Successful Blog

How to Add Audio to Your Digital Marketing

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2021 has seen an explosion in audio content, especially podcasting. A few factors play into this. The technology to produce quality audio from anywhere is available to pretty much anyone. iTunes has ramped up their focus on podcasting with the launch of their podcast app in 2013 and podcast platforms such as Stitcher are moving into automobiles.

 The success of podcasters such as John Lee Dumas, Cliff Ravenscraft and Chris Ducker bring positive attention to podcasting, not just as a content option but as a viable revenue stream.

So how can you turn up the audio in your content strategy?

Adding audio content can be done inexpensively and with less stress around the technology than you may realize. Once you decide to add audio, you will find that this is an excellent medium to leverage for not just podcasting, but other areas of your content strategy.

Free tools like Facebook Live provide an easy way to host your own podcast. Australia-based marketing agency gives some great tips on hosting a live event on Facebook:

The live video will stay on your page after the broadcast and will appear in your friends’ and followers’ feeds just like a usual post. There’s a handy rehearsal feature called Test Broadcast that allows you to broadcast live to admins and moderators of the page to test the audio quality and lighting before you go live to everyone else

Internal podcasting

When you think of podcasting, it’s common to have programs come to mind that are designed for an external audience. But what about your internal audience? Developing a podcast or series of podcasts designed for internal audiences can be a great way to engage your team members and provide important information in a consistent, easy to access delivery model.

Getting Started:  Deduct which areas of your organization could benefit from information, updates or education on a regular basis and who can easily download or access audio for listening. Some possible ideas for internal podcasting implementation could be:

  • Human Resources hosts a series of interviews showcasing employees in your company.
  • Sales Management produces a weekly podcast providing updates, product details, and training for the sales team.
  • Employee Benefits uses audio to keep employees up to date on benefit changes, enrollment information and frequently asked questions.
  • The C-Suite hosts a regular podcast to update the company on the state of the organization, vision of where the company is headed and allow everyone to better connect to management and culture.

To keep things organized and consolidated, use a hosted contact center for your business.

These are just a few ideas on how an internal podcast could benefit your content strategy. What other ways could audio content be used to increase morale and efficiencies, while decreasing costs and turnover?

Agile Marketing Is Perfect On Twitter

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Twitter gives businesses a unique marketing advantage compared to other social media platforms. Internet marketers who know what they are doing love the agility that Twitter provides.

I’m pertaining to the unique culture that only Twitter currently has. You see with Twitter, businesses can post multiple posts in a day without experiencing too many negative responses to it. It’s the norm in that exceptional community. Try doing that on Facebook and you will lose your fans or followers faster than you can delete your posts.

However, not all is able to take advantage of this wonderful culture. It requires a certain creativity because being to blunt and spontaneous without direction doesn’t do brands any good. Because you should know that branding and advertising go side by side. Hence, to make your posts fit your brand and still retain that agility we are talking about, you need to have plan.

Below are some of the best responses we got from the most influential Twitter marketers on how to proceed with this planning.

Plan for Specific Moments

I know it’s impossible to try and foresee events that hasn’t materialized yet. Nevertheless, what you can do is to tailor tweets that go well with events that will surely occur in the near future.

I’m talking about planning for events that are bound to happen like upcoming movies, Hollywood gossip, etc.… Doing this allows you tweet really quick responses to popular events.

People simply wouldn’t know that you’ve already made it witty and consistent with your branding; and that you’re just waiting for the right day to arrive. Other than people thinking that you’re impressive, they would surely think of it as worthy of a follow.

Use this advanced ad maker to create awesome graphics to use in your tweets.

Ad maker

Create A Content Calendar

Every large company I know has this. Small businesses on the other hand are more tedious to adopt. This tip is in connection with the first point. What you want to do is to create a content way in advance for events that would obviously take place along the year. Celebrations like Christmas, Labor Day, black Friday and most of the holidays should be on that calendar.

