So there I was, in a large electronics store, casually looking at IP radios. …‘Not too bad out there today’, the salesman breezed as he wandered in my direction. Before I could ask him anything, he took one look at my face and he knew. The small talk died and I was left with … ‘any questions…. I’ll be just over there’. We both knew we would not be speaking to each other again.

He really had my number and thankfully didn’t wait while I humiliated myself by squeezing out my excuse. With one look, he knew I was no longer a warm lead. His ability to read a prospect is hardwired into his brain. He weighed up my age, demographic details, and demeanour and made the right call on the spot. They just don’t teach that stuff in school.

Sales role helps your marketing skills

While it’s not an absolute requirement, there’s no doubt cutting your teeth in a sales role gives you a more solid understanding of the role of marketing. If you’re a career marketer, you may disagree but I believe any job where you’re facing the public prepares you, just a little, for a marketing role.

Sales people have unique insights into customers that can be hard to replicate in traditional marketing roles.  Creating solid buyer personas is the key to marketing communications and when sales and marketing teams work together, they can come up with robust, realistic buyer profiles which will be the foundation of new marketing strategies and campaigns.

So if you want to define your buyer persona, you could do a lot worse than talking to your sales team and use the tricks they use all day, every day.

Define your buyer persona in six steps…

1. List their characteristics – know the emotions, values, technology preferences, socio-economic backgrounds and demographics of your target market.
2. Technology and media – how do they consume media? Do they read the newspaper online or an actual paper? Do they read a newspaper at all? What about social media and technology usage? Skilled salespeople cajole all sorts of information out of people. Make sure you know what’s relevant and what’s not.
3. Do they belong to a group – find out how they define themselves in group terms. Are they parents/professionals/tourists…Who do they feel they belong to?
4. Numbers – harvest the hard facts. Sales figures, customer satisfaction numbers… From both secondary and primary sources, you can never have enough data about your customers and prospects.
5. Words – listen to the words they use and reflect these in your marketing materials. You may well need the help of an experienced salesperson for this bit!
6. Build it – put all this detail together and when you’re preparing your marketing blurb, keep this persona in mind and write like you are writing directly to them. Because you are.

If you sell more than one product, and that would be many of us, you’ll have more than one buyer persona. They will overlap but just keep your focus on making that sale in the short or long term. And know the information you need that will help you get there.

And there you have it. It’s possible that marketing teams all over the world are ignoring or worse still, competing with, what should be their greatest resource. Building a solid buyer profile will benefit you and your team. But make sure you gather the insights of everyone in your organisation that faces that customer on a daily basis.

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Niall Gibbons is chief executive of Tourism Ireland, the organisation responsible for marketing Ireland overseas as a premier holiday and business tourism destination. Tourism Ireland have had  tremendous success with social media so I as eager to find out more about how they use social media in their marketing activities and to build brand awareness.

Tell me about the brand Discover Ireland, what are the brand values and the key messages that you want to communicate about the brand via social media?

The island of Ireland brand is based on an island of unique character and characters. Our brand is our reputation – it is about how others perceive us, an idea that resides in the hearts and minds of our various audiences. This reputation is built on the understanding that the Ireland destination leaves its visitors enriched by many positive and rewarding experiences.

Research shows that our core audience, sightseers and culture seekers, want to see the real place and get under the skin of its culture. Ireland offers the experiences our audience is seeking – through engagement with our welcoming people and involvement with the many beautiful sights and cultural attractions.

We address our potential visitors in an informal, lively, friendly and engaging way and always with a touch of wit or humour.

What was the strategy for brand building using social media?

An ‘engagement marketing’ strategy underpins all our marketing activity. Our approach has been to establish a branded presence that is appropriate to each market and then to engage directly with consumers.

It’s often said that social media allows a brand to behave like a person. Do you think this is the case? How did you decide on the tone of voice for the brand in social media?

We were conscious from the beginning that social media is first and foremost a personal space and, in interacting as a brand, the onus was on us to respect this and the community we were interacting with. We made a conscious decision to humanise the tone and make it more informal, while still reflecting the market and audience we were communicating with. Some cultures and languages have more formal interaction than others – we needed to be mindful of that.

Tourism Ireland has 12 Twitter accounts. Do you also have a different Facebook page for each audience – UK, US etc? Do you have a different team managing the social media channels for each target market? Is there much crossover between the channels? How do they co-ordinate their activities?

