Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts

Friday, December 3, 2010

The Rockstar Guide to Getting More Traffic, Fame, and Success

image of young woman in sunglasses

Have you ever been to a concert where the opening act was just awful?

Maybe their music was okay, but there was something about the performance that undermined your ability to enjoy it. The group just lacked that special something that would make them stand out, that would draw you in.

That quality they’re lacking is called showmanship — and it’s not just for musicians.

You can spot a blogger who lacks showmanship a mile away.

Even after they’ve built a small and loyal following of readers, they still never seem to reach the level of success that the “A-List” bloggers in their niche have achieved. They sometimes spend years trying to overcome that plateau. They can’t figure out why they never get past being the “opening act” for the real rockstars in their niche.

They get frustrated and discouraged. Many of them give up. They hang up their metaphorical guitars and get regular 9-to-5 jobs and tell stories about how rough the industry is.

Don’t become one of those. I’m going to show you how to get the showmanship and stage presence you need to become the main act in anyone’s feed reader.

What is showmanship, and how does it apply to blogging?

Showmanship, according to the infallible Wikipedia, is “the skill of performing in such a manner that will appeal to an audience or aid in conveying the performance’s essential theme or message.”

That should sound familiar. Conveying a theme or message to an audience is exactly what we’re doing with blogging and content marketing. Yet so many people struggle to develop a style that will set them apart from everyone else in their niche.

But even the most mundane niches can be made new and interesting if you’re willing to find something special you can bring to the table.

For example, one of my favorite performers is pianist Victor Borge, who could easily have achieved a fine career as a traditional classical pianist in front of a hushed concert audience.

Instead, he found a way to make the music interesting and entertaining by adding comedy to his performance.

His shows elicit roars of laughter from his audience — and when was the last time you saw the formally-dressed concert hall crowd rolling in the aisles? It was completely unconventional, but his audiences loved him for it.

And his mastery of the piano was undiminished.

What showmanship isn’t

Showmanship isn’t a gimmick. It isn’t tricking the audience.

If Borge had been a less-than-stellar pianist, he wouldn’t have been able to transcend the concert hall standards to create his own way of approaching the music. Putting on a show isn’t putting on a mask.

Find something that works for you and pursue it. No trickery or attempting to be someone else required.

Good showmanship, the kind that engages your audience, needs to have authenticity at its core in order to work. If you become a sleazy Internet marketer, resort to spamming, or engage in bait-and-switch schemes, your audience won’t care if you have the best show on earth.

No amount of showmanship can hide a scumbag. Instead, take your authentic self and add some style to create a “wow” factor that grabs the attention of your audience and won’t let go.

Showmanship and stage presence

Your showmanship is what you bring that’s unique.

But “unique” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” You could be the only blogger out there dressing in bacon and playing a ukulele, but that doesn’t mean you have valuable information to impart.

If you’re going to help your audience feel confident about your authority, you’re going to need something more than showmanship.

You need stage presence.

Stage presence is your ability to connect with an audience.

At this year’s BlogWorld, Brian Clark gave an excellent example of how to use stage presence.

Especially when it comes to marketing, people are like ‘Oh, well I’m supposed to do this, or I’m supposed to do that.’ No you’re not, because then you’re going to do exactly what everyone else does and you’re not unique.

So don’t feel like you need to be Naomi Dunford. I’m probably more like her in real life, but I choose to keep that on the down-low.

(…) I try to help people out. I try to help them learn something and make a business related to that.

And it’s as [much] the “real” me as any other part of me, but we all play different roles.

So that’s just my two cents on authenticity. Be who you want to be to your people. Be the best “you” you can be for them — not for you, for them.

That’s stage presence. Knowing what part of your authentic self connects with your audience — and then choosing to emphasize that aspect — is the first step to becoming the main act instead of just the ho-hum opener.