Don’t forget to adjust your landing page to match each particular campaign you are running on Twitter. This site offers a variety of online form templates to create seasonal CTAs and customize your landing page.

You should already be thinking about the perfect tweets that should generate more followers hopping into your company on those dates. What’s best about it is that since some of the events are far into the future that you have plenty of time to keep perfecting them.

Review What Your Competitors Have Been Up To

In this case, it is likewise true that experience is the best teacher. It’s best if you’ll look at some of the most popular tweets that went around during special days of the year.

Most likely, you’ll find the best ones from your competitors since you’re in the same niche. Their tweets will automatically apply to your business. However, you also have to be mindful not to copy the tweet so closely. There are lot of meticulous eyes on Twitter.

Stay alert!

All that planning will go down the drain if you’re not quick enough. Remember that no matter how witty your tweets are, they wouldn’t do much difference if you are late on the scene.

It will only get burrowed in the millions of tweets users do each day.

Image by Lerey Eric from Pixabay

How To Write Faster Without Typing

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I consider myself a pretty good typist. On a good day I manage to churn out around 2,000 words in an hour and that’s without ever looking down at the keyboard or the screen. I write for a living and so I’ve gotten to the point where it feels almost as natural as talking.

But that’s not to say that typing is perfect or without limitations. For starters it’s not for everybody – those with disabilities often struggle to type efficiently while others simply take a long time to learn to type.

Furthermore, typing requires you to have both hands available and probably a surface you can learn on – which means sitting down at a desk to write and not being able to do anything else (multitasking with typing is pretty much impossible).

And finally, typing still isn’t really all that efficient. Even at 2,000 words an hour that’s much slower than you would be able to speak the same amount, and when you try to translate the process onto a small touchscreen you find that that slows down further.

So what other options are there? If you want to write while at the same time doing the washing, if you don’t have full use of your hands or can’t get to a desk and keyboard setup, or if you just want to try and go faster than your current typing speed, what can you do?

Dictation Software

One option is to try using dictation software. This of course is software that attempts to translate the spoken word into text on the screen so that you don’t have to input the information yourself. In theory this should allow you to stand at the sink and wash up while simply speaking the text you want noted down.

Alternatively you could dictate while going for a walk and at the same time you would expect it to be much quicker. It would be a blessing for those with disabilities and indeed that’s why many people already use it.

Currently though dictation software isn’t perfect, or we would have far less need for keyboards. Perhaps the best known example is ‘Dragon Naturally Speaking’ from a company called Nuance, and this works by using the normal analysis algorithms while at the same time keeping an index of your currently used vocabulary and learning the way you speak.

Still though, there will be times when it makes mistakes, and it can be a fiddly process trying to go back and edit (‘go back – no don’t write go back…! Delete go back!’). For now it’s enough to provide a viable alternative for the disabled, but it’s not yet going to replace a keyboard.

Still, writing and posting by voice is doable: Here’s a guide on how to do that in WordPress. There are also free plugins for WordPress that can make it more doable.

Pen Input

Another option is to use pen input rather than a keyboard, which is another that’s becoming more and more viable as technology improves. The best devices that support stylus input include the Sony Duo 11, the Surface Pro 2, the Dell Venue 8 and the Galaxy Note 3 among others. Each of these allows you to draw directly onto the screen with a pressure sensitive matrix detecting the input on top, and will then convert what you write into text.

This is actually a very fast method for capturing input and is great for jotting down ideas on the tube. However there are also some downsides to the method that again prevent it from being as efficient as it might be.

For one, most handwriting recognition requires you to write a few words or a short sentence at a time and then wait for it to be translated into typing. Even if you could write an essay the same way you might have done in an exam at school, it still wouldn’t offer you the option to scroll down the screen easily or to start new pages, and it would probably be slower than typing anyway.