We maintain corporate and consumer Twitter accounts, as you outline. Our Facebook activity is significant, with approximately 730,000 fans across 18 presences. Most of these are market-specific, with a couple for specific topics, namely Titanic Stories and IrelandTown – our Facebook social game. We also have about 115,000 followers on three Chinese social media platforms. Our approach has been to make services available from the centre but to allow market teams to scale and co-ordinate activities with their own tone, themes and objectives. Centrally, we provide content and app development, customer engagement, analytics, project co-ordination and social media learning and education. Our market teams provide market-specific content, campaign development and any local media buying.

Cross-over between channels works in specific instances. For example, our award-winning ‘Nick and Sam’s Roadtrip’ campaign in Britain integrated Twitter, Facebook and our main website DiscoverIreland.com. We maintain blogs in four languages and we find they work really well with Facebook. We are experimenting quite a bit to discover what works and to then share those successes across markets.

Tourism Ireland has approximately 730,000 Facebook fans across 18 presences – I think a question that many people would have is how did you build up this fanbase? Did you use a lot of Facebook advertising or do you also use content that goes viral to help build up your fanbase?

By necessity, it’s a combination of both. A new social media measurement tool, called ‘social equivalent advertising evaluate (SEAV)’, allows us to value our social activities. This places importance on organic growth and spread of our content. We also reference Facebook from our website and on many of our 58 million emails to consumers. Nevertheless, Facebook advertising has been an important element of our growth. For example, with our IrelandTown social game, launched in March 2011, we invested in advertising and got a 33% viral uplift over the campaign, using the built-in viral mechanics. We also monitor viral spread of our posts, because in particular this year, that spread contributes to SEAV.

We have had some viral successes; for example our St Patrick’s Day flashmob in Sydney, has had 2.3 million views on YouTube without any supporting media spend. However, we don’t always achieve that level of success; we look for viral or ‘word of mouth’ uplift in everything we do, knowing that in most cases it will only achieve a small percentage of organic lift. We analyse the success of our various videos on YouTube etc, to help us engineer more success in the future!

One of the uses of social media in brand building is the use of brand advocates, can you tell us how Discover Ireland uses brand advocates via social media? Was the ‘Nick and Sam’s RoadTrip’ campaign a good example of building brand advocates? The ‘Jump into Ireland’ YouTube competition also seems like another great use of brand advocates?

In the travel industry we have seen a shift in the balance of power over the last eight to ten years from the providers of services to the consumers of those services. From the ubiquity and importance of hotel reviews to story-telling by video on YouTube, the power of the consumer is widely evident. As a result, the ‘official’ view from tourist boards and service providers is often less prominent or sought after. In large part, this is due to consumers needing a real-time reportage on the experiences they are buying blind. Our use of social media in this area is to tap into the need for these authentic views. Fortunately, consumer experiences of the island of Ireland are largely positive, so the authenticity is there and our job is to help amplify that by getting the experiences to our audience. As you suggest, the ‘Roadtrip’ and YouTube competition are an effort to do this.

Brand-building is also about building reputation; how does Tourism Ireland build the reputation of Ireland as a tourist destination using social media?

Firstly, we promote the best of Ireland through our social media platforms and we interact in a respectful, trustworthy and friendly way; secondly, we provide a platform for our visitors to share their island of Ireland experiences with each other.

How does Tourism Ireland measure the results of your brand-building activities? Do you use brand sentiment surveys or other measurements, such as the amount of searches ‘Discover Ireland’ gets via web search engines?

We conduct brand tracker surveys in our main markets each year and track Ireland’s standing compared to our competitors.

We look at search to get an understanding of performance in specific instances. We also did an interesting piece of work recently to establish the experiences that best represent the island of Ireland to our overseas audiences. We took the by-product of a US social media campaign where consumers listed their favourite things about Ireland and graphed them against their performance in search. This will help us plan our content.

As Chief Executive, you seem to be very close and clued in to the use of social media for Tourism Ireland? Do you think this is because it plays such a vital role for Tourism Ireland, or is it because of your own interest?

A bit of both. However, as the organisation charged with marketing the island overseas, we have a duty to our stakeholders to carry out world-class marketing programmes – that means utilising all channels and opportunities to grow tourism to the island. Social media opens up another channel for Tourism Ireland and our industry partners to engage with potential visitors across the world.

