How to Repurpose Videos Into Many Forms of Valuable Content

Want to create a wide range of content without a lot of effort? Is it easier for you to create videos than the written word? In this article, you’ll discover how to use video to produce up to eight different types of content for your business. #1: Plan Your Video Campaign Style and Outline an

This post How to Repurpose Videos Into Many Forms of Valuable Content first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

http://ift.tt/2uFIMM8

6 Tips to Make Your Brand an Email Response Rockstar

Posted by ronell-smith

Are you ready to create emails that get replies? Well, it's time to step away from the clickbait-y subject lines hawking insincere or insignificant promises, and instead deliver messages worthy of earning a response. Despite rumors to the contrary, asking for a reply or using email templates or sample letters is not the best path to ensuring your emails draw more than a yawn.

If the goal is to deliver emails that consistently get responses, your brand must first focus on being authentic, sincere, and empathetic, putting the needs of the person on the other side of the screen before those of your brand.

By doing so, you not only earn clicks, eyeballs, and responses, you can also increase the number of conversions for your product or services, which likely won’t go unnoticed.

For the skeptical among you, I’ll use a personal example, one that involved me sitting at my desk when my former vice president stormed out of the executive team meeting, yelling my name as he walked down the corridor toward my office.

"Ronell! Where’s Ronell?!" he implored as I stuck my head out my office door to greet him. “I need you to explain these numbers to me.”

I — lump in my throat — looked at a printout with budget numbers for my department.

“I cut your budget 30%, right?” he asked. “But [the revenue for your area] increased 17% over the same period. What did you do?”

Before I could say a word, he ran off to another meeting as I scrambled to respond.

At the time, I didn’t really have a solid answer.

But the more I looked into it myself, the more I realized that I had made a small change that had added up to make a huge difference: I focused intensely on building connections via email with my core clients.

Whereas many of my peers sent ho-hum, “How are you doing? We should talk soon”-type emails that got opened but seemed to never garner responses, I resorted to employing a system that was successful and trackable:

• Set aside 30 minutes a day for what I called “connectedness emails” — highlighting my knowledge of their new products or services, sharing my thoughts on them, and providing an informed opinion on how successful they were likely to be
• Sent a minimum of two emails
• Tied responses to future ad sales

What started out as a fun way to connect with my customers became a process I’ve continued to use for the better part of a decade, during which time I ran a members-only online newsletter that had email open rates averaging 47% (in a vertical where open rates averaged ~5%) and response rates averaging ~35%.

I’m sure many of you reading this could beat these numbers in your sleep.

My point is not to show you how lucky I was to have some success at email marketing over a short period of time. My point is that email outreach can be the powerful tool we view it as, if only we’re willing to revise our processes and focus on doing the things that earn meaningful responses, not merely clicks or opens.

Who cares about email, anyway?

Despite all of the attention and dollars thrown at social media, we have in our arsenal to successfully conduct outreach and build lasting connections.

But I’m sure you don’t need to be convinced, for you’re probably already sending emails more often than you’d care to remember.

What’s more, given the plentiful information on the email outreach, you’re probably wondering why you need to read another such post.

The answer: We can all be more effective at email, whether for marketing or for outreach. I’m of the opinion that the content marketing and SEO industries could be a lot more effective by placing as much emphasis on doing . (I’m not talking resource allocation, mind you; I’m talking diligence and attentiveness.)

Before I share the simple but effective tactics I’ve used for the last decade, three housekeeping notes are in order:

1. I’m not now, nor have I ever considered myself, an email expert.
2. This post won’t cover, in any great detail, subject lines (e.g. length, words, etc.), open rates, optimal times to send emails, etc.
3. Three things compelled me to write this post: (a) the prevalence of (often ineffective) email outreach; (b) the importance of email to SEOs and marketers in general; (c) and my desire to share a few simple elements I’ve used successfully for years.

How can your brand kick butt by creating emails that garner responses?

#1 -Tell me what's in it for me

After the opening salutations, get right to the point. Show me you value my time and have used yours to identify my needs and how your brand can help me meet them.

The email below, which I recently received from GetStat, nails it:

• The subject line not only intrigued me, it made me want to see what they’d collected on my behalf
• The opening was brief and to the point
• The information they compiled is in line with why I would likely be reading and subscribing to their blog
• They were brief
• (I’ll cover the CTA below)

As you can see, any brand can create a similar email.

It all begins with having empathy for the person on the other end, clear brand goals and a willingness to respect people’s time.

#2 - Grab mobile readers' attention with the first sentence

I have a confession: I don’t trust your subject line.

We’ve all become masters of the clickbait email subject line. If you’re going to get me to open your email, you’ll need to think different.

Like most of you, I open most emails on a mobile device.

To consistently get my attention on a smaller device, disregard the subject line and use the first sentence of the email, which is often shown via mobile.

