Aaron Hoos

I’m frequently asked by clients where they should concentrate their efforts while marketing their business. They know that the right content in the right channels can make a significant and positive impact on their business but there are so many choices!

Of course, every business is different but here are a few that I recommend frequently (in no particular order):

• Blogs
• Articles
• Twitter
• Press Releases
• Reports

I’ve found that a significant effort in each of these options can help to grow a business with better search engine optimization, better positioning, more traffic, and higher sales. I’ll briefly touch on each of these content channels and how to use them in your business.

CONTENT CHANNEL #1: BLOGS
I think there is no better value for your business than to have a blog that you post on regularly. A blog provides you with a direct voice to your consumers that seems more intimate than an article while also offering a way for them to communicate with you (through comments) around the stories you tell.

Furthermore, a blog is like a laboratory where you can share your thoughts and develop ideas, even if they are not fully thought-through.

Here’s how to grow your business with a blog:

• Make sure you have a branded blog (a blog with a .wordpress or .blogspot in the domain name is okay but not as good as one that is entirely yours).
• Try to post three times a week minimum.
• Keep posts between 250 and 1000 words, but an average of 400 to 500 is good to aim for.
• Develop a list of topics you want to write about so that you are never at a loss for what to say.
• Identify 3 keywords that are important to your business and make sure they are in nearly every blog.
• Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through. People visit blogs to read blogs with the full understanding that they are one person’s take on a situation.
• Each week or month, stockpile a handful of blogs in your “drafts” folder that you can publish at a moment’s notice if you find that you do not have time that day.
• Avoid overtly selling in your blogs but a self-promotional link or advertisement in the footer or sidebar of your post is appropriate.

CONTENT CHANNEL #2: ARTICLES
Even though there are millions and millions of articles out there right now, there is still space for you. Articles continue to be a powerhouse traffic-driver for many businesses.

You can use articles to position yourself as a leading thinker in your industry. That will drive highly qualified traffic to your site.

Here’s how to grow your business with articles:

• Create a publishing calendar so that you have enough articles to publish 1 a week for 6 months to a year. If you can hire someone to write your articles, you may want to consider doing more (say, 1 a day). However, most people don’t have time to write 1 article a day without the help of a professional. (You’ve got other things to think about!)
• Aim to keep your articles between 450 and 600 words. Some articles are suitable to use words like “I” and “me” but many articles are best when they use a more neutral voice. This helps them to appear more credible. Save the “I” and “me” voice for your blog.
• If possible, prewrite and stockpile as many articles as you can so that you have some on hand for when you’re too busy. (This is frequently a marketing channel that is neglected when things get busy).
• Look around for highly trusted sites to publish your work on. Consider who the target audience is first, but don’t forget to take PageRank into consideration.
• Write content that is highly valuable to readers. One easy way to think of topics is to consider a question your audience has. Make that question your title and then respond to the question in the body of the article.
• Use the resource box to promote yourself.

CONTENT CHANNEL #3: TWITTER
Twitter really burst into the mainstream in 2009. Soon, business was being conducted in tweets of 140 characters or less. Twitter will continue its strong position in the market in the near future but now that the “honeymoon” period is over, users are forced to make sure that are doing the right things to be effective.

Here’s how to grow your business with Twitter:

• Remember that Twitter is a social network. People don’t want to be sold. They want to build relationships with others. Leave your hardselling techniques for your website and instead focus on sharing yourself with your followers.
• Twitter is a microblog so if you’re not sure what to write, just think of it as a blog… only smaller. It’s okay to talk about what you’re doing or where you’re going or a movie you just saw. Contemporary business does not separate business life and personal life but finds a balance between the two.
• Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to compress long domain names into manageable ones.
• You can keep your social engagement manageable by engaging with a small handful of people on a regular basis and with your broader network slightly less.
• Although most tweets should be written in the “here and now”, there is room for some pre-written tweets which can be scheduled to post later at HootSuite.
• While you shouldn’t sell on Twitter, you should make sure that your bio points people in the right direction so that when they are ready to buy from you, they can find you easily.

