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Tuesday 29 January 2019

9 Tips to Become an Awesome Content Creator


Marketing is just as important today as it was during the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now the difference is the wide array of choices available to a business such as, SMS, Email, Blogging, and more.

It’s without doubt that content is king in today’s society. And for inbound marketers (content creators), there’s one piece of information that’s intergral to driving any dollars for the business, and that’s content and marketing.

91% of business-to-business (B2B) professionals use content marketing as part of their strategy. However, this doesn't mean all the content they create is top-notch, compelling, or valuable content.

It’s the burning question that’s on the tip of every executive’s tongue. But what does it take to become a good content creator? Just how do I become one that peers in my industry would look to for advice and opinions?

I believe that all good things are the result of the amount of effort you put into it. It should start with what you do before you put your fingers to a keyboard.

The core of a content creator is to produce entertaining or educational material that is catered to a selected group of people. These can be delievered through many ways including, blog posts, videos, ebooks, photos, and more. AND today, businesses have caught on to this wave, and aggressively employ content creators to engage new and existing customers on the brand's behalf.

As with most things there are some tried-and-true habits you can adopt that will put you on the path to being a truly successful content creator.

As mentioned before like all good things, it's not going to happen overnight. And it shouldn't, because you're trying to get good at it, not just simply do it. But the sooner you start working these five habits into your routine, the sooner you'll be well on your way to becoming a high-quality content creator.

1. Read news about your industry every day.


Creating great content means, content that resonates with your target audience. Simply put: You should know what’s going on in your industry. The best content creators dive deep into a topic and search widely on the internet for industry news and trends to discover what are shaping their audiences current mindset.

Staying organised here is key. There’s a lot of information that is freely available on the internet, and getting in the habit of readying by putting everything you read in one place is going to help greatly.

To expand on what to read be sure to ask a few colleagues what they're reading these days and follow suit.

2. Regularly write.


If you don't use it, just throw it. Successful content creators understand the importance of constantly flexing their writing muscles. Writing is just like any other muscle, it requires training to mould and to perfect.

Get in the habit of writing by doing it daily or every other day. You don’t need to write a polished essay, but rather set aside a few minutes a day to write down any thoughts and ideas you may have. Some questions to help yourself to start the flow are: What did you read yesterday that stuck with you? What didn't you understand?

3. Your audience is king.


Don’t make the mistake when most start as a Content Creator. Understand that your audience needs are most important. They pay the bills, and help to drive KPIs.

It’s imperative that you know your audience inside and out. Examine your own readers and viewers: What do they want that you're not yet giving them? What problems do they have that you can solve for them? Don’t just read into them using demographic data, but consider what are the real problems they face day to day.

4. Establish your own voice.


Earth to human: You’re not the only content creator out there. There’s a lot of other people who are too. That means you’re not the only one offering advice, observations or seeking thought leadership in your industry.

Diving deep or diversifying into other topics seem like a good idea, but don’t forget that there are many others who are doing the same too!

However what you can bring to your content, that nobody else can, is your own personal voice. Readers click on your content for the information, but they come back for the personality.

Writing about an unmissable competition? Don’t just write about the details about the competition, describe the scenario of them winning the competition and what it could do to their lives.

Learn how to blend other available content with your own creativity, and you'll become a much more valuable content creator in the long run.

5. Curate other content.


There isn’t a shortage of content curation. In fact, anyone on the internet can take someone else's content and retweet it, share it on Twitter, pin it -- the list goes on. However, successful content creators know it's not enough to take relevant industry news and deliver it back out to your content readers.

Sharing content just isn't enough. Engaging with the content you're sharing now makes it unique to you.

Only curate content when you have something valuable to add. Ensure you give your readers additional, useful information or even a thought or opinion when sharing content from others.

6. Understand your KPIs.


The Internet is a big place with a lot of competition, and I dare say that it is too big for your content to be discovered.

Just publishing your content online doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy the traffic it deserves. To get your content discovered, you first need to focus in on a key performance indicator (KPI), and optimize your content for it. A KPI is a specific metric you've chosen to measure how well your content is doing against your expectations. Modern KPIs include:

Social media traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a social media post.
Direct traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content by entering your website's URL directly
Organic traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a search engine result link.
Submissions, the number of people who visit your website and leave having submitted their contact information

7. Always Network.


Networking forces you to continue to learn and grow and sometimes having a bit of an idea drought is a sign that you should sit down and talk to others’ to spur new ideas and take them into consideration instead of just your own.

