Many small businesses may not be aware of the free online promotional tools that Google offers.

To take advantage of these, go to business.google.com. You’ll need to register for a free Google My Business account and claim your business.

Once you do, you’ll get a free business profile where you can list essential information about your business, including a description, a list of products and services, hours of operation and more.

In fact, you can choose to get calls and messages through your profile, as well as create regular posts to promote your business, just like you would on Facebook or other social channels.

After you have been using Google My Business awhile, you’ll even get statistics on how many website clicks you get, phone calls, direction requests and bookings if you have them enabled.

Finally, another cool feature is a free marketing kit, available at https://marketingkit.withgoogle.com. You can choose from a few design options, then order a set of free promotional stickers or download printable and sharable items including posters, a table-tent design and social post graphics. 

The lowly RSS feed has been around a long time. More than 20 years to be exact.

Originally dubbed RDF Site Summary—the RDF stood for Resource Description Framework, it was introduced in March 1999. It evolved into RSS, which now stands for either Rich Site Summary or my preference, Really Simple Syndication.

It’s essentially a geeky way for websites to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, or episodes of audio and video series like this very podcast you’re listening to. When publishers of content use RSS feeds, they allow anyone with an RSS reader to subscribe to their feed, so whenever they publish someone new it will automatically show up.

Forget the techno-speak and just think of it as the ability to create your own virtual newspaper or magazine. You can literally subscribe to as many of these feeds as you want to, depending on your appetite for content.

I blame Google for a big decline in the popularity of RSS, when they killed off their free Google Reader software in 2013. I guess they thought RSS wasn’t going to be around much longer, and wasn’t worth supporting.

Personally, I adopted another product called Feedly and I’ve been happy with it ever since. I use their paid version which is $5 a month which I find well worth it. There are a bunch of other alternatives, such as one that I also use sometimes called Panda at usepanda.com.

I subscribe to many business publications and blogs. I benefit from keeping up with relevant news and articles related to marketing, as well as topics specific to some of the industries my marketing clients serve. Feedly makes it easy to quickly scan through dozens of feeds. I do this regularly to bookmark useful headlines to read later or share on social media.

I think most people in business can benefit from curating information pertinent to their role. RSS feeds are still a very effective way to do this, even if the technology seems a little dated.

I have been using a new online tool that I love for content creation. It’s called Frase (at https://www.frase.io). The system uses Artificial Intelligence with dramatic and useful results.

Frase excels in four specific ways to help marketers create better content.

The first feature is called Content Briefs. When you search for a keyword phrase, Frase will create a Content Brief which is essentially a very detailed overview that summarizes the results of that query from the top 20 search results. Each Content Brief lists the top sources for the keyword, along with related topics, summaries of each topic, key statistics that are mentioned and links. It’s like having your own personal research assistant who will do much of the heavy-lifting on researching a topic for you.

The second feature in Frase is Content Optimization. You start by pasting a link to either an article you have written or one from someone else. Frase will analyze it and give you precise information on how to modify the article to better rank on Google. Of course, if you are analyzing someone else’s article, you will want to use the initial article as a starting point only—not to merely modify what they wrote—which could get you in trouble—but to expand on the topic. 

The third feature is Media Monitoring. This allows you to get an up-to-date stream of blog posts and news articles for topics that you are interested in. Frase will suggest publishers to follow or you can add your own.

The fourth feature is Content Curation. With this feature, you can quickly use Frase to curate and compile information that can then be shared through an email newsletter or on your website. Current direct integrations include Wordpress, Mailchimp, Hubspot and a few others. Or you can copy and paste curated documents, create a link to share or export a PDF.

I encourage you to check out Frase at frase.io and let me know what you think.

I was pleased to be interviewed in the July issue of Hearth and Home magazine, in an article by Mark Brock titled, “Enemy to Frenemy to Friend.” The piece is all about the trend of specialty retailers to use advanced digital marketing more and more.

A quick summary is that for many years, the Internet and all things digital were seen by specialty retailers as “the enemy.”