7 ways to use showmanship to command the attention of your audience

  1. Choose a style that belongs to you. In order to be unique in your niche, you need to create a style that conveys who you are and what you do, in a way that your audience can get excited about. Find that “sweet spot” that will set you apart.
  2. Immerse yourself in the style you’ve chosen. Once you’ve decided on your style, immerse everything you do in that style. That’s what showmanship is all about — taking what you do and wrapping it in a unique angle that gets your audience’s attention. If you don’t infuse everything you do with a single style, your audience will be confused by the conflicting brands you’re presenting.
  3. Know what part of your personality connects with your audience. Being authentic doesn’t mean baring everything about yourself to the world. As Brian says, it’s about being the best “you” that you can be for your audience. Figure out what part of your personality “clicks” with your audience, and show more of that.
  4. Focus on your audience, not yourself. I love what Sonia said at BlogWorld right after Brian finished his definition of authenticity. She said: “It’s not about you. It’s never about you. In business, it’s always about your customer.” If you want an engaged audience, you need to focus on what they want, what they need, and what they like.
  5. Know the difference between authenticity and “too much information.” There’s a fine line between being authentic and telling your audience something they really didn’t want to know. Don’t cross the line into TMI. As Sonia says, “No one wants that much authenticity.”
  6. Act like an authority if you want to be seen as one. If you want to be seen as an authority in your niche, you need to present yourself in a way that’s consistent with that level of respect. If you’re a financial advisor and you constantly complain about being broke, no one’s going to be very interested in your advice. Be mindful of how you present yourself.
  7. Be consistent. At its core, branding is all about consistency — giving your audience the same positive experience every time they interact with you. If you want to command the attention of your audience, you need to be consistent in everything you do. Make sure everything you publish is in line with your overall brand, and stick to a consistent publishing schedule.

Being interesting isn’t enough

Being interesting isn’t enough if you want to establish yourself as an authority. Being talented isn’t enough, either.

Let’s face it, talented bands that are one-hit wonders are interesting for a time — then they fade into obscurity. No one wants that for their blog.

If you want to build a sustainable business model, you need to create a unique style that commands the attention of your audience, builds a solid connection with that audience, and establishes you as an expert.

Develop your showmanship and stage presence and you’ll be headliner for years to come. Even after you’ve turned old and gray, you’ll still be a rockstar.

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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Does Your Site Hold Up to the Window Shopping Test?

image of red rain boots

Window shopping can be a disillusioning experience. A beautiful display can pull you in, only to lead to a shop with a bad selection and lousy customer service. Which makes it less fun to pop back onto the street to continue the search.

Online businesses have window displays too — or at least a good counterpart. If you’re doing business online, you may be surprised to know that your window display could be making promises that your store doesn’t deliver on.

Follow along with me and my daughter as we shop for new rain boots, and you’ll discover what works and what doesn’t when you’re creating an online “window display” to entice your customers to buy.

We were looking for the same things most people do when they shop: good selection, quality products, an enjoyable shopping experience, excellent customer service, and a price point we could afford.

Lots of window displays seemed to promise those things. Like that one over there. Are those the boots we’re looking for?

We ventured into the store.

Store 1: Anybody home?

As our eyes adjusted to the store, we noticed it was dark and a little hard to make out what they were selling. The place seemed abandoned, and no one came forward to help us. We had seen a pair of boots in the window, but now that we were inside, we weren’t sure they even carried boots.

They had shoes, but there was no order to how they were presented. They didn’t seem to be organized by men’s and women’s shoes. They weren’t displayed by size or style. They were just placed around the store randomly, and there was nobody around to help us find what we were looking for.

We backed away and kept looking.

Store 2: Accosted by a hustler

A few steps beyond the first store, we saw another window display. The window display was full of light, and the boots were organized by men’s and women’s styles. It was easy to see they had plenty of inventory.

We headed inside.

This store looked much better at first glance. But the loud music playing in the background was really hard to take. The store’s walls were painted with florescent colors. It was distracting, and hard to focus.

A salesperson approached. He strained to speak over the music, and loudly asked what we were looking for.

We said we were looking for rain boots, and he steered us over to a display of leather boots with 5” stiletto heels. He tried to convince me that these boots would hold up great in the rain, and besides that, my daughter’s legs would look longer.