Yes, this can mean your emails have my name in the first line. But for brands I recognize, I don’t need to know you realize who I am; I need to know what you’re sharing is of value to me right now.

This should be an easy sell for SEOs who always include keywords in the first few lines and sentences to of a message, be it a blog post or an email.

So, while you’re laboring over that catchy subject line, go ahead and peel off some time — and a few choice words — to include in the first sentence.

#3 - Mind your grammar

One of my first jobs out of college was a business writer for a newspaper.

The metro editor had a standing policy regarding email correspondence that got everyone’s attention:

• If you spelled his name wrong — no matter how great the pitch — he discarded it
• If you misspelled a word in the email, it met the same result.

In the years since, I’ve met many people who feel the same way.

Don’t focus on the message at the expense of respecting the person you’re contacting.

Take the time to figure out who you’re writing to. It might be a make or break.

#4 - Create & exhaust tension

If you’re really serious about wanting your email opened, show me that you can help me solve a problem you know I’m facing.

“I know you’re looking to…”

“Brands facing the challenge yours now faces…”

“Your content team is doing an excellent job, but are likely stretched thin…”

That’s when you step in with a worthwhile answer and can likely earn more than my attention.

The key is to show the individual reading your email that you feel her pain, have taken the time to find the solution, and, most important, you are the person to handle the job.

That’s how I got the newspaper gig, despite majoring in biology and having zero experience or training in journalism:

(This is not the actual email I sent, but it is similar.)

• I’d done my homework to know the issues the paper — and thus the editor — was facing.
• I knew he’d likely discount a non-journalism major, but I reasoned that he had stories he’d want covered — that is, he’d want to go down swinging.
• I wanted him to know I respected the business and the journalism, not simply the former.

I later learned that after reading my email, the executive editor said “Where did this guy come from?” He then set up a meeting with me.

I was hired the same day.

“Your email did it,” said my editor, months after I was hired, while admitting he was initially skeptical.

Your brand can achieve similar results. All it takes is a little investigation.

#5 - Have a well-defined call-to-action with clear next steps spelled out

One of my biggest weaknesses when I first started in content marketing was calls to action.

I’d write a blog post that simply ended.

There was no thoughts about intended next steps for the folks I was writing to.

Don’t be me.

At or near the end of every email you send, highlight, share, or link to the intended next step in the journey. (See the GetStat email above.)

#6 - End on a high note

A recent post regarding email outreach I wrote for Moz listed "thank you" as a better alternative to “thanks” as a closing.

Not so fast, says the latest research from Boomerang.

While “thanks” seems gratuitous to me, their research shows it as outperforming every other closing but “Thanks in advance.”

The main point I’m taking from this research is the need to test, test, test.

At the very least, start experimenting with various closings while keeping track of the responses.

Your results will likely vary.

Over to you

As you can see, none of the tips shared above is particle physics. They can be employed by anyone, at any brand and at any time.

I hope you’ll give at least a few of them a shot.

We all spend so much time and energy on email each day, it’s worth taking the time to figure out ways to better engage people through the medium.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2tLelYo

How to Uncover Hidden Content Opportunities with Topic Archaeology

This guide was co-written by Jay Baer and Convince & Convert Strategist, Anthony Helmstetter.

To work through this process, download this Excel worksheet.

In previous blog posts, we’ve covered how to identify content assets and gaps, based on the most important persona questions. We’ve covered the 5x5x5 questions and content gap analysis and the roles of “bricks and feathers” and Youtility content. Here, we’re going to show you a process for uncovering hidden content opportunities: somewhat less obvious topics of interest to your audiences that don’t fit into the processes linked above.

We want to prioritize these “hidden” content opportunities based as much as possible on actual data. But where does that come from? Where do we get new ideas for content our audiences will love?

Topic archaeology is a process we have used at Convince & Convert for clients all over the world. We like it because it uses data from organic search and social chatter to identify topics people actually seek and discuss.

What Is Topic Archaeology, and Why Is It So Important?

Topic archaeology uses a data-driven method to unearth, uncover, and identify topics relevant to your potential audiences. The process has four parts: topical seeds, keyword research, social listening, and scoring and ranking.

Start with Topical Seeds

The first part is your topic intuition. Identify 20 relevant topics within your key audience segments that are not well covered by the 5x5x5 questions process. These should be topics that you have not thoroughly covered in your existing content. Put these 20 seed topics in a spreadsheet.

Topic archaeology uses a data-driven method to unearth, uncover, and identify fresh content ideas.
Click To Tweet
Research Search Popularity

Query your list of topics in a keyword research tool of your choosing. Select relevant suggestions, permutations, and adjacent topics as candidate phrases. You can use Google Keyword Planner which resides within Google Analytics.

