Writing on the Web from Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Delivery: Gated or Not Gated?

Is your content gated or not? This is a new term for me, but it captures this marketing tactic:

When you offer an ebook, audio file, white paper or special report off your site, it's "gated" if you require a reader's email address. It's not gated if you allow digital downloads freely without any exchange of information.

This is stirring up a big discussion on blogs such as David Meerman Scott's Web Ink Now, Joe Pulizzi's Junta 42, and Newt Barret's Content Marketing Today.

Here's an example of gated: The Blog Squad's free ebook Better Business Blogging. It's an free give-away with plenty of information on how to use a blog for business results. We've used it for a while now as a lead-generator.

5 (More) Reasons an Ebook is a Must for Content Marketing

Ebooks are nothing new. Do you have one? Are you offering a free ebook on your site? You should. I'm in the process of setting up a brand new site for one of my businesses, and I'm writing an ebook this weekend. It's not that difficult and it should be one of your main lead generators on any site.

Newt Barrett on Content Marketing Today just posted Five Reasons an e-Book Should Be a Core Component Of Your Content Marketing Strategy:

1. You can quickly, compellingly, visually, and inexpensively establish thought leadership with an e-book that provides relevant information on the toughest challenges your customers face.
2. Offering a free e-book, is a wonderful incentive to entice your prospects to begin in their engagement with you.  
3. E-books, in the universally acceptable PDF format, are easy to pass along from one prospect to another, giving you potentially infinite reach. 
4. If you need help in designing your e-book and in generating the content, you can find talented designers and freelance writers easily. 
5. If your budget is very limited, you can create your own e-book by starting with PowerPoint and then transforming the PowerPoint files into PDF files.

 Here's why I can't stress this form of content marketing enough:

List Building & Segmenting with Autoresponders

Let's suppose you want to build a list of people interested in one part of your business related to a product you sell or a service you provide. Offer a 7 part mini-course or tutorial on how to accomplish a certain task.

The reason to do this is obvious: you shouldn't be overtly marketing a product on your blog that is designed to inform and build relationships to a broader audience.

You make an offer on your blog or in your ezine: those people interested in learning more about how to do "XYZ" can go to a landing page, register their email address and get the 7 step tutorial.

Deliver the tutorial over the span of a week via autoresponder. Make it informational and helpful, including the benefits of your own product or services related to the task.

At some point in the tutorial you’ll want to start offering a call to action to actually buy the product or contact you.

After the tutorial is over, follow-up with related content that allows you to repeat the call to action. The key is to continue to offer value combined with your offer. Don't send too many email messages, however, be respectful of people's time and tolerance for promotional material.

To see an example of how I wrote a series of autoresponders, go here and sign up for a 7 part series on writing successful ezines.

To learn and use autoresponders, I recommend KickStartCart.

Online Marketing: 6 Steps

This week I posted a series of blog posts: 6 Steps for Successful Online Marketing for Your Business. While it is impossible to be comprehensive in 6 steps, I believe I cover many of the essential skills and tools you need to thrive online, no matter your profession.

Two of the posts were published here and here, because they relate to writing; the others were on our sister blog that focuses on Internet marketing, www.BizTipsBlog.com. The final post, Step 6, is important because I talk about the right tools for each step.

Here's an excerpt of those:

Remember, for online success you have to: attract, give, convince, compel, sell, and up-sell. And you need to use the right tools for each job, as in:

Step 1, to attract, you need a website, a blog, and/or a landing page. You need bait (keywords) everywhere in the cyber pond: articles, press releases, podcasts, blog posts, web pages, archived newsletters, etc.

Step 2, to give, you need a database management system that helps you build a list of prospects, deliver digital downloads, segment your lists by interests, and follow-up with email confirmation and autoresponder messages. For us there is only one tool that does this job, and that is KickStartCart.com.

Email By the Num8ers: Chris Baggot Connects the Dots

Chris Baggott's new book Email Marketing by the Numb8ers is really good. I say that not because I contributed to chapters 2 and 7, but because you could learn a lot about how to use email to take your marketing to the next level.

We all get such narrow perspectives entrenched in our own businesses. It's natural to not see the obvious. Chris is very knowledgeable about how email works for businesses (he's a founder of ExactTarget.com).

For his book he invited other email marketing experts to contribute articles. So this gives you perspectives on how other businesses besides your own are using email. Things you might not think of.

I'm still reading it so I'll save some examples for later, but the point here is that if you struggle with your ezine or email marketing campaigns, hunker down for a weekend and learn from Chris' book. It's available here on Amazon.