I noticed the boots were $485.00, and wondered if that had something to do with his recommendation.

I pretended to need to make an urgent phone call, and we hustled out in a hurry.

Store 3: Our luck turns

At this point, we were a little frustrated. The first two stores we visited had made a promise with their window displays. We went inside expecting to find what caught our eyes in the window. Once inside, though, the shopping experience fell apart.

We were getting a little tired at this point, but we kept going, hoping to see another display that caught our attention. And this time, we finally got lucky.

The window display looked organized and appealing. The boots were grouped together, divided into men’s and women’s styles, and organized by color.

A spacious, soothing atmosphere greeted us when we walked inside. There was plenty of room to wander the aisles and look at products more closely. We scanned the merchandise and found the boots section right away.

As we moved to that part of the store, a salesperson appeared. He let us know that all their boots were marked down 50% this week, and that he could help us find what we were looking for. We started to feel lucky we picked this week to wander into this particular store looking for boots.

We found the style she liked, but they didn’t have them in red. My daughter had her heart set on red rain boots.

We asked the salesperson what we could do, and he had a great answer for us. They could special order the boots in her size, in red. They would deliver them at no charge, and she would have them the next day.

We happily handed over the credit card. Victory!

Which store is yours?

If you think this is a lesson in e-commerce sites like eToys or Zappo’s, think again.

Every site gives its readers an experience. And it’s up to you to make sure your site, particularly your homepage, delivers what they want.

When people arrive at your site’s homepage, which of these stores reflects their experience? Is it uninviting and disorganized? Is it bright, loud, and not terribly helpful?

Or does it make your offerings easy to skim, and enticing to sign up for or purchase? Do you have help systems like FAQ pages and contact forms to make it simple for your customer to get their questions answered?

Have you made it easy to find great content that gives them exactly what they’re looking for? Is everything on the page geared to making sure they find just what they want?

Do you track what your customer is looking for so that you can be sure you’re displaying what they’re in the market to purchase?

Your home page makes a promise, just like a window display does. If it’s set up right, customers will click to enter and find out more.

Once they’ve found you, will they buy your boots?

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Monday, October 25, 2010

How to Beat “Invisible Content Syndrome”

image of ghostly figure

If you had known how hard it would be when you first started your blog, would you have done it at all?

You had a topic you cared about. You thought you had something to say. And you had $10 to register a domain name.

But you’ve been writing (and writing and writing) and it’s all just words into the void.

No readers. No tweets. No stumbles. No comments.

Just … silence.

I hate to break this to you, but you have Invisible Content Syndrome. Fortunately, this condition is curable.

Invisible Content Syndrome is an equal-opportunity menace. It doesn’t just hit lazy people, or people who don’t care about good content. In fact, every blog starts out this way.

But some grow out of it quickly, while others get stuck there.

And being stuck with Invisible Content Syndrome is amazingly frustrating. So let’s get you out.

Make yourself useful

Sure, the colorful show-offs get the best traffic. But at the end of the day, you’d rather be known for being useful than for attracting attention. We have more than enough useless attention-grabbers.

Even among the hundreds of millions of blogs out there, not enough are useful. Not enough solve problems that people care about.

If you have a solid grounding of the basics in your topic but you aren’t the world’s foremost expert, you’re in luck.

Most people, in any topic, are beginners. So write for beginners. Teach them those basics you’ve just mastered. Go back and teach the newbie that you used to be.

You’ll understand the newbie perspective far better than the 10,000-hour genius can. She’s too far removed from what it’s like to be new.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Go find a kingdom of blind people to help. Become an expert by helping people who know less than you do.

Be a good friend

Once you’ve built a solid cornerstone of useful content, it’s time to expand your social network.

Figure out five big blogs and ten smaller ones that have the readers you want. All of them, of course, should be writing content you think is very good.

Then start hanging out.

Tweet their best content, but don’t stop there.

Make intelligent comments. (Not lame “great post!” ones.) Describe your own experience, or ask a smart question, or bring up a related point that wasn’t covered.