Would you have any advice for other Chief Executives starting to get more involved in the social media for their business or organisation?

Firstly, social media seems here to stay, so it is important to engage. The nature of the engagement will differ from organisation to organisation. It is important to think through your approach to tone and content, as you would with any other marketing communication. Social media is a conversation, not a one-way broadcast. Plan for interaction and set aside time and, if necessary, resource to help with that. On balance, it is a very positive experience that can benefit your organisation in many ways.

Related: Tweak Your Biz: When An Irish Business Community Goes Global!

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But you don’t get the contract.

You scratch your head and wonder why. You don’t feel there’s anything else you could have done. But there is one thing. Did you check for typos?

Think about it. If the contract goes down to the wire between you and another company, the organisation issuing the contract will be going through your documentation with a fine tooth comb. If a few typos have crept into your documents, and the other company’s document is typo free, that could be enough for your competitor to clinch the deal.

Why Editing is Important

Editing could be the difference between winning and losing business. People think that editing belongs to the world of books, but any document where you are displaying your wares to the world needs to be edited with care, whether it’s a thesis, a CV, a blog, a presentation.

A well-edited document showcases your professionalism and attention to detail. It plants the idea in the reader’s mind that this is a person (or a company) who’s serious about their work, and who will deliver their work to the highest standards. Editing also helps you communicate with your customers, because it removes muddled or long winded wording, so your message is clear and easy for your audience to absorb.

Editing for Length

Cutting content down to size is the biggest challenge many people face. It’s because they feel a compulsive need to keep elaborating on the point they want to make. Trust me, you don’t need as many words as you think. I would always recommend letting the words flow in the first draft of a document, even a tender document, where the criteria are quite rigid. But when you’re finished doing that, it’s time to be ruthless. Get rid of anything that does not tie in with your core message.  This will ensure your message shines through, loud and clear.

When you’ve done that, read your document aloud. You’ll soon spot clunky or long-winded sentences that you can trim down. When you change one sentence, all the text around it has to be adjusted too, so it’s an efficient way of reducing your word count.

Fleshing Out Text

A less common but more challenging problem is writing too lean, not elaborating enough on the points you want to make. The reason why it’s a challenge is because if there isn’t any text there to edit, you have to write text from scratch. Some people are naturally concise, but they may fear being long winded to such an extent that they go too far in the opposite direction.

Take a step back and do some more brainstorming to define your core message and decide on the action you will take to deliver on that message. Then add those points to your text. If you’ve already made notes, plunder them to bulk out your text.

Editing the Fine Points

Once you’ve done the major edits, it’s time to fine tune the document, to make sure it reads as well as possible.

Reading out loud has a dual purpose, because it helps you to spot repeated words. We all repeat ourselves when we’re writing. It’s part of the process as we work out what we want to say. Getting rid of repetitions also reduces your word count.

If you’ve edited as much as possible, but still feel your content lacks lustre, you could be over-relying on what I call weak words. These are words which are so overused that all their meaning has been worn away. Watch out for culprits like do, thing, have, get and nice. They can all be replaced. Also, watch out for adverbs and adjectives. They add unnecessary padding to a document. Weed out as many of them as you can.

The Final Check

By now, you’ll be a little snowblind from doing so much reading. To break your connection to the material and gain some perspective, start at the end and read the last sentence, then the sentence before that and so on. This final check will help you to spot those rogue typos that would otherwise escape.

What’s your biggest challenge when you’re editing your documents? Do you struggle with spelling or sentence structure? Do you find it hard to cut down the length? I’d love you to comment and share your thoughts.

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BizSugar is a niche resource and social networking platform for the small business community. The social networking platform is owned and operated by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends LLC. Small Business Trends LLC is a stable of 7 websites including the flagship site Small Business Trends, group business blog Tweak Your Biz and BizSugar. As their former community manager, I am well placed to advise you on how to get the most from the platform.

What is BizSugar?

BizSugar is a place where you can submit and share your small business content. Once submitted, the BizSugar community votes on this content with the most voted posts making it to the home page.

