinsey noted that email is close to 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter
• The Direct Marketing Association found that email marketing “yields an average 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States.”

If that doesn’t convince you about the importance of email marketing…

Still with us? Glad to hear it! Now, if you’re a service business you might be wondering how email marketing campaigns can work for your brand.

You’re in luck, here we’re going to share with you three different autoresponder campaigns any service business can use to help grow your business.

Let’s take a look. 

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You want one thing from your blog. 

You want people to notice you.

In a good way. 

You want readers that come back for more while shouting your brand from the rooftops.

I get it. I’ve been there.

You need to attract attention to your blog and business

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But you can’t stand on a street corner and wave, hoping to catch someone’s interest. 

That would be inefficient, unnecessary, and pointless.

(Kind of like writing a blog post that no one reads.) 

Successful bloggers do three things:

1. Develop solid relationships with influencers 
2. Find new readers/clients
3. Keep existing readers/clients as happy as newlyweds 

Readers want to find a community that ‘gets’ them. They want a writer who’s inside their head.

But blogs (and their writers) can’t be everything to everyone. 

A blog will never: 

• please everyone
• catch everyone’s attention
• convert every blog reader to a client
• write for everyone every time

It’s time to take a deep breath and let go of unreasonable expectations. It’s okay. 

Readers are not like leprechauns. They exist, and they’re trying to tell you what they want to read. 

You just need to know where to look and you’ll find your pot of blogging gold. 

But first…

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

You write an awesome post, click publish, then sit back and wait for the hordes of adoring readers to leave hundreds of comments on your site.

Except…

Crickets.

Sound familiar?

Chances are this has happened to most of you at least once because this is exactly how most people go around promoting their content, by focusing the vast majority of time writing it. The promotion part ends up being an afterthought.

The funny thing is, this is exactly the opposite of what most big bloggers that have seen success are doing.

As Derek Halpern of Social Triggers is always quick to say:

“It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more. Or, in other words, create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you’ve created.”

You see, it doesn’t matter how great your content is if no one knows it’s there.

The good news?

We’re gonna change all that.

(Drumroll….)

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So you’ve got a fantastic business blog, and a decent amount of traffic to it. But you’re impatient. You want more visitors to your site now. A great strategy to add to your content marketing mix to get more visitors is guest blogging.

By contributing blog posts to other sites that attract your target demographic, you build a connection to that blog’s audience. If you provide really useful content, you’ll catch their attention. Because you’ve got your bio at the end of the post, people can easily click to learn more about you and your business. There’s no easier way to reach a wider audience — not even with advertising, which many people tend to ignore

Let’s say that you run a marketing firm, and you start guest blogging for sites catering to your customer demographic: owners of software companies. You’ve written posts for several high-profile blogs, and you start getting calls and emails from new potential clients. When you ask where they found you, they mention one of the sites you guest blogged for.

When people start to see your face and name on multiple blogs that they read, they start to think, “hey, this person seems to know what they’re talking about. I should hire them.”

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We all know that content marketing – and more specifically, blogging – works. It works really well. Consider a few statistics:

• The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors than companies without a blog on their sites.
• Blogging generates 97% more inbound links to a site and 126% more leads.
• What’s more, blogging gets you 434% more indexed pages in search engines – that’s more chances for you to get found by search users.

With all that goodness right there for the taking, why are so many marketers and business owners struggling to create enough content to build some momentum and make an impact?

And folks, we are struggling. Tea Silvestre of Story Bistro conducted a survey a few years back. Over 1,000 respondents were asked what their biggest marketing challenge was. Number one with a bullet, at 40%, was time management.

And in another study, 51% of B2B marketers said a “lack of time/bandwidth” was their biggest challenge to producing enough content consistently to achieve their marketing goals.

So, clearly we’ve got a problem here, and a lot of us are still looking for solutions. 

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What does July 4th mean to you? Freedom? Liberty? Justice? Independence? The American Dream?