Social networks are good for socialing as the name suggests for it to be! Spend some time on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to check out who the thought leaders are in your industry and follow them.

Once you do that, you can ease into in-person networking. Make it easy on yourself and start small with people you already associate with on a day to day basis such as your colleagues. You already have something in common, so striking up a conversation in the kitchen or at your desks shouldn't be too scary.

8. Offer solutions, not just comments.


Want your audience to remember your content? Don't just recite the things you know -- explain why they're important and what your audience can take away from it and it's your job to put your market observations into terms they can understand and find lessons in.

9. Learn to ask why.


It is important to be curious. Insights learned from this curiousity is what continues to make great content.

It’s these solutions that drive great content pieces, and deliver outstanding value to your readers.

An alternative would be to play the devil’s advocate. Taking a contrary view on a piece of content is a unique spin that would get readers instantly reading an opinioted. Start questioning why the author things that way and you would be triggering a different viewpoint, and you will start to think critically about any given point.

In conclusion, there’s a lot of pressure on you to deliver. You need to develop great content to deliver a strong marketing strategy, but do not be disheartened take small steps and you will eventually reach your goals.

Discover how you can deliver smashing content through Email, here.

Wednesday 23 January 2019

Optimise Your Email and Skyrocket Conversions


Email Marketing is still important in today’s day and age. Even with the advent of Social, and the hype of AI.

It is the most personal way of engaging with your customers or prospects.

How is Email still relevant today? 


Emails can be segmented, personalized and automated while maintaining the relevance to the conversation going with the customer.

But to maintain the effectiveness of your email campaigns, it’s important to understand this fundamental question; Am I providing additional value to my subscribers?

Here you can learn about the importance of optimizing your email marketing campaigns and how to craft your email messages to improve conversions, based on a methodology based on 20 years in the research and testing.

To optimize email campaigns, is to refine a process and understand that Email is a communication between 2 different landing pages.


The 1st landing page is the form where you try to convince the people to willingly have a communication with you.

2nd, is your email’s ability to raise the interest of the subscriber and guides additional information to them.

So the overall flow is as follows:


Capture email of prospects >
Have them open your emails >
Interest them to and motivate them to click (through your Call to Action) >
Lead your subscriber to a landing page with more information.


To capture a prospect’s email you need to show that there is mor value compared to the cost of subscribing.

While your subscribers do not pay any money in order to be added to your mailing list, but the cost is their email and risk of them subscribing to spam and their time taken off to look at your email.

Don’t discount the importance of providing enough value to the subscriber. Overcoming the cost of a subscribers willingness to subscribe can prove to be a huge stumbling block.

Ideally you should collect their name and email address. The name is important because you can send them a personalised message.

A great way to lead your subscribers into engaging with you through email for example is in the first visit you only collect their name and email address, then the next asks for specifically which products that they might be interested in knowing more about.

Doing this progressively collects additional information about your subscribers and it is only possible if if your subscribers have reasons to visit you repeatedly.


Generally, in email there are a lot of factors that weigh in. But know that the optimization of emails becomes easier when you simplify the process. It’s also easier if you understand that the base of all email marketing is to get 2 actions from your prospects.

1st to get email opened.
2nd to get an action.

Learn more about email here.

Tuesday 15 January 2019

5 Important Questions Salespeople Need to Ask


Performing sales is more of a skill than a science.

Although a common trait amongst good sales people is being organised, a sales person who has the ability to recognise when to set their organised plan aside to follow an unexpected conversational turn understands the small nuances in a dialogue between a prospect and how to conduct himself.

Small off-topic conversations can be enlightening and a great way to build rapport. Although tempting, you should never entirely abandon your organised list of questions, rather consider which are the questions that absolutely need to be asked.

There's a raft of questions any sales person can ask a prospect, but we believe that less is more. This is evidence as most people are only able to remember 7 items or less.

To assist with the narrowing of questions a sales person should always ask (in order of importance) are:


  1. Who will sign off on this?
  2. Create an influence map. - "what does your company's decision-making process look like?"
  3. Can I show you?
  4. Ask for permission - start with, "What would a successful outcome look like for you?


I may have provided a lot of information above to digest. If you have further questions or if you'd like to go through this together, please connect with us through Facebook.

Consider these tips in your next email, and share with us your results. For more tips on sales, marketing, or the web stay tuned for future posts.