The business case for using BizSugar

• BizSugar is a niche and successful social media for anyone interested in the International Small Business community.
• With over 1 million registered members based around the Globe, it is an effective way to target the small business community, promote your content and drive qualified traffic back to your website.
• It allows you make  connections with small business owners, managers and entrepreneurs and to stay informed.
• “Top stories” on BizSugar make it into their Top 10 widget, weekly Top 10 newsletter and the Twitter feed where they get even more visibility.

Setting Up

New users need to provide a username, email, and password, and confirm if they would like to subscribe to the weekly Top 10 newsletter.

Then, once your account has been set up, you can further edit your profile to add more info including your:

• Avatar
• Location
• Occupation
• Skype
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Websites
• Interests
• RSS

Note: You can also log in using your Facebook account.

Submitting content

To maintain the quality of the website and information, content that gets submitted to BizSugar goes through a moderation process:

To submit your content to BizSugar, you need to include:

1. URL
2. Category
3. And description

Moderation team

This content then goes into a queue to await approval from the BizSugar moderation team.

Guidelines

Here are the full BizSugar submission guidelines but in short, content needs to be specifically relevant to small business. Also, titles must not include site names, locations and other words unrelated to the article and there should be no barriersi.e. extra windows, forms, or links out that readers have to click through.

Voting

Voting on BizSugar is easy.

Users simply:

1. Log in
2. and vote (“sweet”) for their favourite articles.

Voting buttons

BizSugar also provides the option of voting buttons.

These you can install onto your website or blog and allow the community to vote for your content directly from there.

Getting more “Sugars”

As with any other social media and online community, the more you put into BizSugar, the more you will get out in the long run:

• Content: The first step towards getting these votes is of course, creating and submitting great content to BizSugar. However, it’s also a good idea to submit more than just your own content. If you find information that the small business community would find useful, why not submit that too!
• Community: Playing an active part in the BizSugar community, voting and commenting on other members’ content will get you noticed and will in turn help your content to get votes, comments, exposure and traffic.

BizSugar exposure

Getting your content onto the homepage is where you want to be seen on BizSugar: the more votes you secure, the better your chances of getting on there:

• Hot stories:  Hot stories are published to the @BizSugar Twitter feed which has over 20K followers.
• Weekly Top 10: The content with the most votes over a 7 day period also have the added bonus of being included on the BizSugar newsletter that goes out on Fridays to over 200,000+ subscribers.
• Video & Image Gallery:  BizSugarlaunched a new “Video & Image Gallery” on October 30, 2012. Videos include those submitted by members as well as some especially selected by the moderation team.

What others say about BizSugar:

Steven Hughes, GeeklessTech:

“BizSugar is a recommended platform to market your website and blog…There are also moderators that get involved and comment, keeping the pace fluid…Be consistent and you’ll make connections.  The BizSugar blog traffic back to your site will be sweet.”

TJ McCue, Forbes:

“If you are looking for high quality content you can trust, BizSugar offers it. There are real people moderating, vetting, and culling out the spam. There is an opportunity to build a reputation in this niche social network and then spread your content and ideas.”

John Jantsch, Wall Street Journal:

Try “networks that cater to business owners, such as Biznik and BizSugar.”

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So, you have content ready to share? A new blog post? An infographic? An email newsletter? Maybe you have just added a poll to your Facebook page and you want your Twitter followers to click and respond. Once you have quality, interactive content to share, your next hurdle is getting it noticed.

• That’s why knowing how to write headlines and titles can be crucial to your business’ content success.
• You need to entice your audience from the get-go. A poorly worded blog title, email subject line or tweet announcement is like leaving money on the table. You can get a bigger slice of the audience pie simply by writing a title that more people click on.
• But creating a killer headline grab is a craft unto itself. In the ol’ newspaper days, it gave rise to a whole professional class of sub-editors whose main job was to come up with a clever tease that got you reading the rest of the article. Now it has morphed into a key digital content competency that every business needs to sharpen.

Luckily, there are some online tools that can help you get started. Here’s 3 to help your content’s clickability:

# 1. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

This online tool is principally used to come up with blog ideas based on your main subject matter, but you can also use it to help you brainstorm good titles (and you’ll get more content ideas along the way).

The blackboard-like interface lets you insert your subject matter term and the random engine behind the scenes will come up with a blog title (and content idea) for you.

Of course, most of the titles won’t be a good match for what you have already written and some suggestions are a bit cheesy.

