In an ever-changing marketing world, the word ‘Clout’ should mean something to a growing business. Clout means power and influence. As a business, having the power TO influence is what building an effective marketing campaign is all about. So how do you determine if your marketing campaign is doing what it should? You can begin by finding out your ‘Klout’ score.

What is Klout?

Klout, a company founded in 2009, analyzes your individual or company data from social media platforms in order to help you determine how much influence you have within your social networks. Klout assigns each user a score, between one and 100. It is proposed that the higher you score with Klout, the more influence you have in your social media presence.

Social Media Doesn’t Matter That Much, Does It?

Yes, it does. One of the most effective tools for growing a business is worth of mouth. In fact, it is one of the leading reasons consumers give for purchasing a product or investing in a service. Social media matters more than ever to a growing business, because it can give your business credibility, generate great reviews, and spread awareness.

I Don’t Have Time For Social Media?

Social media is about creating connections and building relationships. Creating an effective social media marketing plan can seem overwhelming with the addition of more and more social media outlets. So how do you begin to narrow down where to place your efforts?

Begin by working smarter, not harder. Centralize your social media marketing efforts in one place. There are a wide variety of programs that allow you to create a branding campaign for your social media outlets in one location. Some examples of this would be HootSuite, Sprout Social, or Shoutlet.

How Do I Know What To Say?

Creating effective and meaningful social content is a lot easier than you might realize. When creating social media content, go back to your ABC’s.

Use an AUTHENTIC voice. No one wants be blasted with your marketing prowess. They want to connect. Find your own voice and use it to build that connection.

Build your BRAND. Branding consistently across your social media platforms helps your followers to understand who they are interacting with.

COMMUNICATE CONSISTENTLY. Followers want to know what to expect. They want to feel acknowledged in their efforts to interact with you. Following up on comments and questions allows that engagement to happen. It doesn’t pay to build a platform for your business, and then ignore your customers.

Social media can be great for your marketing toolkit, engaging for your customers and cost-effective for your business. By using tools available to you to evaluate your effectiveness in using social media, you can begin to take some of the fear out of whether or not you are ‘doing it right.’ So how much ‘Klout’ does your business have?

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The days of readers and search engines tolerating poorly written, SEO-stuffed content are gone. When a reader happens across a website in their search for useful information, they are more than mildly annoyed to stumble across the page filled with keywords that are misplaced and inaccurately portray the website.

To the delight of users, search engines are getting the message and advancing the methods used to not only recognize keywords but to put them into a context. How cool is that? What does this mean to the Everyday Joe searching for information on snakes? It means that he will actually get results that have interpreted the website and analyzed that it does contain content on snakes, slimy, cold-blooded venomous slithering snakes.

It also means that the search engines are in the process of creating a system that allows the Everyday Copywriter to actually write quality content that is informative and helpful. The days of being focused on how to stuff the necessary keywords into copy that will get the highest ranking with the search engines are coming to an end. We’re not there quite yet, but we are headed in the right direction.

What has changed? The old idea was that you had to use a keyword in your content several times throughout your page in order to appear on a search engine results page (SERP), such as Google. Say you are writing an article on Diamondback Rattlesnakes. If someone was searching for information on Arizona baseball teams or military firearms, your page would show up in the results. The SERP’s formula was not able to distinguish between what the searcher wanted versus what your page was about. It was only going on the keyword.

The fascinating advances in SERP is that the formulas have the ability to recognize CONTENT and not just the keywords. By writing a clear, concise article that conveys the idea of a Diamondback Rattlesnake, through a sentence such as “slithering, venomous species capable of causing fatality,” the SERP is able to take the context of the sentence and return likely results. Perfect results? Not yet. But far more advanced than ever before.

So what does this mean to content writers? The beauty of this advancement is that as more quality content is written, SERP formulas will begin to recognize the content as a whole, and not by its individual parts (keywords). It means that while keywords still play a part in the game, they will no longer have to be the sole focus. You will be able to create content that will appeal to your intended audience. Your materials will be more accurately found. And you will be able to get back to creating quality content.

You’ve left the starting line in the marketing race, but halfway through you’ve begun to realize that you are lacking new and creative ideas. You’re losing steam and can’t even begin to see the finish line. Perhaps it is time to pass the baton to a content writer.

Hiring a content writer to create quality content for your blog, social media content, or website is a smart investment in order to enhance your marketing efforts. But there are a few steps to take to ensure that you are getting the most for your money. Establish Expectations

Establishing expectations for your writers will alleviate a lot of frustrations on your part by helping the writer understand exactly what message you are trying to convey. When you begin working with a content writer, there are a few questions to ask yourself.