CONTENT CHANNEL #4: PRESS RELEASES
Press releases continue to be a solid producer of results and, thanks to the way the web has changed how we do business, press releases are now a channel that can be accessed by the media (just like they’ve always been) but also by consumers. Press releases provide a way to get into Google News rapidly and get relevant backlinks.

Here’s how to grow your business with press releases:

• Make sure that whatever you are writing about is newsworthy. Too many businesses write about non-newsworthy content and try to pass it off as a press release.
• Keep your press release to 400 – 600 words. Much longer than that and people simply won’t read it.
• Make sure you have some contact information inside your press release.
• A press release should be written from the point of view of a journalist (so you should refer to your business in the third person). However, be sure to include quotes in your press release and those can be in first person and are ideal to promote yourself.
• Don’t be afraid to spend money on distribution. Businesses frequently hire me to write press releases but then release them through a free service which is often less credible and very limited. PRWeb is the best service with paid distribution services between $80 and $360.
• Typical newscycles are a month or less. So consider publishing a press release each month about your subject.

CONTENT CHANNEL #5: WHITEPAPERS AND REPORTS
Reports or whitepapers are highly credible positioning documents that businesses can use to demonstrate thought-leadership on a subject. While some reports may not generate huge amounts of traffic or be solely responsible for a sale, they play a key role in driving more traffic and more sales by compelling people with their credibility. A business that wants to rapidly achieve the status of an authority on a topic should produce reports or whitepapers.

Here’s how to grow your business with whitepapers or reports:

• Create a publishing calendar and plan to produce at least one report every quarter or, better yet, one report every two weeks.
• Aim to publish reports that are at least 3 pages (not including a cover). However, reports of 5-20 pages are better. Reports of a hundred pages or more are not unheard of but will need to be extremely valuable for customers to read them. (After about 40 pages, you may want to consider breaking it up into 2 or 3 reports).
• Reports need to strike the balance between being thought-leadership pieces and being relevant for consumers. It’s okay to produce a report that anticipates trends a hundred years from now… as long as your business is also producing reports that address immediate needs.
• Good report topics should combine high quality information with high value applicability so that readers can apply what they’ve learned.
• While not always necessary, reports may be considered more authoritative if they have links and footnotes.

There are, of course, many other content channels out there. These are my favorite and I’ve seen them produce good results for clients. The important thing is not to adopt as many content channels as you can, but rather to find the right mix of content channels to reach your target audience.

Growing businesses face a variety of challenges, from scaling distribution to hiring and training competent staff.

A knowledge center can help to minimize the pain that comes with growth.

A knowledge center is an offline or online area in your business where you capture and store all of your best practices, procedures, processes, and more. It is a single repository of information to enable effective operations.

It’s a place where your staff can go to find the latest and most relevant information and resources to help them do their job. Instead of running here for one thing and over there for another, you can keep it all together in a single knowledge center.

Your knowledge center might start quite humbly, with just a document or two, but as your business grows, your knowledge center can grow with it.

Hiring a technical writer to help you create and/or improve and/or moderate your knowledge center may seem like an investment in a non-core asset. However, with the right structure and attention, your knowledge center can deliver the following benefits:

• Less time wasted as staff go searching for an answer.
• Faster redeployment time when you change a process and need to change the instructions, guidelines, and policies that accompany that process.
• Lower training costs — knowledge centers support training and sometimes even replace it. Moreover, HR can rely on knowledge centers as a starting point for training that they perform.
• Improved managing: Management moves out of “how-to-do-it” training mindset into a “how-to-do-it-better” mentoring mindset.
• Processes become streamlined for an improved customer experience and potentially lower costs throughout the organization.

