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.

I wanted to show my work and demonstrate the thought process that goes into content strategy. Here is simple content strategy “story” of one project I’m working on right now.

This project is ultimately a list-building whitepaper project. The client wants to build their list of newsletter subscribers and they intend to do that by asking site visitors to leave their email address in exchange for a whitepaper (which automatically subscribes them to the newsletter). So, we start by charting out a really basic project outline from start to finish.

STEP ONE: GENERATING LEADS
We start by deciding on the lead generation method, which is Google AdWords. The AdWords are actually written and ready to go, created for the client by another vendor…

Pretty simple and straightforward so far. There might be other traffic generating opportunities in the future but AdWords is a nice, measurable, highly-controllable tools.




STEP TWO: TURNING LEADS INTO PROSPECTS
By clicking the Google AdWords, the visitors will get to a website. It’s here that we reach our first “unknown”. The client already had web copy written but isn’t sure which site to post the content at. We could do a A/B split test but they aren’t decided yet and are considering one of two domains as options. One of their domains is brand new and would be dedicated to this project; the other domain has pre-existing content and this would be added as a new page to that site…

The plan here is for a long-form sales copy with a clear call to action at the end. The call to action would be something along the lines of “download your whitepaper here” with a place to insert their email address.




STEP THREE: POSITIONING TO THE PROSPECT
Next, we talk about what action they want their site visitors to take. No matter which of the 2 domain options they want their site to eventually reside at, the audience will ultimately be prompted to give their email address in exchange for a whitepaper…

The whitepaper would be emailed to them in a PDF file or text file and although it would be positioned as a whitepaper, the reality is that it is the first in a series of newsletters. You’ll note the text to the right of the whitepaper “box” that asks if the whitepaper should be accessible as a registered or unregistered asset. We’ve just decided to make it registered but may measure response and consider making it unregistered. By making it registered, we may reduce the number of people who are willing to give up their email to read it; by making it unregistered, we can increase the number of readers but reduce the number of people who will subscribe the newsletter after reading the whitepaper. It’s not an easy choice.




STEP FOUR: BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP
By providing their email for the opportunity to download the whitepaper, the audience is automatically subscribed to the newsletter, which has already been written…

In this case, newsletters would be spaced 2 weeks apart and would provide content that supports the content found in the whitepaper.




STEP FIVE: MONETIZATION/WHAT’S NEXT?
And it’s here that another big question has been raised: What’s next? The client initially wanted to send out a newsletter and assumed that was the last step. I disagreed and recommended a clearer “back-end” sales strategy. What products or services do they plan to sell? What action do they want their subscribers to take? And so we end up with…

This orange box is another “placeholder” to highlight a critical decision that must be made before we can move forward. Just having a growing list of subscribers isn’t good enough. You need to have a plan after. It might be that you want to present products and services to them or you want to increase web traffic or you want to increase calls to your office or you want them to click through to special offers from advertisers that you periodically send out.

Whatever is decided, this can inspire the newsletters to be revised to more appropriately present whatever the monetization action needs to be.

SUMMARY
From here we have a very strong direction to bring the project to a successful completion. We know exactly what decisions still need to be made, and we see the full process so we can make sure that all the content lines up exactly the way it is supposed to, to compel people to go from one step to the next.

I’ve been thinking about the purpose of content lately, believing that businesses that understand the purpose of their content can make sure they are reaching all potential audiences with the right content in the right places.

The matrix below is an early-stage idea (read: it’s still evolving and you’re welcome to leave comments with your recommendations) to define where different content channels can be “mapped” on a purpose landscape.

Below, you’ll notice that I started wtih a simple X/Y matrix…

The horizontal axis measures the “humanness” of the content: The left side is all about relationship; the right side is all about information. You might say that Chris Brogan is on the left and Anderson Cooper is on the right.

The vertical axis has to do with the directness of the content in relationship to the transaction. At the very top of the chart is positioning — the general credibility you try to achieve by producing content of value for your audience. At the bottom of the chart is very direct and compelling sales copy. So, Harvard Business School is at the top of the chart and the ShamWOW/Slap Chop guy is at the bottom of the chart.

With the matrix labeled, we can start plotting content channels…

Obviously, these are going to be fuzzy definitions. And, without a doubt, people don’t always use these channels in the way they were intended. Twitter is a content channel you can use for connecting with people and for positioning. Press releases and articles tend to be more informational and positional. Websites are often a good channel for a more obvious sales pitch, and they don’t always have the connecting mechanisms that other channels offer.

(There are many other content channels than just these but I needed to start somewhere, so I started here.)

After observing this matrix and thinking about it a bit more, a couple of other thoughts became clearer, especially about business models…

This is very much a “web 2.0″ business model. Social networks, social marketing, social sites… this social business model is all about connecting and positioning.

I don’t think there are a lot of content channels for this connecting/selling space (perhaps LinkedIn… to a degree) but the business model is very much a multi-level marketing business model. Start a business, contact friends and family, add them to your downstream.

Lastly, I think the right-hand side of the matrix reflects a pre-21st century business model: Connecting was saved for conferences and networking events but content tended to reside on the informational side of the matrix, up and down the positioning/selling axis.

What this means for businesses

• Content choices become clearer: People will (hopefully) use each channel more appropriately knowing the role that each one plays.
• Opportunities become apparent for businesses to launch sites that allow for gaps to be filled.
• Target markets can be appropriately addressed and content strategy can be more effectively developed with a fuller understanding of the purpose landscape.

Agree? Disagree? I tend to use my blog as a laboratory of ideas and this is definitely an idea in progress. I’d love to hear what you think.