Audio Articles: Great Idea for Greater Online Reach

Today Denise and I interviewed Debra Simpson, MagicInWords.com about podcasts and other media to reach and pull visitors to your online business. (I'll post notes about our Blogging and Beyond radio show on podcasting and multi-media marketing over on our Build a Better Blog site.)

One idea I hadn't heard of before is to post audio articles and audio tips on your website and blog. Take an article you've written for your ezine or for article directory syndication, and revise it for recording purposes. A 500-700 word article should translate to a 3-5 minute mp3 file.

Why would you want to do this? Because there are 63 million owners of mp3 players in the world, who want to download files and listen to them in the car and in the gym.

Now, I'm not a big fan of listening to podcasts on the treadmill - I need a little rock n roll to motivate my feet! My favorite is Jock Jams - those tunes really get me going!

I am, however, a big fan of getting the maximum juice out of everything I write. And just because I love to write and read my information, doesn't mean I shouldn't give other options to readers. Some people just prefer to listen to information. Give visitors to your site a choice.

Audio files can be serialized, so that visitors come back to your site for tip #2, etc. A special report or article can be recorded and given away as a bonus for signing up for your ezine.

It is becoming clear that even writers must be prepared for the new interactive Web, what the geeks call Web 2.0, and be able to record information in audio and video files when possible. It that too much to ask of us writers? I think not. After all, 10 years ago, hardly anyone was using email, and we all learned how to do that, didn't we?

For more tips on audio and creating informational products, visit Debra's site, www.MagicinWords.com. 

Recipe for an Ezine: Offer Incentives for Signing Up for Your Ezine

Ingredient #7: Attracting Subscribers

Getting people to sign up for your ezine can be challenging in today’s world of overcrowded inboxes and information overload. Most savvy professionals offer a reward (called an "ethical bribe!") to readers in exchange for permission to email them.

Here are several incentives that work for increasing sign ups:

1. A report, article, or white paper with valuable information readers can’t get elsewhere
2. Insider secrets or tips to professional resources
3. Exclusive results from a survey or poll
4. Participation in a drawing with valuable prizes, such as an iPod pre-loaded with your exclusive content
5. Entry in a contest, with free tuition or registration to a seminar or teleconference to the winners

CAN-SPAM Compliance, a Review

What You Need to Know:  CAN-SPAM Laws
©2007 by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad™

Anyone doing business online and using email for marketing needs to know about the CAN-SPAM laws.

Smart online marketers use “permission” marketing: you invite potential customers to join your email list, and offer a newsletter, a special report, or a sequential series of messages to form an e-course. The recipient “opts-in” to the list by replying to an invitation and subscribing. By "opting in", your subscriber is telling you it's OK to send email.  They've given you permission and your email messages are not considered spam.

But most people don’t really understand what constitutes spam. If you're in business for any length of time on the Internet, you may encounter false accusations of spam simply because people forget they opted in receive your message. To many people spam is simply an unwanted message.

This can cause problems for you with your email service provider. You should be able to prove that you haven’t been sending unsolicited email. Your proof lies with the list management system you use that tracks invitations and opt in responses.

Here’s what you need to know about the law is so you can rest assured that you aren’t breaking it.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

Simply put, here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

• It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

• It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.  Subject and content must match.

• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or an automated way for your subscriber to opt out. You must honor the requests.  When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address.

• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

More Blog Subscribers: How to Get 'Em

I may as well just camp out over on the Copyblogger site and just copy and paste Brian Clark's posts every morning. He does such a great job of keeping us posted on what we need to know to write better web content and deliver it well. If you're not a subscriber yet, go there now and sign up...

Here's Brian's list of 10 ways to get more subscribers to your blog:

1. Make it easy and obvious
2. Be laser focused
3. Offer a bribe
4. Use viral ebooks

Blog Traffic: How to Double Yours

We did it again this week: the number of visitors to this blog maintained the boost in traffic established two weeks ago, double what it was before. On November 7, I wrote a post in which I guessed at the things I did differently that might have caused the sudden increase in readers.

My main guess was that the increase in frequency of posts to almost daily was the big difference. Yaro Starak, of the Blog Traffic School blog, wrote a nice summary of my post, of all the other factors that might have contributed and you can read his post here.

So this week I posted here every day, except Sunday when I went to the beach instead. My guess is that the more you post, the more people get in the habit of reading your blog, the more they either sign up to get updates, or they bookmark your site. Of course this assumes that you write something interesting.

Oh dear... I feel the pressure to perform and deliver. Maybe I'll go to the beach. Nah, I've got a couple of more things to write still. Thanks for stopping by.

Tell me what you've noticed about your own traffic. Does it increase the weeks you've been writing more?