Note: To use Google’s Keyword Planner, you must have a Google analytics account, and you must have an active Google paid search campaign set up to access the full details of search volume. This is important because otherwise, all you have access to are low/medium/high labels rather than the actual average monthly search volume numbers. For purposes of this exercise, it is important to have actual monthly search volume. If you do not have a Google Analytics account and a Google paid search account, you can easily set one. To have an active pay-per-click account in Google, you’ll need to provide your credit card for the campaign—however, you do not have to turn the campaign on. Hence, no credit card charges.

Once you have access to your account, go to Tools, and select Keyword Planner from the drop-down list. Insert your first topic, and select Get Ideas. Review the related topics and the search volume for each and select the most desired, relevant topics. Add at least five different, related terms and phrases and select Add to Plan move them into an ad group; if they’re not relevant, don’t add them. Repeat this process with each of your 20 seed topics. When you’re done, export your new list with accompanying data as a .csv file.

As an alternative, you can use KeywordSpy, which offers a free trial and does not require a credit card. If you chose to use KeywordSpy instead, you essentially repeat the same steps described above. Enter a seed topic, get ideas, select relevant candidate phrases, and export the list as a .csv file.

So, if you already have a Google account, use that. If you don’t, it’s probably a little faster and easier to use KeywordSpy.

Once you have your data—you have keywords, phrases and search volume—you use this worksheet. You paste the candidate words and phrases into the worksheet in the corresponding columns. The worksheet will automatically score each of the terms on a scale of one to five (one being low volume, five being high volume of search inquiries). There may be a need to adjust the ratios, which we’ll cover later in this article, but for now just paste in the data.*

Gauge Social Media Popularity

Next, we want to measure social media chatter for your topics. If you already have a social listening tool that allows you to access social mentions by topic—not by post type—use it. There are many social media listening packages that allow that, and if you have access to one, use what you already have. If not, BuzzSumo is terrific for this process and a number of other things as well. They offer a 14-day free trial with no credit card required to subscribe, and it’s only $99 per month for the Pro version.

Let’s assume you set up a free trial and follow these steps. From the BuzzSumo dashboard, click on the Content Analysis tab in the top menu bar. Next, filter by 30-day time frame located in the left-hand column. If your business is seasonal, perhaps super busy in one particular quarter, or if over a 30-day filter period you just don’t have very much social chatter for a particular topic, set your filter to the past year instead of 30-days. Play with that and adjust accordingly, but keep the filter the same for all your key phrases.

Take each of your keywords and phrases, and one at a time, enter them in and click on Search. Interesting things happen now. BuzzSumo will show you an Average Shares by Network chart which shows you how many times that topic was shared in social media. Takes each of those numbers and add them into your worksheet.

Just as with your search data, when you paste the numbers into the spreadsheet, they will automatically be given a relative score from one to five. This may take you a little bit of time depending on how many phrases you have in your spreadsheet, but it’s a pretty process.

At this point, your worksheet has keywords and phrases, search volume, social volume, and a rating score for both search and social.

Quick sidebar: You may not get Facebook data because of the way Facebook runs their API. Don’t worry about that because this is for comparative purposes only.

Some social listening tools will measure social “shares,” and others will measure social “mentions.” They’re different behaviors, of course, but for purposes of this analysis, it doesn’t matter. Either is a proxy for popularity which is a social media measure for search volume. Just be consistent across the whole spreadsheet.

Create Combined Score

In the last step in this process, the worksheet has combined the search and social ranking scores to give you a cumulative score between two and 10 (two being lowest popularity, 10 being highest popularity). You can see in the example there are several topics with eights and nines, and even a 10. What we would do next is select all the eights, nines, and tens, take those topics, and get them into your upcoming content plans and editorial calendar.

That is the topic archaeology process: Keyword search volume, plus social chatter volume, and a ranking score to deliver a data-driven, prioritized list of topics based on popularity. You can tweak this process based on tools at your disposal or tweak the spreadsheet if you find joy in such things. Just remember: It’s a relative comparison model, so be consistent across setting and scoring.

*Based on the amount of volume you have for your topics, you may need to adjust the index in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet formulas are based on volume from zero to 100,000. You may be searching on phrases that are very low, or very high. If your search and social values are automatically being calculated as all twos or all tens, you probably need to adjust the scoring index. If you do this, be sure to do it for the entire worksheet because again, this is all about relative popularity. If your volumes are too low or too high, change the formula using one of these:

If low volume, try this:
=IF(I4>10000,5,IF(I4>5000,4,IF(I4>1000,3,IF(I4>250,2,1))))

If high volume, try this:
=IF(I4>1000000,5,IF(I4>500000,4,IF(I4>100000,3,IF(I4>25000,2,1))))

If you are not an Excel expert and this paralyzes you in fear, don’t worry. This doesn’t require any deep Excel skill—it’s just a text edit, cut-and-paste into every cell in column J, and make the identical edit to the formula in each cell of column K.