Use your name, not a keyword phrase. (That, frankly, just makes you look like a spamming asshat.)

Get your picture registered with Gravatar so people can associate a face with a name.

Link to the best posts you find. Create your own content by riffing on their ideas with your own take. Use their posts for one end of an intelligent conversation, with you holding up the other side.

You won’t attract attention and links from everyone you cultivate. But you will from some. And as long as you’re making yourself useful, some of their readers will become your readers.

I know this sounds like old-fashioned advice. (“OMG that’s so 2007.”)

But comments and links are down for many blogs since twitter became so prevalent. They’re still the best tools for building relationships with the folks who can bring you new readers.

Give it some time

It amazes me how many folks start to gripe about being invisible when they have four posts up.

It takes time. No, it doesn’t have to take years (although many ultra successful people had a slow start). But you’ve got to give things a chance to gel.

It helps to cultivate a healthy dose of stubbornness about your goal. (While still being open to changing your approach about how you’ll get there.)

Every successful content marketer started out with an audience of two … yourself and your other email address. How far beyond that you grow depends on how well you can execute these principles.

Be entertaining (if you can pull it off)

It’s important to take your topic and your audience’s needs seriously.

It’s fatal to take yourself seriously.

If you’re funny, go ahead and share it. If you tell a great story, share that too.

Yes, you need to make yourself useful. But we already have one Wikipedia, we don’t need your version.

Do what Wikipedia can’t. Find compelling angles on the tried-and-true. Be subjective and opinionated. Have a personality. Be interesting.

And if you’re the most boring person you’ve ever met, make fun of yourself for that.

Speaking of being boring …

Figure out what you’re so scared of

Most boring people have a really scary story they could tell.

If you’re writing and writing and you can’t capture attention, the awful truth is that your content is probably boring. But that’s not the last word on the subject.

No toddler is boring. Maddening, annoying, headache-inducing, sure. But they’re not boring. Humans just aren’t wired to be boring.

You used to be complicated and fascinating. Something made you boring.

Somewhere along the line, you got punished for being interesting. You got ridiculed for being yourself. You got your hands slapped for coloring outside the lines, and you promised yourself you wouldn’t expose yourself to that again.

You might even have had something really heartbreaking happen. Something that stole your spark before you ever really got to share it.

Oprah, if she had never found the courage to tell her harrowing story of triumph over crushing adversity, would have been another Sally Jessy Raphael. A competent performer. A hard worker. Pretty successful.

But not a game-changer. Not a billionaire.

If you’re boring, it’s because you’re scared and you’re hiding your best stuff. Getting un-scared is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but since you need to do it anyway in order to have a great life, you might as well get started now.

How about you?

Did your blog go through Invisible Content Syndrome? How long did it take you to break out? Or are you still stuck there now?

Leave a comment and let us know your favorite techniques for getting visible again.

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Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

image of swiss army knife

As a digital branding and marketing agency, our company has encouraged, coached, and cajoled clients over the years on the importance of blogging for building traffic, buzz, and organic search.

We watched some clients grow by leaps and bounds, attracting hundreds of thousands of blog visitors per month.

And we watched others clients stumble along without ever gaining the momentum we were working for.

Of course there are a lot of factors that drive success or failure. But among the blogs that succeeded on a huge scale, we noticed two common factors.

First, the breakthrough blogs had a strong editorial calendar. And second, they used a thoughtful, strategic approach to managing editorial content.

What is an editorial calendar, and why do you need one?

An editorial calendar is just a fancy term for a publishing schedule.

If you blog regularly, you should look ahead at least one month and make some decisions about which posts you want to publish on what dates.

It’s really that simple.

An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging. That little bit of planning goes a surprisingly long way toward getting the most audience reach from your blog content.

1. An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead

By planning your posts ahead of time, you drive perseverance.

An editorial calendar encourages blogging as a habit, wards off writer’s block, and ensures that you never miss another deadline.

It’s a small, subtle thing, but you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in your mindset.