If you'd like to learn about how we keep other businesses online all-day and everyday reach out to our sales team here. Posted in: Business Email, Tips

Thursday 3 January 2019

Free Tools for Malaysian Business to Get #1 on Google

It's
Getting #1 on Google should be every company's objective. It isn't a luxurious option anymore where businesses can opt-out of having a presence on Google.

3.5 billion searches are made on Google everyday. That statistic says it all, you should be on Google now.

Here's a list of tools which will help you to get to Number #1 on Google:


Helpful Google Marketing Tools for Business


1) Google My Business


Advertising on Google can be expensive, but as with most things in life there is way around spending expensive advertising dollars.


All you have to do is claim your Google My Business listing and your business will be featured in local business featured listings. This also includes a feature in Google Maps.

Best of all, unlike Google Adwords, none of those businesses paid any advertising dollars for their positions in these local results.

If you haven't already claimed your Google My Business listing, hurry on and claim yours now. All you need to do is follow the onscreen instructions and have Google send a postcard with a code to your business for you to verify your listing. Doing this automatically creates a Google+ Page for your business too.

2) Google+ Business Pages


Another free option is to create a free Google+ Business Page. Although, Google+ didn't pan out to have as much authority as it was once billed to be, and now with the +1s out of the search results, some may argue the importance of maintaining an active Google+ Business Page.

Even with little fanfare around Google+ Business Pages, it is a free listing place for local businesses that can improve search-ability on Google. It is after all built by Google and tied directly to your Google My Business Listing by default.

As part of the ever changing ever improving Google Search, an important factor is social and that leads the assumption that having a Google+ Business Page can only help to improve your content rank in Google Search.

3) Google Webmaster Tools


The previous 2 were great free tools to list your local business on Google Search and help to improve your search-ability on the Internet. However, how would you know if some of the activities you've undertaken is improving your content's rating to Google?

Although the algorithm is set to discover a set of words typed in a language humans understand, Google does require a set of architectural requirements to allow for its users to safely access your website and for Google to effectively and efficiently index your website.

Check the health of your website using Google Webmaster Tools. It's an account you can set up here which will alert you to any problems which may prevent your website from getting indexed (searched) by Google for it to display your content in search results. Also, this helps you to anlyze your existing search traffic so you can better understand how visitors are currently finding you.



4) Google Suite: Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms


Currently we are in the content age where users are looking for valuable content to help them with their day-to-day tasks or guides to problems so that they have an idea on how to solve them.

Some of the valuable content that users are looking for include:


  1. White Papers
  2. Ebooks
  3. Templates & Checklist Downloads


Great thing of building a library of these assets are that you can host and share them for free on Google Suites. Find out more about Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms.

As with most recommendations online it is found that these contents are driving great results for link-building (an activity which increases your authority in the eyes of Google - in plain english: Google likes that your website is well cited by others and this means better rankings on Google).

5) Google AdWords Keyword Planner


When you're looking to give your organic SEO a boost, it's important that you do some research on your keywords first. Key research helps you to identify keywords to target as you're creating any content. Having this focus makes it easier for you to get found by the right searches.

Google provides a tool for you to help you plan for your AdWords campaigns, and can also help you to search for new keyword ideas and suggestions to help you with your organic keyword research planning. Do keep in mind that you will need to set up an AdWords account to use the Keyword Planner, but it does not mean you actually have to create an ad.

6) Google Trends


On top of the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Trends is a great tool for helping you with smarter keyword choices. Its an additional tool that will help you to evaluate the popularity of certain topics and compare them with other topics to analyze and compare which over time are popular and can be helpful in getting new keyword suggestions.

7) Google Analytics


You're making a valid effort in trying to drive users to your business online by employing various digital marketing strategies paired with some of the tools introduced in this blog. However there are some questions that you are asking yourself to know which of your activities is actually driving the best results?

Key questions such as how many of your website visitors are new compared to returning? How long are users actually spending on your website?

All these are important analytical questions that can be answered through Google Analytics. This is a free service, and it can give you great insight into your website traffic and help you understand how users are finding and navigating your website.

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Not everyone needs every Google tool in this list, but it's important to have some of the basic products in your list, because when used the right way it can really help your business to become more efficient when communicating to your customers online.

Pair your marketing efforts with your website to drive valid user searches for the services you offer. Learn more about how EVERWORKS can help you here.