Here are some tips to build and maintain a useful knowledge center:

• Don’t start from scratch. You probably already have user manuals and job descriptions you can add
• Keep it simple: Create a blog but make it private (require a sign-in).
• Train your staff to refer to the knowledge center first, before they go up the chain of command.
• Record every question you are asked and add it to the knowledge center.
• Assign on person to be in charge of your knowledge center. Task them with the responsibility maintaining and regularly updating the information.
• Get your staff to record the procedures they perform and add them to the knowledge center.
• As your company grows, start dividing your knowledge centers up and give each department their own knowledge center to maintain.
• Over time, review the content and remove or modify obsolete information.

Business owners frequently rely on the standard marketing and sales tools that are out there: Perhaps articles, press releases, and websites to get attention and start building a relationship; blogs, social media, downloadable reports to grow the relationship and to position the business; and presentation content to close the deal. Pretty standard stuff, really. All of these content channels can get lost in the sea of competition, though.

One way to make sure your sales material gets into the hands of the people it’s supposed to get to, and to make sure it gets read, is to use a magalog.

I’d never heard of a magalog before, until Mike “The Magalog Guy” Klassen stopped by my website one day and commented on one of my blog posts. I looked up his site, did some research, and have been thinking about them ever since. I am convinced that they are a truly untapped sales tool in today’s highly competitive world.

A magalog is basically a magazine that you publish to position and/or sell your products and services. People already do this all the time with ebooks and print books but I magalogs fill a gap in the content used in sales funnels, and I think they’ll be particularly useful in face-to-face and/or direct mail marketing.

WHAT IS A MAGALOG?
Think of a nice, glossy magazine… but one where you have complete control over the content and design of the magazine. The magalog looks like a regular magazine but is filled with articles that ultimately position you as the best and only solution to your prospect’s problems.

HERE’S WHY I LIKE MAGALOGS

• A magalog is unique
• A magalog is more likely to be read by your target audience. It’s easier to read than an ebook and the article format is less daunting to read than chapters in a book.
• A mailed magalog will be more likely to get past the gatekeeper than your sales people or your sales letters.
• A magalog may be viewed with less skepticism than an ebook or report (depending on how it is written) because it doesn’t seem to be exclusively from you.

A FEW MAGALOG TIPS

• Fill the magazine with timeless articles that subtly position you and your solution. Don’t make the articles overtly about you. Make the articles useful and insightful.
• Don’t hand over the magalog to your prospect and say: “I wrote this. You might find it helpful.” Instead, leave it behind or mail it with a handwritten note.
• Create one magalog issue to send to brand new leads (with a handwritten note about the magalog being a complimentary issue); create a second magalog issue to leave behind during a sales called; and create a third magalog issue to send to a prospect when you hear that they are going on a trip (with a handwritten note that says, “I heard you were flying to a conference. Here’s some reading for the airplane”).

So, go visit Mike Klassen’s site, MagalogGuy.com, check out his sample magalogs, read his blog, and think about how a magalog might be useful in your business. (Disclosure: This is not an affiliate link. I have no business relationship with Mike Klassen… I just think his magalogs are useful sales tools).

You’ve got a great idea and you’ve written the most kick ass content and published it through a particular channel.

Instead of going back to the drawing board to write something else, why not repurpose that same idea in several different ways so that, with some slight revisions, you can make it available to new readers in different channels:

1. Package it together with other thematic material from your blog or website as an ebook.
2. Get together with a colleague and write an article or report with each of you giving your thoughts on the content.
3. Break it up into something with step-by-step instructions and write it as a guide.
4. Outline the problem in greater detail and give it a formal spin to make it into a whitepaper.
5. Create resources and checklists that might assist a reader to follow through on what you’ve written and call it a toolkit.
6. Break it up into a handful of lessons — perhaps each step is one lesson or run through it in increasingly deeper “passes” — as an ecourse and deliver through a site like Prfessor.
7. Break it down into 140 character concepts and write a series of tweets about it
8. Write it as a single blog or as a series of blogs.
9. Write it as an article or as a series of articles to distribute through an article distribution site.
10. Record it as a speech and make it available as an MP3 or the first episode of a podcate.
11. Video yourself reading it or talking about it and post it on YouTube.