What am I trying to achieve? Who is my audience?

What type of writing do I need? A blog post? Social media content? A newsletter? A brochure?

What tone are you looking for? Do you want your content to be professional and technical? Informal and friendly?

What point of view should the writer take? 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person approach?

Being clear about your expectations and needs in writing is an important part of the process. It allows the writer to review your requests as needed. It also gives you a point of reference if you should need to ask for edits.

Fresh Topics

You are able to steer the conversations with your readers with the topics you wish to cover. You can guide your writer by creating a list of topics that steer you towards your goals. This is a great way to produce fresh, quality content. Your writer is just that – a writer. You are the expert in your business.

Creating a list of topics is easy to do as you complete your day-to-day tasks. As you go through your day, make notes of the compliments that your employees receive, the unique stories that make you happy to go to work each day. What questions do you hear on a regular basis from your customers? Are there problems your customers are facing that you have answers to?

Allowing your writer a glimpse into the ’story’ of your business helps to enhance the quality of writing you receive. Share the details. Tell the stories. Share your knowledge.

Editing Etiquette

You’ve tried your best to lay it all out for the writer you are working with, but the content is just not what you were expecting. Rather than providing a whole new set of instructions, which would require the writer to create a whole new piece, discuss what areas you like and what just aren’t up to snuff. Remind the writer of the initial expectations and ask if they would like any clarification. This may best be done by a phone call rather than an e-mail, to make sure the writer has the ability to get all questions answered.

A quality writer is invested in their final product. Their goal is to please you and continue to work with you to achieve your goals. Writers also thrive on feedback. If you have edits or a review of their work, produce it in a timely fashion so that they know how to improve when working on future projects for you.

You’re in this race for the long haul, so utilize your newly-produced content to make sure your efforts go the distance. The written content you receive can be used in a variety of ways, from social media prompts, e-mail campaigns, and blog links. Share the information with your readers and create reasons for your customers to connect. Create a conversation around the content, allowing others to comment and share this great resource. Engage your followers, and they will spread the word with you.

Emails are a fantastic way to drive customers to your site, where they can find additional content that will (hopefully) engage them. In order for this to work properly, however, there are a few things to be taken into consideration. First and foremost, you never want to spam your customers. One email a day is plenty to keep them informed and entertained. Less is sometimes better, because no one wants to see their inbox filled with emails from the same person or company. That being said, there are numerous ways for you to bring people to your site from your email or to engage them directly from the email itself. Let’s take a look at just a few of these ways.

Ask Questions

People like to think they make a very real impact on the businesses they frequent. Allowing them to express a relevant opinion on something will target that. It can be a small question, a big question- any question will do just so long as you are engaging your readers. The most important thing is to ensure it is a question which will prompt people to answer it. This may sound redundant, but there are some topics people tend to be more opinionated on. Target these topics.

Address Concerns

Doubtlessly people will have question or concerns about your business. As you receive them, document your answers for your own records, and then share these answers with everyone on your mailing list. This will help to keep your target audience more informed, of course, but there is also a second reason this is so engaging: it makes people feel as though you care. All customers want to know a business cares about them, the customers. Prove that you do, and you will find more repeat customers.

Offer Information

Send out emails detailing what your business is doing now, what milestones you have done in the past, and what you are planning on doing in the future. Is there a big date coming up? Do you have an event planned which your customers should know about? Then tell them! Customers want to be well informed, especially in the modern world.

Feature Promotions

Running promotions is a great idea because all people enjoy a good sale or freebie. These promotions don’t help if you don’t market them, and email marketing is one of the best ways to do this. Good promotions to feature are sales, giveaways, and freebies. Promotions are not limited to this, however. If you have a limited edition item or if you have come out with a brand new line of products, you will want to feature these as well. The later two items tie in with both featuring promotions and offering information, making them twice as effective.

Link To Social Media & Websites

Somewhere in every single one of your articles should be easily identifiable links. These links should redirect your readers to your social media accounts and business blog or website should they desire more information. Be providing these links, readers are able to redirect to one of these multiple destinations on their own should they desire to. This gives them ample opportunity while leaving the final decision up to them as the consumers.

More is not always better, and content marketing is a key example of this. While content marketing can be a viable technique to help give your company that little boost it needs, there are a vast amount of companies which overuse it. You may be wondering how such a thing could be overused. It helps to rank you higher in the search engines, and bring more customers in from social media, right? Yes, it does, but there is a firm goal with this type of marketing which is often overlooked in the race for the top spot on search engines. Let’s take a look at the real reasons why more content marketing isn’t always better before we delve into what actually is.