You may also want to pick a minimalist theme for your blog, one that doesn’t require a lot of editing before publishing.

The Solution

The real problem is that we are taking our existing input methods and trying to adapt them to more modern scenarios.

We are trying to write and type into our computers and talk to our phones, when really our language and the devices themselves aren’t suitable for either. To speed up we are going to have to change one of those things – at which point we may well see a huge paradigm shift.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

How to Become a Better Storyteller

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Are you engaging your community the best you can with visuals?

In most cases the answer is: probably not.

Yet, visual marketing is crucial these days. According to Megaphone Marketing,

With 70% of visual receptors in our eyes, it only takes 150 milliseconds to recognise and symbol and 100 milliseconds to attach a meaning to it. Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and retains 80 percent of what we see versus just 20 percent of what we read.

Here are a few tips and stats for you to consider:

  1. In the age of “infobesity” and with an adult attention span of 3-8 seconds, marketers need to learn how to stand out with visual content.
  2. Viewers spend 100% more time on web pages with videos. 60% are more likely to buy a product if video is included. Use an online video editor to create videos.
  3. Web posts with visuals drive up to 180% more engagement than those without visuals. Use visual elements to create better lead magnets!
  4. Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic on average of 12% more than those who don’t.
  5. According to Sephora, their Pinterest followers spend 15X more than its Facebook fans.
  6. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and processed 60,000x faster.
  7. Cartoons can increase your newsletter open rate to 45% vs 5% industry standard.
  8. The 7 elements of visual storytelling are:
    1. design,
    2. personalisation,
    3. usefulness,
    4. personality,
    5. storytelling,
    6. share-worthiness,
    7. real-time app… Know them!
  9. Don’t be afraid of low-fi (Low Fidelity) images taken on the go, we live in the Now! economy and people get it. Have fun w/ it.
  10. Make content easy to consume, make it snackable!
  11. Remember the Cs: content + context: know what content to place on what networks. Ex: GIFs do well on Tumblr, but not others.
  12. Ensure every blog post has at least one great picture and you have a Pin It button on your site for heavy Pinterest users.
  13. Twitter is extremely visual, even if you are sharing a link attach a picture to draw attention and increase click-through.
  14. On Slideshare, use less text on slides, keep it short and visual, use a catchy title, and include a “tweet this” button on the slides.
  15. Don’t be afraid to play with different types of content. See what works for your community; ask them too!

Never stop monitoring and improving. Use web analytics platforms to understand how your audience is engaging with your visual content and whether it is sending them down your conversion funnel:

Visualization of a conversion funnel

There’s no one secret for success! Leave a comment and share what visuals you’re using and what’s working to help you and your brand better connect with your community.

LinkedIn Marketing: Are You Doing it Right?

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With more than one third of professionals worldwide members of LinkedIn, opportunities have never been greater for finding future employers, generating business leads, making deals and generating revenue.

In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 Benchmark report, LinkedIn has witnessed the biggest jump in B2C platform usage: from 51 percent last year to 71 percent this year.

LinkedIn has chimed in with its statistics and research stating that with over 300 million potential brand advocates, LinkedIn’s “ Pro-sumers” – Professional Consumers – are the most sought after audiences for brands. They carry more purchasing power than members active on other platforms, are 152% more likely to be active in online conversations and 80% more willing to pay more from a brand they trust.

Along with those numbers comes some fierce competition. Your professional experience needs to match your and groomed appearance and the quality of the content you are sharing needs to be on-target to grab the right eyes and generate leads.

So are you “doing it” all right?

LinkedIn offers various best practices from how to find a new employer to how to author winning content.  But when I took a look none of the below tips said “wow” to me. They screamed “business, and boring, as usual”:

Best practices found on LinkedIn:

Profile

  • upload a professional image
  • ensure your profile is complete
  • share content your audience is looking for
  • update your skills
  • get endorsements
  • use your business email address (and let people contact you!)