2. An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity

Many bloggers worry that an editorial calendar will straitjacket their creativity. Actually, the opposite is true.

Writing comes to many of us in waves. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, a blogger can write two or three posts in an afternoon.

That’s fine — keep writing about what inspires you. Then use your editorial calendar to publish each post according to a plan that keeps your target audience in mind.

Staring at that blank screen and trying to come up with a topic can be one of the most stressful aspects of blogging.

But you’ll find that when you make those decisions weeks in advance, you actually come up with more and better ideas. You’ll be more creative, not less.

3. You can take a great concept further

An editorial calendar is a powerful tool for maximizing the reach of your content, while removing the pressure of having to generate new concepts for each post.

Say you’ve got a great topic in mind, one you know your readers care a lot about. There’s no reason to blow it all in one day.

Would it make a valuable series, parceled out over a period of time and then gathered into a content landing page? Could you run some interviews or line up some guest posts on the topic? Or go multimedia and round up a few engaging videos or cartoons on the subject?

Whether you write everything yourself or use guest writers, planning ahead lets you group your content more effectively. Once you start looking at your blog a month at a time, you can develop patterns and make sure your content is well-balanced among all the readers you serve.

4. You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends

When you pair planning with a strong foundation in SEO, you start to build your audience highly efficiently.

An editorial calendar helps you pay better attention to key outreach strategies, such as blog post titles and link building. At a more advanced level, you can use it to plan and time posts related to your target audience’s search behaviors.

Capitalizing on search activity can be as simple as timing posts and topics to synch with public holidays or product launches. Or it can be as complex as doing deep keyword analysis and planning content around trending search terms that will deliver maximum traffic to your blog.

Why Stresslimit developed the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin

After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients, using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we wound up in a long discussion with our close friend (and brilliant engineer) Zack Grossbart.

Beyond our mutual excitement about blogging and the power of editorial calendar strategy, we shared a passion for open source projects and wanted to give back to the WordPress community. We also wanted to develop a tool that would make our lives and coaching our clients more efficient, easier, and simply cooler.

Our clients were excited about the idea of using an editorial calendar. But there was no single tool that enabled us to eliminate “busy work” and free up more time for strategizing and creativity.

We were also in synch with Zack on our love for creating simple, intuitive interfaces that help people manage complex behaviors.

An eight-month collaborative project was born: co-developing, co-designing and re-iterating the WordPress Editorial Calendar.

We’re excited to announce the launch of version 1.0 of our editorial calendar plugin, which is (in our humble opinion) the killer tool for managing and driving the success of any blog — from the small and personal to the large and corporate.

We invite you to take the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin for a spin at this link. It’s free, and we think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Here are some of the things you can do with the plugin

  • See a month’s worth of posts at a glance.
  • Juggle your calendar by simply dragging and dropping posts from day to day.
  • Quickly edit your posts’ titles, contents, and publishing times.
  • Publish posts or manage drafts.
  • Instantly see the status of your posts.
  • More easily manage posts from multiple authors.

And you can do all of that right from the calendar interface itself. It’s simple and intuitive.

No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior. Check it out here.

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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Freakonomics Guide to Making Boring Content Sexy

image of orange with skin of an apple

It’s easy to write about certain topics, like celebrities, or technology, or even social media. Everybody wants a piece of it.

But what if your passion is botany, supply chain logistics, or cognitive psychology?

How do you get noticed with a compelling story when your subject is … well … boring?

In the summer of 2006, an economics book was on the New York Time Bestseller list. The title was provocative and promised to be anything but a boring read.

Even my hero Malcolm Gladwell said, “Prepare to be dazzled.”

Since I really can’t stand economics (hated it ever since college), I skeptically handed over my $25 and took Freakonomics home.

From the very first page, I was treated to a wild ride through the most bizarre stories I’d ever encountered. I learned about cheating schoolteachers and self-sacrificing sumo wrestlers. Why drug dealers still live with their moms and how the KKK is like a real estate agent.

Every story taught a boring economic principle in a way that made me want more.

