Writing on the Web from Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

4 Steps to Creating Massive Online Visibility

Can your ideal clients easily find you when they go online to search for solutions to their challenges? Are you hard to find? Or do people tell you "You're everywhere on the Web!"

It's not difficult to create massive visibility on the Internet. It's free or low-fee. It's relatively easy, few tech skills required. (I know what I'm talking about cuz I'm a recovering techno-twit who was unheard of less than 4 years ago.)

I'm not a genius or a smooth-talking networking virtuoso. I haven't had large sums of cash to spend, nor do I understand how things work on the Web. Blogs, social sites, email marketing, autoresponders and digital downloads all work without me knowing how.

True, I did team up with a great partner (Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad) who's savvy and sometimes has to explain things to me ;-). But here're the things we do that many of our peers don't bother doing (or at least not consistently):

How to Master Storytelling for Better Selling

Stories sell. It's not really a secret. Read the best sales and landing pages and you'll be captured by personal stories. Ask any of the online copywriting gurus and they will tell you: Stories sell.

Our brains are hardwired to be receptive to stories. Once engaged, we find ways to relate, to trust, to enjoy the experience the storyteller is sharing with us. And it's quite easy to sell something after that.

As a psychologist, I am tempted to explain the neural background for all this, but that's not the story I want to share here with you today. This post will be short, because I'm going to simply tell you about a master of storytelling who will reveal how to use stories for selling. You can listen and learn from him for free this Thursday.

Craig Valentine is teaching these important concepts. Craig is the 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking and 3-time Mid-Atlantic Salesperson of the Year for Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. He knows a few things about storytelling and selling. Here are the details:

When:  Date: September 25, 2008  Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST (10:00 am – 11:00 am Pacific)

Writing Survey Questions: 3 Things to Ask

You need to survey your readers to find out what they want, what they need, and what their biggest challenges are. This is crucial information you need to know before promoting any event or teleseminar or informational product.

When we promoted our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program, we used a survey to help us define what people wanted to learn the most when it comes to marketing their business online. We wanted to keep the survey short so people didn't have to spend time filling out irrelevant information. We included 3 items:

1. One broad question with 10 choices where they were asked to rate degree of severity on a scale
2. One open ended question where they could write in anything they chose
3. One demographic question to define the number of years using Internet marketing

Writing survey questions can be tricky. There's a reason most graduate schools require you to take a year of statistics. Unless you understand the pitfalls of surveys, you risk getting answers that tell you nothing. Keep it simple and make your questions as clear and neutral as possible.

Get Content, Get Customers - Get this book!

I just got my copy of Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett's content marketing book in the mail, and I'm happy as a pig!

Get Content, Get Customers is written exclusively to address a new style of marketing with content that is revolutionizing the way big and small companies attract clients on and off line.

This book has as it's tag line: How to use content marketing to deliver relevant, valuable, and compelling information that turns prospects into buyers.

It is thanks to Pulizzi and Barrett that I embarked on re-purposing this blog. Finally I had a name for the kind of marketing I was helping our clients do: market themselves by providing useful and unique content to a targeted audience.

I realized I wasn't just writing about ezines or blog writing. The big picture is content marketing, how to use content to attract customers and grow business.

Here are a few choice morsels from the book:

Video Promo Clips: Content Marketing Comes Alive

People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Video clips will shortcut the process of connecting with people quickly. Viewers can more easily decide if they like and trust you when they can see and hear you.

How do you write a script for a video clip to promote a program or event? Posting video clips has become popular and easy to do. This is another promotional step you must include in order to boost your sales.

Video promotional clips are part of the various writing tasks necessary for making money online. It doesn't matter if you're presenting a teleseminar, publishing a book, or promoting a coaching or consulting program. You've got to get the word out to as many potential participants in many different ways, on Web landing pages, blog posts, email messages, ezines, and audio and video.

Marketing with content isn't only about writing text. If you're not using video yet, It's fairly easy to get a Flip video camera and get started without any tech skills or expensive equipment. But be sure to write out a short script before recording so you don't forget any essential details.

In the example we're writing about here, Denise and I and Kathleen Gage promoted a free teleseminar on our blogs through posting a video each day, outlining each of The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. Kathleen and I each wrote out a script for these, presenting 5 Traps and 5 Truths, and then the information for registering. Each script was 2-3 minutes long. Here is the outline we used:

Email Marketing Messages: How to Promote a Program

How do you write great email marketing messages to promote an event or program? After your landing page is up, with your well-crafted sales copy, you must drive people to that page with email messages. This is the next writing task you'll need to master if you want to successfully promote a program.