Why More Content Marketing Isn’t Always Better

Businesses spend numerous hours, tons of effort, and lots of money on content marketing. They push the strategy so hard that they tend to forget what the original goal was- to engage the audience content marketing brings in. Optimizing keywords, ranking high in the search engines, and spending money on articles to bring in your audience isn’t going to help you one iota if you don’t have something on your site meant to engage the audience. So how are you supposed to engage them? Continue reading to find out.

How To Engage Your Audience

Engaging your audience is actually incredibly simple, which is why it is such a shame so many businesses forget it. Once you have brought people onto your site via content marketing, have something for them to do. Below is a comprehensive listing of just a few easy ideas.

Run giveaways. Rafflecopter is a good gadget to use, but you can use any method or gadget you like. Giveaways do not have to be huge. Plenty of people will enter them for the chance of winning a small item or bundle of small items.

Have polls for your audience to vote on. The best polls are those on the same topic as your business niche.

Ask for people’s opinion. This may include surveys, or short bits of information asking the readers to express their opinion on a given subject via comments.

Always use a call for action at the end of your articles. A call to action is written into the last paragraph of a blog post or article which prompts the reader to do something- anything.

Offer links to additional information. This can be information on your site, from an outside site, or could even be citing references used to write the article. Whichever way it goes, it gives the reader the opportunity to delve further into a topic pertaining to your given business niche.

That’s Not All

These are, of course, just a few general ideas which have been proven time and again to work effectively. The main idea is to come up with your own way of engaging your audience. Just remember that getting something out there is only the first step. In the majority of cases, you must then personally engage with your audience. You can not simply ask for people’s opinions and leave it at that. If the opinions are being posted via comments, you must try to respond to at least a portion of them. Responding to all people can be virtually impossible, but giving their comment a like allows them to feel as though you have actually read what they had to say. On blog sites, responding to at least a quarter to half of all commenters is a good idea. On social media sites, responding to more is necessary. Just remember that the ultimate goal of content marketing is to engage your audience, and conversing with them will keep them engaged, thus keeping your business at the forefront of their minds.

Black Friday is the biggest day of the year for many businesses, whether they are online or offline. Millions of people are out searching for deals that will fulfill their holiday shopping lists. They want to buy, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily buy from you. In order to bring in the millions you must have a solid Black Friday Marketing plan in place. Today we are going to show you how to do just that in a few easy steps.

Step One: Know Your Customers

The very first thing you must do is know who you are marketing towards. Who does your target audience consist of and what is trending for them right now? Ensure you do an adequate amount of research on this because knowing your target audience is the number one most important thing to your marketing campaign. Aiming your marketing efforts towards people who will have no reason to buy what you are selling is going to instantly fall flat.

Keywords are important because they drive relevant people to your site through the search engines. Create a list of these all-important words once you have identified your target audience. Begin with two or three general keywords, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and sales. Add some keywords which are relevant to your business niche. Lastly, include keywords tailored towards your specific promotions.

Step Two: Know What You Want To Do Take time to pour over as much research material as possible. If applicable, look over what your company has done in the past and evaluate what did or did not work during those previous campaigns. Look at information on other company’s Black Friday marketing campaigns. Identify what did or did not work for them as well. Once you have done this, take a look at trending keywords, sales trends, and what the top sites on the search engines have been doing.

Although you should take cues from what has or has not worked for your company and others, this does not mean that you should use the exact same marketing campaigns others have used. Instead, you should avoid marketing strategies which have utterly failed, and use those which have succeeded as ground work. Simply put, there are things which work and things which do not, but originality always increases your chances of a successful campaign. No person wants to see the same type of thing over and over again.

Step Three: Create Your Website Chances are high you already have a website built and running. That does not mean you can skip this step, however. You will still need to redesign it to better suit (and advertise) your marketing campaign. Remember your website is the base of operations for your entire marketing campaign, and it should reflect this. Here are a few quick, useful tips on designing your website for Black Friday:

Ensure it is attractive and will appeal to your target audience. (For example, if you are selling something pertaining to men, you would not make your website pink. The design should be relevant to your target audience.)

All information should be easy to find and understand.

Customers should be able to easily identify what items are discounted for Black Friday. Creating a custom section for these discounted items is ideal.

If you are running any freebies or giveaways during this big sale day you should highlight them on the front page of your website.

Your website should allow for interaction. Polls, freebies, giveaways, contests, rewards, forums, and blog posts are all fantastic ways for customers to interact on your site.