But it can help you understand how to write headlines that are intriguing. After you enter your subject matter, you will see blue balloons that explain why that title was given to you. When I tried “blog title”, for instance, I got advice that using negative words – like the phrase “won’t happen” – challenge the reader to prove you wrong, so they are more likely to read the whole post.

# 2. Linkbait Generator

This title generator isn’t as smoothly rounded as Portent’s, but they are working on further developments (for example, when I started writing this article, you could use the generator straight away, now you need to sign up first). Whatever engine they are using to randomize content isn’t too fussed about grammar, even though it offers a singular or plural noun option (“9 crazy ways that blog title is infiltrating pop culture”?). Again, the titles might not be a good fit if you have already produced your content, but they will get your brainstorming juices flowing enough to keep the tangent going.

The suggestions for linkbait generator stay true to their domain name moniker: these are mostly linkbait titles of the shock and awe type. “Linkbait” is an online marketing term to refer to content that is shared a lot: pictures of grumpy cats or those 1950s style postcard images with a bitter drag queen-type comment, for example.

As a small business using marketing, remember it is not always about getting the most traffic. You want traffic that is intrigued by your products and services and will be interested – now or later – to buy from you.

Pictures of dogs and geese getting along are great for whiling away spare time on Facebook and Twitter, but they don’t nudge your audience along to have greater respect for your business or instil in them a desire to align themselves with your products and services (unless you are a petting zoo or dog food company, of course).

If you are a retailer, sometimes these sorts of linkbait tactics can work, including some of the more risqué suggestions suggested by the linkbait generator, but for the rest of us, using sex or death to sell is a little tacky. Still, not all the linkbait generator suggestions are overly risqué, and many may give you an idea of what direction to head in.

# 3. Must Click

While Portent’s and Linkbait rely on best practice from the world of sub-editing and an extensive random phrase generator to spin the wheel and offer you an idea that may or may not work, Must Click uses the best in data-driven marketing to create an online tool to help you understand how to write headlines.

You can type in three of your best ideas for blog titles or tweet announcements, and send off with your fee ($1.99 per request). (Secret tip: You can get around the fee by simply tweeting a mention that you are trialing using their product, and can then get the data results for free.)

Must Click conducts real tests to determine the clickability of your proposed titles and sends you an email report with the number of clicks each title received.

This is an outstanding tool to make sure your content gets noticed, and after running a few examples, will give you a much greater insight into current cultural trends around what sort of titles get clicked.

Generating engaging, valuable content for your target audience is a struggle for many small businesses. Don’t waste the investment you make in content by letting it sit on your website while your audience passes by. Create headlines that grab them as they scan your pages or twitter feed and draw them in.

It all starts with your first 11 words! Of course, for a comprehesinve selection of possible titles for your content, you can also check out the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.

What advice do you have for how to write headlines that you can share with other businesses? Share in the comments below…

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Now, don’t get me wrong. J.C. Penney was in deep trouble before they tossed the keys to Johnson. But the wild moves he made were like the captain of the Titanic changing course so radically after the ship was filling up with sea water that rescue boats couldn’t even find the handful of survivors.

The Poison Apple

Johnson of course came straight to J.C. Penney from the Apple Stores and before that he was in charge of Target. The Apple Store experience must have gone to his head because it doesn’t seem like he brought anything he learned from his Target experience to J.C. Penney. And can we talk? J.C. Penney is a whole lot more like Target than it is Apple. I have an interesting idea regarding that relationship, but first let’s get to the main point we need to make about tweaking a brand:

✓       Build on your brand’s strength.

We could cite all kinds of very wise folk wisdom here, like “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” or “Don’t try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” or “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole,” and they would all speak to the situation. However, there must be an underlying reason why Johnson went counter to all of that accumulated wisdom. Bob Herbold says Johnson was seduced by his own strengths. I would boil it down to one word: hubris.

The world according to Johnson

Johnson’s over-the-top pride and self-confidence was oozing off the screen last year when CBS Sunday Morning talked to him about remaking J.C. Penney in a story the news magazine did about the current state of department stores. Today stores must be a destination, a place where shoppers want to meet and spend time, he boasted. So he was transforming JCP aisles into “streets” and building stores within the store.

He was apparently so blind he didn’t notice something: Malls already do all of that and J.C. Penney stores are located in malls.