In this series of posts, we're using our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program as example. We sent out several email messages during the month prior to the event, most of them during the week before.

Email marketing messages are challenging. Everybody gets too much email, and each time you broadcast you get people who unsubscribe because they aren't interested or are annoyed. But you must send out enough messages to remind people to sign up, especially at the last minute. Otherwise you're leaving money on the table. It's a balancing act of risking so many unsubscribe requests and so many last minute registrations.

You need your email recipients to:

1. Open and read your message
2. Discover something important they can benefit from
3. Convince them they need to learn more about this
4. Trigger their desire to click over to the sales page to read details and register
5. Realize the some sort of urgency so they won't put it off and forget to take action

The most important thing you can do is to write naturally and with sincerity. If you come across as promotional, readers' BS antennae will get triggered. The delete finger goes into automatic action when you use hype and fluff.

10 Steps to Writing Sales Copy for a Free Telecall

When staging a major online teleseminar program, quite often we use a free preview telecall to generate interest. We make the subject of this call compelling in order to draw in as many people as possible to the free call. (Recently we presented The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business - And How to Avoid Costly Mistakes.)

The free preview call is not a marketing call, although we do warn them we will tell them about the project we have coming up. Nobody wants to be on a telecall for an hour to hear you market a program.

But people do want to learn how to save time, money and energy. So we deliver plenty of free information that people can use right away in their business. Then we tell them if they need or want to know more how they can access more with the paid teleseminar.

Even when a call is free, you still have to write marketing materials and promote it. In today's busy world, people are cautious about signing up for even free things, because they're afraid of too many emails.

So you must write landing page sales copy that's persuasive and compelling to get people to register for the free preview call.

Writing this sales copy is similar to the one for the paid project, but a little different. It's much shorter for one thing. Here are the steps we took to write sales copy for this free preview call:

12 Steps to Write Your Online Sales Copy

When you're going to launch a money-making program on the 'Net, the first step is to write your sales copy. Yesterday I listed 8 writing tasks necessary for an online campaign:

1. Sales copy
2. Email marketing messages
3. Thank you pages and thank you autoresponders
4. Survey questions & survey results report
5. Press releases
6. Video tips
7. Blog posts
8. Updates posted to social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, etc.

Each task is different, requiring you research and write different elements. However, all of them must be written to grab the attention of your targeted audience of readers and persuade them to take action.

In the case I'm using as an example, our Law of Action 2.0 program, here are the 12 steps I went through to compose the copy for the sales page at www.actandattract.com:

8 Writing Steps Yield $18,000 in a Month

What are the writing tasks involved in order to promote a major teleseminar program on the Internet? Obviously, you have to write a sales or landing page. But that's only one part of it. There's so much more.

Recently Denise and I along with colleague Kathleen Gage promoted a 4-week teleseminar called The Law of Action 2.0: Attract Clients and Build a Money-Making Business on the 'Net. We started by promoting a free teleseminar called The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. We got about 1,000 people to register for the call.

From that, we promoted the paid program, registering 94 participants and netted $18,000. The program is delivered in four 90-minute sessions and includes a private Facebook group, learning guides and many resources.

But it would be a gross exaggeration to say we're earning $3,000/hour with the 6 hour program, although some Internet marketers would certainly use that calculation as bragging rights.

The truth is we spent considerable time writing the promotional materials and distributing our content in various forms all over the Internet long before the free program on June 24.

Denise is outlining all the promotional steps we did over on BizTips Blog this week. As a companion piece, I'm writing on this blog a series of posts to show you every piece of content marketing that was involved in the success of this program.

Better Business Blogging: Get a personal trainer and buff up your blog

Every Monday I meet Pablo Healing in the gym at our club for an hour of intense, grueling, sweaty workout. Yes, that’s really his name… and even though working out with Pablo can hurt, in an odd way, it’s healing and I look forward to it!

Not that I can’t workout without him. I do. Just not as well by myself. Why? Because, like any human, I make excuses, and when it starts to hurt, I back off.

Pablo is a trainer who doesn’t allow me to ‘back off,’ because he knows humans. He knows we are capable of a lot more than we think.

Truth is, I’ve never been fitter; it’s improved my stamina on the tennis courts as well as my League match scores. Working with a personal trainer works incredibly well, on many levels – physically, mentally and spiritually.

Have you considered a personal trainer for your business blog? Can you imagine what you could achieve with The Blog Squad there along-side you as you get your blog in optimal shape?