While online merchants continue to be primary competition for specialty retailers, a fundamental shift has occurred and is accelerating. Retailers are becoming more adept at using digital marketing—from websites and social media to search and email blasts—to connect with their customers and encourage them to come into the showroom.

Websites are morphing from brochure-ware to interactive sites that serve as the hub of digital marketing programs, providing a showroom experience online and a landing page for search while creating personality, credibility, and brand. Retailers are increasingly active on social media, particularly Facebook, because of its reach and targeting capabilities, and Instagram because of its emphasis on visual and lifestyle content and its growing popularity.

https://www.hearthandhome.com/magazine/2019-06-14/enemy_to_frenemy_to_friend.html

I ghostwrote a blog post for a sales training organization this week. Much of the post focused on the best practice of personalizing any messaging you send to prospective buyers.

It should go without saying that personalization is a no-brainer, but surprisingly most people don’t see it as more than just using the person’s name.

With all the tools at our disposal now, it is the height of laziness to not take the time to look for meaningful ways to connect with someone else on a personal level. Surely you can find something of interest that will resonate with the person.

If not, be advised that your cold or lukewarm outreach attempts will likely fail. I know they do with me. I can’t tell you how many times I get pitched from people who obviously haven’t taken even five minutes to learn something about me or confirm that I’m even a good prospect for them.

So much of our lives now are lived digitally.

We’re reading emails. We’re streaming videos. We’re consuming social media. We’re surfing Web pages. We’re talking to our stoic companion Alexa, asking what the weather is like outside and who won the game.

All that is great—the technology I mean. We have so much at our fingertips. It can be empowering.

But.

But then you look up and remember there’s an actual world out here. There’s someone sitting across from you at the table, staring at her own device. You suddenly wish you were making more eye contact. That you weren’t worried about taking a selfie to preserve the moment.

There’s rain pattering on the window. You hear a clock ticking. You take in a breath and exhale. And again. Inhale. Exhale.

A sleeping dog sighs and shifts in place. A bird chirps.

You want to move. To get outside and feel the sun and hear the quiet murmuring of your heart beating.

You breathe in again and recall all the smells and tastes of summer from your youth—lotion on your skin, a charred hamburger, cotton candy, Coca-Cola, watermelon.

You feel the tug to pick up your phone and write these thoughts down. But you stop, and for a few moments disconnect and become conscious of yourself again, here, breathing, living in a world far vastly greater than the sum of zeroes and ones, not projected from screens but seen in all its natural vibrant glory.

I have been experimenting with a new online tool called Frase for content creation and curation.

I'm impressed with its capabilities. I has a number of features that let you quickly compile summaries of keyword-based topics that include the top sources found, how many words the top indexed posts contained, a quick summary of articles and more. It's a great way to create content briefs or curate top articles that can be shared on social media.

There are a number of integrations that make it easy for example to use Frase to curate the contents for an email newsletter then publish to Mailchimp or create a blog post and post it to WordPress.

Videos posted to social media sites continue to increase in popularity. And among the myriad reasons for posting more videos is simply to get more eyeballs. According to one study by Socialbakers, video posts have 135% higher organic reach than regular photo posts.

Facebook alone generates over 8 billion video views per day, with Facebook users watching more than 100 million hours of video in their news feeds daily.

But one of the key issues with videos is that many people watch them with their sound turned off, for various reasons. It’s most likely because they are watching them at work, or someplace like in bed where they don’t want to disturb others in the room.

In fact,  Facebook determined that 85% of video on the network is watched without sound.

So if you’re posting videos online, you need to consider whether people will understand what’s being said with no sound. Chances are slim that they will.

The solution is pretty simple, actually. And that is to add video captions.

One of the best ways I’ve found to do video captions is using a website called Quicc. 

In addition to getting a video file with words displayed on the screen that you can upload to Facebook, YouTube or wherever, Quicc also provides an SRT file. This is basically a specific type of plain text file that includes a timestamped version of the transcription. SRT files can be added to sites like YouTube and LinkedIn to provide for additional SEO benefits—meaning the full text of the video can be indexed and searched.

Check out Quicc at https://quicc.io. There’s a free version that let’s you caption up to two minutes of video a month, and several premium versions.