Well, as an Irish lass, it never held much meaning for me. It was always just another day. Until last year, that is. Last year July 4th marked the day that my first post for Spokal, entitled “How To Overcome Your Fears And Write The Perfect First Blog Post“, was published.

As a writer, there are very few times that you look back at your writing and confidently declare, “I wouldn’t change a thing”. This, however, was one of those pieces.

When I was mulling over ideas for my first blog post, I realized a 2 things:

1. I had no experience in the marketing industry, so writing about SEO or lead nurturing was out of the question. I’d need more time to do some studying and learn about the industry before I can write about it in any legitimate way.
2. Being the sole writer of a business’s blog (that’s not your own) is kind of intimidating.

So what did I choose to do?

I focused on myself. I focused on what problems I was facing.

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Content marketing is an ever-evolving marketing strategy that can, at times, leave us feeling overwhelmed. How are we supposed to keep on top of all the latest news? When are we supposed to take time out of our very busy days to read all the latest blog posts? How does everyone know about the latest so-and-so before me?

Well, it’s all thanks to Twitter.

Twitter provides us instant access to the inside workings of some of the best in the business, and you’d be a fool for not tapping into it.

From social media strategists, to growth hacking gurus, and prolific bloggers, Twitter allows you the opportunity to follow some of the best in the business to help you keep updated and informed. But, it’s not as easy as “build it and they will come” anymore. You can’t just start an account and follow anyone related to “content marketing”. You may very well end up following a bunch of Twitter accounts that are less than stellar.

So, if you want to get all the latest and most reliable updates and insights quickly and easily, you have to know who to follow. Or, in other words, you have to figure out who’ll add the most value to your Twitter stream.

And while there are tons of amazing thought leaders out there, here’s a list of 16 best content marketing twitter accounts to follow.

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I love writing. I love language. I love reading a sentence that flows with such lyricism that stopping it could be likened to a blow against the very fabric of nature.

So it comes to no surprise that I’m all for preserving language and abiding by its grammar rules. For me, grammar rules are there for good reasons. They exist to ensure that we’re able to express what we want to say with complete clarity and confidence.

However, I believe that some rules are made to be broken. I believe that some rules don’t help with clarity. I believe some rules are outdated. Plus, language is fluid and should grow and change as society does.

So I like to start sentences with “and”. Sometimes there’s nothing like good ol’ slang. And I think using “I” makes things way more personal and creates connections with readers like no other word can.

And I want you to learn how to write without fear of the Grammar Police reigning down their corrections of terror on your content.

But before we go any further, here’s some ground rules:

1. Think about your audience. If you’re writing an academic paper, you should probably be writing in a formal tone. If you’re writing for an audience of small business owners who’ve very little time to waste, you want to keep things informal and straight to the point.
2. Be true to your voice where possible. If you’re writing for personal reasons, or in a market that’s more informal, this will come naturally. However, if you’re writing in a more formal tone, this is going to be more of a challenge, but one that you should definitely work on.  
3. Understand the context. What is the topic you’re writing on? What kind of content are you creating? An EBook will be more formal than a blog, for example.

Now, on to the rules you should know (and break).

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Creating a website and trying to figure out what platform to use? 

We created a site in the big 4 website creation tools – recorded the video and show you the pros and cons of each.

If you’re thinking of building your own website – you want to read this first.

First, some background on each:

Reports of the number of users of each platform vary widely from source to source, but the general consensus is that WordPress leads and no one else is catching up anytime soon. 

According to a July 2015 study by W3Techs, out of the 40.1% of the websites it surveyed that use a Content Management System, WordPress enjoys a market share of 60.3% (24.2% of the potential market overall, when including non-CMS users). 

The study found that all other CMS platforms together account for just 15.4% of the potential market, and Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace each claim less than 1%. WordPress dominates on all fields and channels, except on Facebook, where Wix’s recent surge is likely attributable to its promotional broadcast during Super Bowl XLIX.