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.

Selling ebooks can be lucrative, and it’s an easy business to start. Unfortunately, although people know that they need an ebook if they are going to sell one, the other parts of the equation aren’t as clear. What ELSE do they need? What should they do first? How do they make it all fit together? The ebook is just part of the equation… brand new entrepreneurs want to know how to take the ebook and post it for sale online.

I’m going to show you a really easy method in this blog. This is for absolute beginners — seasoned pros will already know this and may have a different system that they prefer. You should be aware that this isn’t the ONLY way to do it; it’s just a good basic way.

Step 1: Get your ebook written. (You can do this or you can hire someone else to do it; whatever).

Step 2: Go to GoDaddy.com and get some hosting and a domain name. (Those are two different things: Hosting is a container that will eventually hold your ebook and the code. The domain name is the way that people will find you on the web). You’re probably looking at less than $100 for everything. Buy it and get your domain name to point to your hosting account. The good folks at GoDaddy can help you with this.

Step 3: Upload your finished ebook into your host.

Step 4: Go to Clickbank.com and sign up. (There’s a small fee – about $50 or so). Clickbank is a company that accepts money from people on your behalf and makes sure that only the people who pay can get your ebook. They also have some affiliate programs in place so that other people can sell your ebook (if you want) and earn some money.

Step 5: Create at least two web pages and put them in your host. You can create more webpages if you want but creating just two is the simplest. You can get free website templates just by Googling “Free Website Templates” and then changing them yourself or having someone else change them for you. Here are the two pages you’ll need:

• One of the pages is your index page or “homepage”. This is a public page (viewable by everyone) and the main page that people will see when they type in your domain name. It will have the ebook offer right on that page. The filename for this page is usually “index”. I’m going to call it your Sales page.
• The second page is your Secret Thank You page. It’s a page that people can’t get to until they’ve paid for your ebook. You can name the page anything you like… but DON’T give out this page’s address! On your Secret Thank You page, put a link to your ebook. The link will look like this: [Your domain name]/[The filename of your ebook]. So if I had an ebook called “How-To-Start-A-Business.pdf” then the link on my Thank You page would be: http://aaronhoos.com/How-To-Start-A-Business.pdf.

Step 6: Go back to Clickbank and go to your account page and enter the URL of your Secret Thank You page. This way, Clickbank will know where to send people when they pay.

Step 7: While in Clickbank, get a “buy now” button and add it to your Sales page. (It’s a snippet of code you copy and paste into the code of your Sales page).

Step 8: Upload those two web pages to your host. Test everything. You should be able to type your domain name into your browser and get to your Sales page. And, you should be able to type in the other page into your browser to get to your Secret Thank You page. (That’s why you don’t want to give out the address of this page to people… because anyone can type it in if they know it and they’ll get to that page without paying). Test the ebook link to make sure you can download the ebook.

Here’s what *should* happen: People will click to your Sales page and see your compelling sales letter and then click the “buy now” button. When they click the “buy now” button, a window from Clickbank will open and Clickbank will accept your customer’s payment on your behalf and then send them on to your Secret Thank You page.

Step 9: Start marketing your ebook. Okay, so this step seems pretty vague. I think it’s covered well on this blog and elsewhere. Basically, get a lot of people going to your homepage and then tweak the sales letter on your Sales page so that more and more readers decide to buy.

Step 10: Once you’ve started making sales, Clickbank will collect your money and forward it to you. (They have different payment forwarding options, depending on where you live).

I’ve been writing professionally for a long time. 17+years, in fact. For newspapers, magazines, corporations, you name it. I’ve watched ebbs and flows in business as content — and the purpose and function of content — has changed.

THE SHOTGUN APPROACH TO CONTENT
Just a few years ago, as the volume of my web writing contracts increased, I started to notice that many clients were using the shotgun approach to content: Shoot out tons of content and hope that some of it works. The no-surprise-to-anyone result of this was that industry rates were driven down as bootstrapping entrepreneurs offshored their content to third-world/non-English-speaking countries who could produce tons of barely-passable content. Quantity over quality was a way to “work” the search engine system.

At the same time, I was writing my thesis for my MBA (in Strategic Management) and I was thinking a lot about building a scalable, measurable business framework. Basically, a corporate structure that could be used for more than just making fancy organizational charts.