I realized that Freakonomics was an instruction manual for transforming boring blog posts into sexy must-read masterpieces.

Check it out:

People love “dot connectors”

Our world is getting more complicated by the second. Every day your readers are trying to get a handle on what happened yesterday, what’s happening now, and what will happen tomorrow. If you connect the dots for them, you can get popular in a hurry.

Freakonomics is built around connecting dots in an interesting way. For example, it’s long been an economic principle that almost every choice we make is connected to incentives. Pretty boring stuff — until author Steven Levitt used a story about daycare centers to show how some incentives backfire.

Since parents were showing up late frequently, the daycare center started a policy of a $3 fine to incentivize parents to show up on time. Unfortunately, the fine wound up incentivizing parents to pay $3 for an hour of babysitting and not feel guilty for showing up late!

Giving your reader’s these “aha” moments is a great way to keep them reading a so-called boring topic and have them asking for more.

Headlines still matter

Even with all of our shiny social media tools, good ol’ standby skills like writing a great headline still matter.

You can be a masterful storyteller and write killer posts, but you still lose if no one reads them.

Titles are the closest thing us writers have to a “silver bullet.” Don’t waste ‘em. Do you think that Freakonomics would have been a New York Times Bestseller with the title Aberrational Behavior and the Causal Effect of Incentives?

The quickest way to give your boring blog a facelift is to put some eye-hijacking power into your headlines. In fact, write your headline first, before you even start the rest of the post. It’s that important.

Numbers are a blogger’s best friend

One common complaint of blogs is that they can’t be taken seriously. We are accused of playing fast and loose with the facts and being weak on proof. It’s easy to avoid hard numbers and focus on writing the soft stuff, but Freakonomics shows that this is a mistake.

Many bloggers are afraid that statistics, equations, and hard facts will scare away our readers, but that’s not giving our readers enough credit. The problem isn’t the numbers — it’s that we stick numbers out there without a story.

Freakonomics uses numbers to reveal a hidden story. Levitt looked up the numbers on standardized tests for Chicago students. On the face of it, this was pretty boring data. This district got such-and-such a score, this district got such-and-such a score. Yawn.

Until those numbers revealed that teachers were cheating.

In some districts, teachers received salary boosts when their students performed better on standardized tests — motivating them to fill in a few additional correct answers for their students.

The story makes the numbers interesting. The numbers make the story credible. Give it a try.

Everyone loves a mystery

Why would a successful sumo wrestler throw a match? The obvious answer would be that he’s getting paid to do so, but Levitt quickly discovered there was a much more mysterious motivation that drove who won and who lost in Japan’s sumo contests.

The answer is buried in psychology, probability, and incentives, but the only thing that I care about is that there’s a mystery. Any mystery begs for gumshoe detective work. We can’t leave well enough alone and we want to know why — especially if someone else is going to do the legwork of figuring out the answer for us. That’s why the CSI series has spun off more offspring than a jackrabbit.

You can use this quirk of human nature to make your topic enticing. Look closely at your topic and uncover some old-fashioned mysteries. Now write a post that presents the mystery and leads your reader through the investigation to its incredibly satisfying conclusion.

Provide a better way to solve common problems

Freakonomics uses a powerful set of tools to explain the way the world works. By the end of the book, you can’t help but think that every problem imaginable can be solved with the right incentive, data analysis, or storytelling. When you’re finished you feel that there is a better way to tackle your problems.

This is what “added value” means. Simply restating a problem is boring. Offering new tools and perspectives to solve problems helps your reader get closer to their goals — and that makes you someone whose content they’ll want to read every time you come out with something new.

Freakonomics: The Movie is coming out soon, and I’ll be first in line — because reading the book was so valuable to me I can’t wait to see what else the authors have to offer. To get devoted fans who’ll anticipate your every output with the same enthusiasm, give them some solutions.

Time to get freaky

Have you ever used any of these techniques to make your content sexier? Can you see how to apply some of them to your own blog?

And if you read Freakonomics yourself, tell us in the comments about any other blog-enhancing tips you picked up!

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