Job-Seekers

  • build a profile
  • ask for recommendations
  • inform your network you are looking for a job
  • purchase Premium

Content

  • keep an authentic voice
  • showcase your expertise
  • include concrete advice you’d like to give someone new to the field.
  • talk about what your industry will look like in 10 years
  • address industry issues or problems, offer your thoughts

How to get ahead on LinkedIn

I don’t personally use LinkedIn for lead generation or heavy networking, but one thing I will be doing soon though is leveraging LinkedIn’s latest innovation — Linkedin Publishing

Will I be alone? I doubt it. Will all of the other LinkedIn member also begin publishing their own content and clutter opportunities? Will publishing long-form posts (in the short-form world) help highlight my professional achievements, expertise and know-how? So far the quality of content I read is outstanding. My bet is that this feature is a game-changer for members.

LinkedIn members, social marketers and influencers alike have begun publishing.

Alone the visibility of posts in terms of views and shares speak volumes and can’t be discounted as a player in building, or increasing, trust and opening doors to new opportunities. A new era of social influence has begun.

Image by David Bruyland from Pixabay

How to Turn Your Passion into Cash with Blogging

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Are you passionate in one topic and want to spread your passion to others? Do you want to make money from your passion?

You can do it simply by starting a blog. Yes, blogging can help you to turn your passion into cash. Furthermore, blogging is one of the best ways to stay productive even when you are bored!

Follow these tips carefully:

1. Share what you know

Sharing information is what blogging is all about. If you have something to share with the world, blogging is one of the best platforms for you to simply share what you know.

Remember that everyone is an expert at something. Some people may not know about what you’re sharing, and they may need that information. When you are blogging, simply tell people about your passion. You will be able to naturally attract readers with similar passion as you.

You can use this cool business name generator to find a cool domain for your site. It can help you find an affordable domain that will be easy to brand!

2. Write only what you’re deeply interested in

You should write about what you know, not about what you don’t know. Writing about something that you enjoy will add more power to your writing. If you write about something that you know, what you write will naturally become persuasive.

When you’re able to persuade people with your writing, you can easily make some cash from your writing. Remember that the key to cash in with your blog is persuasive writing. It can be obtained only if you write about what you’re deeply interested in.

Example: If you are a blogger who want to get hired, start a blog on how bloggers can get hired!

3. Help your readers wholeheartedly

Aside from sharing information about your passion, blogging can become your channel to solve their problem. You can only make money with blogging if you’re able to help your readers to solve their problem.

After all, most products that are sold on the market are products that can help their buyers in some way. Help your readers wholeheartedly with your blog writing. Recommend products that you think can help your readers to solve their problem.

Example: There are no boring niches as long as your content is helpful and creative

4. Install advertisements only if you’ve made your blog popular

Although you can change your passion into cash with blogging, most people are quickly switching their gears once they start to make some money with their blog. They will start cluttering their blogs with advertisements and lots of pop-ups. You should avoid doing this.

You can monetize your blog through advertisements, but you can’t install those ads right away. The best timing to start monetizing your blog through advertisements is when you’ve made your blog popular.

What’s the measurement of popular blog? You can assume that your blog is popular enough when you see regular daily traffic of 1000 visitors or more.

You can also monetize your site by selling your services. Here’s an easy way to set a client booking form to collect leads.

5. Make yourself an expert

The last thing to make sure that you can cash in your passion with your blog is to make people notice that you’re an expert in your field. Through your passionate writing, you can make it.

People will regard you as an expert in blogging if you can solve their problem and share valuable information to them. Once you’ve build good reputation as an expert, it will become easier for you to make money with your blog. People will just start to call you and offer some gigs to you.

If you have a passion in any field, don’t suppress it. Start by creating a blog about the topic that you’re passionate about and follow the tips above. Within short amount of time, you will be able to turn your passion into cash with blogging.

Featured image by LUM3N