Want some reasons to repurpose your content? Here are a few:

• Turn a great idea into an alternate revenue stream.
• Focus on an SEO keyword for a month and create several pieces of content around that keyword.
• Grab some old content that was good but is now collecting dust and breathe new life into it.
• Position yourself as an expert in a particular area by generating a lot of content on that topic.
• Outpace a competitor by creating a lot of content on a particular topic that they are trying to develop.

When marketing your business, it’s easy to become enamored with the latest and shiniest marketing techniques. Like a new car the “new marketing method smell” fogs our brain and makes us believe that THIS particular technique will send a flood of new customers. Unfortunately, this method of bandwagon marketing completely ignores a fundamental tenet of marketing: Your marketing needs to ultimately lead to a sale.

Jumping from one shiny new marketing method to the next doesn’t lead to a sale as effectively as finding and locking in on just a few proven marketing methods. Here’s how your marketing can be improved to actually lead to more sales:

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SALES FUNNEL

Your marketing content needs to play very specific roles in your sales funnel. It’s not good enough to just push a bunch of stuff out there; you need to give it some strategy.

All too often, we think that if we put some marketing content out there, that a contact who interacts with it will move to a purchase. However, we need to think more granular than that: Each stage of your sales funnel (i.e., leads, prospects, etc.) is not a single step but a series of steps. So, you shouldn’t create content to address a stage of your sales funnel (which is what many marketers do). Instead, you should create content to address a step within a stage of your sales funnel!

Start with just one stage of your sales funnel (leads, for example, or prospects) and figure out the following:

First, think about: What are your contacts thinking about when they enter that stage of the sales funnel?

Then, think about: What are your contacts thinking about when they exit that stage of the sales funnel into the next stage?

Last, think about: What is the progression from their entry mindset to their exit mindset. What are the typical steps they might take in that stage of the sales funnel?

Once you know the answer to these three questions, you can create content (a range of marketing content and positioning content across various media or content types) that helps them get from one step to the next within a particular sales funnel stage.

AN EXAMPLE OF SALES FUNNEL CONTENT MAPPING
So let’s say that your prospects enter the prospect stage of the funnel by asking for more information about your product. And, they exit the prospect stage of the funnel by becoming customers. The overall steps in the prospect stage might be as follows:

1. (Entry) They want more information about your product
2. They wonder if the product will be useful to them
3. They wonder if the product will offer appropriate value compared to the cost
4. They wonder how long they can live without the product
5. They wonder if you can deliver the product more effectively than someone else
6. They wonder if other customers of yours have had a good experience
7. (Exit) They want to buy the product

Assuming that these are the general steps that your prospects go through before buying from you, then you simple write content to all 7 steps. Each piece of content doesn’t have to point to the ultimate sale, it only needs to point to the next step. Here’s an example:

1. (Entry) They want more information about your product: You write a brochure about your product and place a clear call-to-action in your brochure to visit your website for case studies about how people are using your product.
2. They wonder if the product will be useful to them: You have a website with case studies and at the bottom of the website is a link to an ROI calculator.
3. They wonder if the product will offer appropriate value compared to the cost: They can use the ROI calculator to determine value and then you offer them a link to a downloadable whitepaper.
4. They wonder how long they can live without the product: The downloadable whitepaper addresses the cost of ownership of the product versus the cost of delaying purchase. At the end of the whitepaper you send them to a “how we deliver” page.
5. They wonder if you can deliver the product more effectively than someone else: At the bottom of the “how we deliver” page you have a link to a testimonials page.
6. They wonder if other customers of yours have had a good experience: At the bottom of the testimonials page you offer a link to buy the product.
7. (Exit) They want to buy the product

Each step doesn’t need to close the sale. Instead, each step is strategically built around what the prospect is thinking about right then. Of course, some customers prefer to accelerate beyond that and you’ll of course have a “buy now” option available for them. But if most of your prospects go through these steps in this order, you’ll make more sales by writing content that maps to their mindset.

Once you’ve mapped content to each of the several steps in a stage, do this same effort for every stage of your sales funnel(s).