Connect with customers

Every retail genius is able to relate to customers and know them more intimately than they know themselves. That is why savvy retail leaders can tweak their stores and align them better with the needs of their customers. This goes back to our main point: build on brand strengths. And at the same time, avoid bonehead branding pitfalls.

Here’s a good exercise. Complete the sentence: Our customers expect ________. Can you do that for your customers? For J.C. Penney customers one good response would have been “sales.” The retailer was famous for sale flyers. Johnson tossed out the frequent sales, instead opting for supposedly everyday low prices. This pits J.C. Penney “mano a mano” against Walmart.

Where does the smart money go on that bet?

A good tweak

Above I said that Johnson could have related his Target experience to J.C. Penney and I believe there’s one tweak he made at Target that he would have been an immediate winner at J.C. Penney. Johnson cashed in on the way people like to mispronounce Target and give it a French twist by saying “Targét.”

If Johnson had truly understood J.C. Penney customers he would have known that they like to do something similar by calling the stores Jacques Penné. That is something he could have used to draw new attention to the brand and built some enthusiasm.

However, Johnson had no clue. Quelle horreur! It’s no wonder the board bid him adieu.

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The real challenge in writing product reviews is not based on building but on maintaining your credibility. In order to accomplish that, you have to comply with standards in writing substantial product reviews. This article will provide you some tips to help you write an honest and unbiased product review.

Know your audience

Just like writing any blog topic, assess if the product review you will be writing is relevant to your target audience.

For a product review, it usually starts with identifying the unifying problem of your target audience. And then, to build how your review would go, you would need to assess how that certain product can help resolve the problem you have identified. Also, evaluate the market value of this product and its worthiness for your audience.

Try the product

If you cannot convince yourself in the efficiency of the product you will be endorsing, chances are, you won’t convince your readers as well.

It is important that you know what you are actually reviewing, in order to obtain a smooth stream of thoughts that your audience can relate to easily. Once you have tried it, cite three to five benefits of the product you have personally experienced. Make sure that you are citing its benefits and not its features.

If you cannot afford to purchase and try your products for review, then ask your product supplier to provide you reliable affiliate sites which can give you relevant reviews. Or better yet, survey some feedback from people who actually used them.

Be transparent

There is no perfect product, which only entails that transparency is citing the positives and the negatives on a subject. By highlighting what it can do but not omitting what it cannot do, you can provide an unbiased account for the product.

Be the Pursued, not the Pursuer

Writing a review is just like building a relationship—being too pushy defeats the challenge, and as such, the interest of your customers diminishes. It does not mean that you’d have to let your customers chase you all the time. It only means that you have to make the review sound conversational, in order to promote an exchange of opinions and avoid sounding invasive or pushy.

Disclose the purpose of the review

If you value integrity, it would not be an issue for your review to disclose your relationship with your affiliate. This also affirms how transparent you are to your audience.

Here are a couple of tips:

1. you can try ending your review by mentioning that you were personally asked to try the product for free and you did not regret that decision; or
2. you can divulge that you were paid with a commission and it is just minimal compared to the multiple benefits of using the product.

The idea here is to be honest.

Can you think of any other tips in writing good product reviews? Have you already posted one? How did it go? Feel free to share it through your comments below.

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Then you wait….and wait some more.

Yes you get traffic, but only 5% actually become subscribers. After 3 months, 3% of these subscribers eventually unsubscribe after realizing that your business wasn’t for them. To make things worse, only 0.5% actually buy your product. They try it for a few weeks and then ask for a refund.

How bad can it get?

In my opinion, you didn’t do anything wrong by writing tens of guest posts for your business. But what went wrong was your strategy.

In any business, you only get results when your input and process are intact. In this case, your process wasn’t. Here are 5 tweaks you can make to ensure you get the best results from your guest blogging efforts.

# 1. Redefine your one customer so your content becomes targeted

Every business has a customer. But the question is, “how well do you know yours?”

Regardless of the marketing strategy you use, if your banner ads, PPC campaigns or guest posts aren’t targeted at your one customer, then you’ll get pathetic results.

Knowing the geographical and psycho-graphical details of your customers will go a long way in helping you craft content that converts just the way you want. You probably think you already know who your ideal customer is, but does this customer of yours have a specific age, a name, a hobby, a business or favorite kind of movie? If you still don’t have these details, then stop writing any more content.

There’s no point developing a product for people who don’t exist. So take a break, develop a detailed one customer profile and then get to work writing content.