You now have everything you need to shake up your editorial calendar with fresh content ideas. Armed with this data-driven list of topics, you’ll be better equipped than ever to capture your audience’s interest. Download your copy of our topic archaeology worksheet here to get started.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2tIlyJ0

5 Strategies Nonprofits Can Use to Break Through on Social Media

There’s lots of advice out there about using social media strategically. Much of it is very, very good (especially on this website). And I certainly don’t advocate you use social media any other way.

There’s no point in wasting your time throwing spaghetti against a wall. Even if you see other people doing it. That’s not a strategy. It’s a ‘splattergy.’

As St. Augustine said, “One prays for miracles, but works for results.”

Want to use social media to get intended results?

Forget the Spaghetti Approach

While it’s tempting when you’re time-constrained to just throw stuff out there and hope it sticks.

First, you need to know your intent.

What results do you seek?

I’m sure your mind instantly races to these two common “results”:

1. Create awareness
2. Raise money

This is a trap.

http://ift.tt/2tI9Fm8

How to Create Instagram Stories Ads for Traffic and Conversions

Do you use Instagram stories? Looking for ways to increase your conversions? Instagram Stories ads have expanded to include four objectives that let marketers drive specific goal-oriented conversions. In this article, you’ll discover how to use Instagram Stories ads to improve your marketing results. What Are Instagram Stories Ad Objectives? Instagram story ads play between

This post How to Create Instagram Stories Ads for Traffic and Conversions first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

http://ift.tt/2ugOzs1

Bluetooth Marketing - What Is Blue Tooth Proximity Marketing?

http://ift.tt/2sezequ IMAGINE that you are a local business, whether it be a retailer, restaurant, or some kind of business that provides a service, and you are struggling to get customers through the door. What inventive ways could you come up with to get those footsteps through the door? There are many untapped ways of marketing to people that you didn't even know about - and one of those ways is by using "proximity marketing" via special software that taps into people's mobile smartphones, and when a mobile is detected in and around the vicinity of the local business, the person's mobile comes up with an ad for that business. PROXIMITY MARKETING This maybe something like: "Pop down to Jo Jo's local pizza parlour, and get a FREE bottle of Pepsi with every order." Make sure your offer ad you send out is enticing for the customer, and will ensure that they want to rush down to that local business. Make sure you tailor your campaigns to suit the need of the customer of the local business. Make sure that the customer feels that there is a need for him to pop into find out more about the local business and its service. If it was a legal service ad, it might be a FREE consultation to a legal problem or query they may have, etc. This new untapped marketing is called BLUETOOTH MARKETING, and hardly anyone is engaging in this for their business. In fact, anyone could use this underground technique to drive customers to their business. If you are a mobile marketing agent, this is another useful way to interest local businesses in the whole mobile marketing industry. And once it is set up once, it is automated. HOW IT WORKS All you have to do is download a piece of software to your PC/MAC, and then drag a picture ad into the interface of the software. The software will then detect all the mobile phones in the area, and will reveal the ad on their mobile phone. This is not mobile advertising as such, as the ad pops up. WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH PROXIMITY MARKETING You can use any type of marketing for this, including: - Text Message Marketing - Image Advertising - Video Advertising Once the person has accepted that they are interested in the business ad, and want to find out more, they are then added to a database. You could use this as a feature similar to email marketing, to further interested customers, who may not be "active" to visit the business at that particular moment. This could be used in conjunction with your SMS Marketing campaigns as a mobile marketing agent, and you could even use it as an automated virtual business card. So when people accept the business ad, they are then sent via an SMS Marketing service,and given details of the business, what it provides, how it could help the customer with what they need etc. Find out more about the whole mobile marketing business models, by going to the link below... http://ift.tt/2twJ8rw If you want to test out a new SMS Marketing service for FREE for one month, then click this link below, and kick off your mobile marketing career straight away... http://ift.tt/2sdZMby Article Source: http://ift.tt/2txcu9a Article Source: http://ift.tt/2sesGIx bluetooth marketing bluetooth advertising bluetooth marketing software bluetooth marketing device bluetooth marketing software bluetooth marketing device suppliers bluetooth marketing software free smart bluetooth marketing bluetooth proximity marketing bluetooth marketing transmitter bluetooth marketing device suppliers bluetooth marketing device bluetooth marketing software bluetooth marketing software free bluetooth marketing examples bluetooth marketing ppt bluetooth marketing hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSiffnOfL7A

Facebook Groups Updates, New YouTube Features, and the Facebook Video Creator App

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Facebook Groups changes, new YouTube features with Steve Dotto, Facebook’s new app for video

This post Facebook Groups Updates, New YouTube Features, and the Facebook Video Creator App first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

http://ift.tt/2u9TniX