BUILDING CONTENT STRUCTURE
So I was writing content and thinking about the strategy of a structure and it was only natural to bring content into that framework. My research took me into the world of content strategy where insightful businesses realized that quantity over quality only worked on search engine algorithms, not on search engine users. Content strategy, instead, recognizes that end users approach content with a purpose. (Read a great article from FastCompany called “Filter or Be Flooded: Do You Need a Content Strategist?”, which offers a compelling overview of content strategy).

THINKING ABOUT CONTENT STRATEGY
For a few months, I wrote a lot about content strategy as I worked through it in my own mind. (That’s what I use my blog for: As a brain laboratory). I posted an article on Technorati about it, which was received well by most readers except for the Queen of Content Strategy herself, Kristina Halvorson. Her blunt comment prompted a brief email exchange between she and I which clarified my thinking and narrowed the scope of my “content strategy” work into a much narrower field.

NARROWING MY FIELD TO CONTENT FOR SALES FUNNELS
I do content strategy as part of the copywriting and technical writing services I deliver. The content strategy I was focused on (even way back in that initial Technorati article) — and am still focused on is the strategic use of content as a tool for sales funnels.

There are other uses for content, of course, and content strategists deal with the various uses and functions of content. But I’m primarily concerned with how a business’ sales funnel moves audience members to become leads then prospects then customers then evangelists… and strategically developed content plays a role in that progression.

So, content strategy still plays a role in my thinking and services but it serves a larger purpose today (at least for the work I do): To accelerate business performance by accelerating sales funnels.

Retail businesses rely on customers coming into their stores and spending money. Getting more customers spending more money is the name of the game.

With the exception of advertising, advertising, and more advertising, a lot of retail stores don’t do much else. (There are other options but they’re not always done well). However, a recent trend is creating some interesting opportunities for retail stores and if you run any kind of B2C store, you might want to consider how this trend applies to you.

INTRODUCING THE TREND
The trend is the “haul video”. A haul video is a video posted online where a buyer goes through their purchases and talks about them: Maybe why they bought they, where they bought them, how much they paid, and how they feel about the purchase.

To a lot of people, this might sound pretty weird. At first glance you wonder “who would watch that?” But it makes sense after further consideration: Who among us doesn’t want to share the great purchases we found, and who among us doesn’t want to look with envy to others. It’s like shopping without the expense! And retailers should like this because haul videos are made at the perfect point: The buyer is thrilled with their purchase and looking to further justify the money they spent but have rarely even used the items and are not yet experiencing buyer’s remorse. It’s exactly the time in a purchase lifecycle when you want to get a testimonial… and that’s what a haul video is.

STRANGE BUT TRUE
Yes, it seems voyeuristic; yes, it seems like excess commercialism. But retail stores should pay attention because these videos are popular! The video below, for example, is basically a 16 minute discussion of clothes this girl bought… and it’s been viewed over 340,000 times at the time of this writing. (You don’t have to watch the whole thing… just watch the first couple of minutes to get an idea of what haul videos are all about).

This is just one of them. Mitch Joel, of Six Pixels of Separation, says that YouTube is tracking over 150,000 of these videos and 2 of the most popular contributors have a combined viewership of over 75 million views for their haul videos. Those are some significant numbers.

IF YOU RUN A RETAIL STORE…
So, what does that mean for retail stores? Here are some ideas:

• Cross-post haul videos on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Set up a YouTube channel and invite people who include your store in their haul video to post in your channel.
• Encourage your buyers to post their haul videos. Start a wall of fame where buyers can post their haul videos and send you a link that you post. (Heck, if you have some extra monitors laying around, why not loop a couple of haul videos?)
• If you have an email newsletter (you have an email newsletter, don’t you?) add a link to the haul video.
• Offer incentives for those who post haul videos: Discounts are good but I think an exclusive invitation-only evening where popular haul videographers come to your store and make on-the-spot haul videos.
• Above a rack of clothes, post a notice that says: “Reviewed by…” and list the names, screenshots, and domain names of haul videographers.
• Hold a contest for haul videographers and give away a shopping spree and a camera.
• Set up a camera in your store and invite people to create a haul video before they even leave.

To an entire group of shoppers, the haul video extends and enhances the shopping experience. To retailers, it creates a new opportunity to engage your customers and prolong their attachment to your store while generating some exciting testimonials.