# 2. Write for targeted blogs to streamline your strategy

You can’t write for targeted blogs if you don’t have a reason for guest posting. Before writing any more guest posts, you need to determine whether you want just backlinks, traffic or new subscribers. If it’s just backlinks, then writing for just any blog with good search engine rankings would work out fine.

However, if your reason is for new subscribers, then you really need to step up your game. Your fist step would be to find blogs whose readers have the traits of your ideal customer. Not just any blog, but A-list blogs with “colonies” of readers, waiting to obey your every wish (which will include, “sign up on my list”).

The key here is not to just find blogs with lots of readers, but blogs with lots of readers who can become potential customers for your business. You need an audience that is ready to pay for whatever you have to offer.

Regardless of your niche, Technorati and Alltop are good resources for getting such blogs. They both contain hundreds of A-list blogs in various niches that are willing to accept your content (not crappy content by the way).

# 3. Write compelling content that improves your conversion rates

Finding targeted blogs isn’t the end. Your guest post needs to perform a specific task which is – convert traffic into subscribers or buyers. With this in mind, writing just any kind of content will give you any kind of subscriber who’ll not spend a dime in purchasing your products.

Your focus should be to write compelling content:-

• Compelling content has to be fascinating,
• must talk directly to your target audience,
• outline a problem and must provide a solution.
• Most importantly, it must prove that you can help them with whatever problem they have.

If the content you create lacks any of these 5 ingredients, don’t expect ground breaking conversions. If you realize that “engraving” these ingredients into your guest posts is like writing a PhD thesis, then get help. It can’t be simpler than that.

# 4. Streamline your call to action in a way that makes readers click

On most blogs, the call to action is always in the brief author bio at the end of the post. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs fill this spot with their qualifications and unrelated products descriptions.

As a reader, I really don’t care whether you’re the CEO of your internet business or whether your book has sold millions of copies. All I’m concerned about after reading your article is, “how can you help me achieve this solution?” This is the question you should answer your call to action.

So, how do you do this? Simple!

You can offer a free eBook or webinar and ensure you let them know that it directly solves the problem outlined in the article (they can’t read your mind). Or, you could otherwise refer them to a free resource post on your blog that moves them a step closer towards the solution they want. Just ensure that whatever you’re referring them to is packed with unquestionable value.

Another point to take note of is that ensure your Call to Action is directly related to the title and subject of that post. You can check my author bio and Call to Action to know what I mean.

# 5. Track your strategy to find what works

It’s totally impossible to know that something doesn’t work if you don’t test it out.

Tracking the results from your guest blogging campaign does just one thing- it helps remove the guess work. You’ll get to know just how well your guest posts are doing.

During the whole tracking process, you’ll realize that some posts worked better than others. Find out what exactly you did in these posts that made them convert. Then implement your discovery in subsequent posts that you write. It’s a simple rinse and repeat process.

The best way to know the effectiveness of your guest posts is to know how viral each one went:-

• Compare the social share counts,
• the number of comments,
• the kinds of comments (negative and positive feedback alike)
• as well as the traffic back to your Squeeze Page or blog.
• Also look out for blogs that made a pingback to that specific guest post.

How would you like to write lots of guest posts, create lots of products and then get bankrupt in the process? I don’t think you want that. But it happens, especially to entrepreneurs who don’t focus on making their guest blogging campaign effective.

Nothing feels better than having a decent number of new subscribers who buy your products at even the highest price possible. But first, you’ve got to pass your guest blogging strategy through the five checkpoints in this post. You’ll be better off for it.

What guest blogging methods have you used lately that seem to give you results? I’d love to know.

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Once you’ve written a fabulous, newsworthy press release, you have three ways you can distribute your press release. Choose one, or choose them all!

# 1. Online distribution

The easiest method to get your release out there is through online press release distribution sites. PR Newswire in the UK and PRWeb in the US are two examples. What these sites do is take your press release and send them to dozens of news and niche websites who have signed up to publish news in a given category. So if your press release covers your software launch, it would be distributed on technology websites, as well as general news channels like Yahoo or Google.

The benefit to online distribution is primarily SEO. Google likes to see other sites linking back to yours, and because every place that publishes your release will include your website (as long as you’ve provided it), you’ve got tons of fresh sites linking to yours. You can also include keywords in the press release that you want search engines to associate with your brand.