Step Four: Become Active On Social Media Social media allows for a virtual word of mouth which can and will spread. It may not spread quickly, but if you focus enough time and energy on your efforts it will eventually spread to a considerable amount of people. Remember social media is all about sharing, expanding your reach, and engaging your customers. These things don’t always just naturally happen, but there are things you can do to ensure it does.

Sharing

Offer an incentive for people sharing a promotional...

When the big search engines first started ranking articles the algorithms were actually much simpler. They looked simply at the keywords peppered throughout the article. Let’s say, for example, that one of your keywords is ‘pirate.’ The search engine would simply filter it under a bunch of other articles containing the keyword without reference as to what pirates you are referring to. It could be historical pirates, pirate costumes, pirate rock, or pirate television series. All of these things would be lumped together under one enormous search, which made it extremely difficult to rank high in the search results. A second problem presents itself here. Not only was it harder to rank high in the search results, but the content being presented was of much less quality because of extensive keyword usage. With the keyword ‘pirate’ being used between two and three times per paragraph, the content suffered.

For this reason, other articles had to be written for actually readability, or your readers would get frustrated and go elsewhere. All in all, it was a rather confusing, difficult situation to find yourself in. So how has it progressed until today?

The Big Difference

Today the search engines rely less on an individual keyword, and more on the article as a whole. Keywords still hold a bit of importance because they will help you register on a given search, but they are not the only thing factored into the equation. Let’s take a look at our example keyword ‘pirate.’ If your site is based on pirate rock, then other words contained within your article would be taken into consideration. Words like ‘rock,’ ‘music,’ ‘show,’ and ‘band’ will help the search engines to identify what that article is actually about.

Why This Works Better

The main reason why this updated algorithm works better is that all content may be written for readability with a light emphasis on keywords. Keywords can simply be included where they naturally fit into the article instead of inserting them a large amount of times. This increases the quality of articles found around the web, and leaves your readers much less frustrated. In addition to this, it makes your work a bit simpler. No longer must you distinguish between reader friendly and search engine friendly articles. Ranking higher on individual searches is also a little easier since these searches are more exclusive and relevant.

Tips To Making This New Algorithm Work Best For You

Although the new algorithm used by search engines is better, it also means taking a look at your current marketing techniques and tweaking them. You shouldn’t have to change your approach to SEO too much, but it will have to be slightly altered to best work with the new way search engines process data. Here is a short list of tips to help enable you to do this:

Write all of your content to basically be reader friendly versus search engine friendly.

Limit your use of an individual keyword to no more than three or four times per article.

Ensure your piece is well-crafted to contain helpful words which will allow the search engines to best assess the actual topic of your article.

Post regularly. Posting regularly is a big factor in how your site does in general. You should be posting at least once a week to maintain a decent spot. Posting once a a day or every other day is even better.

If you look at your competitors as something to be feared and avoided you’re living in the dark age. These days offer us plenty of ways to make the most out of these competitors. No longer should they be avoided. Embrace them instead! Not sure what we’re talking about? That’s okay, because today we are going to show you how you can use your competitors to help advance your own business- and without crushing anyone else on your rise up.

Interacting

If your competitor has a blog, follow it. Comment on the articles they write. Comment on social media accounts, and respond to tweets. It may seem contradictory but doing this will put you in front of your competitors audience. That isn’t all either. This will also help you build a solid online, working relationship with these competitive businesses which will help you to move forward with our other suggestions.

Join Together

If you can’t beat them, join them. Everyone has heard that old saying. Interestingly enough it proves true for our intents and purposes here today. Once you have begun to develop an online relationship with your competition through interaction you may want to try setting up a joint venture. We aren’t talking about something huge like a new company, but rather small things which will merge the two distinct audiences together. Here are a few ideas:

Run a sale spanning both businesses and websites.

Create a workshop together where your business covers one topic and their business covers another.

Run a mutual online giveaway boasting items from both stores. If you use Rafflecopter there are Facebook like and Twitter follow options which can help both businesses increase their reach.

See if another successful business is interested in becoming affiliates. This means you are able to advertise on their site, and vice versa. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Guest blog on their site and allow them to write a guest blog for yours in return.

Offer A Helping Hand

There are several ways you can help your competition while helping yourself at the exact same time. If you think about it you will see it is possibly the smartest thing you could do as far as your marketing efforts. You don’t appear to be getting anything in return, but the truth is that every nice thing you do for another company will end up benefiting you in some small way. A prime example is interviewing the owner of a competitive company for your blog site. Chances are high the company will promote the piece, which gets your own business out in front of their customers. Another idea may be to offer your competitor a spot in a promotion or business write up you are doing for the same exact reason. A little bit of time and effort should give you unique ways to offer a helping hand. Get creative and you sure are to reap the benefits.