Keep in mind, online distribution will cost you, but it’s well worth the $200 or so to get the kind of SEO boost you’ll get.

Note: Many people think that journalists will read these releases online and write a story about them. While this has been known to happen, it’s not that common, and there are better ways to reach journalists.

# 2. Pitch journalists

A better way to reach those journalists who cover your industry is to email them directly with your news. You’ll need to start building relationships with the media far before you want to pitch them. Do a little research and make a list of several key journalists who write about your field, both locally — because you’ll have a better chance of getting coverage — and nationally. Follow them on Twitter. Share their content. Comment on their articles.

Then when you want to pitch them, send a well-written, customized email. Mention an article of theirs that you really enjoyed reading. Explain why her readers will care about your news. Provide three bullet points as to what your news entails, and leave the details to be covered in subsequent emails, if she’s interested.

If you don’t hear back, wait a week and follow up.

Note: Never attach your press release to an email. People don’t like getting attachments from people they don’t know. Instead, include a hyperlink to your online press release.

# 3. Pitch bloggers

Bloggers are similar to journalists in that they can help you get the word out about your news to their audiences. But they’re more fun to work with in many ways! For one, bloggers rarely publish a press release verbatim. They’re more likely to ask to try your product or engage with you on a deeper level. They want to get to know your brand so that they can confidently endorse you to their audience. Find creative ways to work with bloggers. Consider offering a few products to give away to their readers, or create a fun campaign that ties in with your news.

Note: Never, ever pitch a blogger without first reading her site. First, it will tell you whether she welcomes PR pitches or not, and second, you’ll find out if your news is really a good fit for her audience.

It’s worth the effort to try all three methods of distribution to get as far a reach as possible with your press release. Use Google Analytics to track what sites sent the most traffic to yours, and use this information to tweak your future PR efforts.

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In March, Google’s head spam-buster, Matt Cutts, made an announcement that the “next generation of Penguin” is coming in 2013. The update is controversial, but one thing is certain: Google is making major changes to its algorithm. And that means using old SEO tactics can actually hurt your site’s reputation and rankings.

White Hat, no worries

There are plenty of “how to avoid being affected by the Penguin update” claims making their way around the Internet. But the truth is, if you’ve been doing everything white hat — that is, ethically — then you don’t have much to worry about. Ask yourself:

• Does my site provide high-quality content, like infographics, studies, white papers, how-to guides, educational videos, and blog posts?
• Does my company reach out to build links via guest blog posts, forums, social media, social bookmarking, etc.?

If you answered yes to these questions — meaning you’ve been optimizing your site “by the book” — you don’t need worry. By taking a few steps to prepare for the update, your business will be fine. Most of the people nervous about these changes are those who are walking the line on ethically generating content and backlinks.

Penguin preparation

Here are five actionable steps every entrepreneur can take to prepare his online marketing for the next Penguin update:

# 1. Make your site more educational

I personally recommend my clients use various mediums — such as infographics, eBooks, how-to guides, apps, or videos — to promote their products and educate clients. (Different demographics respond to different mediums, so don’t be afraid to switch it up!)

# 2. Stay away from “fluff” content

No one wants to read rambling content that was written for search spiders, rather than people. Instead, write in a natural way about topics that are newsworthy, relevant, and informative to your audience — and avoid stuffing in keywords just to try to attract rankings. Did something new happen in your industry? Write a blog post about it. Is your company making some major changes in operations? Write an article in the company news section.

# 3. Start building your social equity

Make sure to update your social profiles and reach out regularly. If someone posts a reply to your post, message him back. If a Twitter follower says something clever, retweet it. If you have something clever or interesting to share, post it on Reddit. As long as you’re honest and post true-to-brand content, the social equity will come.

# 4. Clean up your site

If it’s been more than two years since your last site redesign, it may be time for a refresh using the latest SEO techniques. Remember, the key is to convey educational content without overwhelming your visitors.

# 5. Monitor your SEO vitals

Use tools like SEOzio.com, which gives you all the stats the search engines use in this post-Penguin world.

Because user experience is at the forefront of these Google updates, it’s vital to ensure that your site is as educational and user-friendly as possible — starting now. By practicing ethical SEO and cleaning up your site before the change, your code-breaking skills will put your business on top when the next Penguin generation hatches.

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