How to Create Awesome Content

You would want to create amazing content that humanizes your brand. You need content that gets customers to convert. But let’s be real: You don’t have time to maintain a blog, and keep your business running at the same time!

There are so many wonderful things about the digital age in which we live, and we’re lucky to have an ever-growing abundance of information at our fingertips.

Social media is a great way to attract attention. But that doesn’t mean you can just throw your links out there and people will come flocking. If you want your content to succeed on the major social media networks, you must consider whom you are sharing it with. Then, you can write the perfect copy and produce the best content and optimize it for each social network to lure them in.

Here are some tips for how you can create amazing content that defines you:

Integrate your work and play
Creating content is a lot more fun when you can truly be yourself. When you’re yourself, you can tell stories. And when you tell stories, your content marketing is holistic and comes alive.
Your stories are your strengths. When you integrate your work and play, you open the gates to creating amazing content for your business. It gives you more creativity to create content. And creativity is the best (and sometimes only) way to stand out.

Create conversations
Markets are conversations. This concept isn’t new. But so many businesses forget its value. Creating conversations is extremely important. You need to create conversations with your customers to create amazing content. Your content needs to cause some type of reaction. And when you can create conversations that cause reactions you can.

Have fun with your content
Stop waiting on the traditional systems of yesterday to save you. The tools are in front of you to create your own platform and pave your own path.
When you have fun with what you’re creating, your culture comes alive. And bonus -sales happen more naturally.
Show off your amazing personality by creating fun, engaging content. It shows you’re a leader in your industry. And leaders make an impact with their business (and make more money!)

Focus on one type of content. And do it. Do it well.
Your blog is one of the most important channels for your content marketing efforts. If you want to start creating content, but you’re not sure where to start, blog is your answer.
A blog is the cornerstone for your business. And when you create written content, it can exist on the Internet forever, and get picked up by Google. And who doesn’t want to be on Google?

Opt Out of Updating Old Content; Make New Posts Instead
If you’re blogging about a developing story or continuing topic, create a new post rather than updating the old page. Your audience do not want to read articles and posts that they already have. Redundancy is always a big NO.

Use Online Data to Discover Trends
Twitter provides great real-time data about what topics are trending and what people are buzzing about, and Google Trends gives insight into the hot button topics people are searching for. Creating content with this online data in mind will keep you in the loop and allows you to optimize your content for those trending search terms.

Evaluate your Top Content
Testing allows you to discover what is working and what is not in your advertisements. Evaluating your top content is the same idea. Examine your top-ranking pieces and try to see why those posts did so well. Did you include several images? Was it a timely news piece? Did you include a great offer?

Make it Easy to Share
Imbed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ buttons on your content pages so that visitors can easily share them via social networks. We’re all far too busy and/or lazy to copy and paste.

Use Dynamic Content and Internal Links
Increasing on-site discovery is important in boosting page views and time on site. You can suggest relevant topics to visitors through the use of dynamic content (most shared topics, most viewed topics, etc.). Internal links and relevant anchor text also make it easy for your visitors to discover additional content and navigate seamlessly throughout your site.

Keep Your Ideal Audience in Mind
Always create great content with your ideal customers in mind—will this information be valuable to them? If not, how can you craft the information so that it will interest them? If you use personas in your marketing efforts, consider the various personas, their individual interests, and unique needs.

As always, content is king. Your pieces won’t ever get too much attention if they don’t offer valuable information that interests people. However, when you’re creating great content that just doesn’t seem to rank, these tips might be just the boost you need to get your content noticed.

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Social Media Tools That Help Marketers Save Time

Too many tweets, too little time! Facebook, or Google + or the analytics dashboard? Oh, the report is still pending!

Can you connect to any of these sentences? If you did, then this blog post is just for you.

Being savvy business managers and owners, we are always on the lookout for ways to manage our time around all the social media scheduling and posting that’s our bread & butter. Unless we have been totally unplugged from the physical world for the past 5 years, it’s surely obvious that Social Media Marketing has quickly become the go-to solution to help businesses find and engage with customers via an effective social media manager.

Social media management tools can help us get (and stay) in control of our marketing efforts, and hence, save a lot of time. Here’s a list of the top ones, and an explanation of each to show what they do and which ones may be a good fit.

HootSuite

A built in analytics system, post-scheduling, and being able to monitor keywords puts HootSuite at the top of the popularity polls for sure.  In addition to this social media manager’s tons of settings and features, the key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ Pages, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more.

SproutSocial

Sprout Social is a social media management tool created to help businesses find new customers & grow their social media presence. It is also a Social CRM for Businesses. You can monitor all your clients’ social media profiles. It is affordable and is worth the monthly subscription for many people. Having integrated with Google Analytics, it boasts of one of the best social media analytics.

SocialOomph

Manage your social media accounts including Facebook and Twitter as well as your blogs with SocialOomph. There are different tools that will let you manage multiple Twitter profiles and you can configure lots of features such as Auto Direct Message, Auto Follow and Auto unfollow.Social Oomph’s Twitter auto unfollow tool will come in handy to help clean up your newsfeed.

SpredFast

For those who are driven by data and like to measure analytics, SpredFast is the answer. It is an Enterprise Social Media Software with a social CRM dashboard. This tool measures the data of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts to determine the amount of folks we are reaching and whether the target audience is actually interested in what you’re posting.

 Crowdbooster

This tool is good when a little direction is needed because it actually makes recommendations for us! It provides the data to determine how successful our social media marketing campaigns are and even sends email alerts that summarizes the collected data and provides recommendations or actions helpful to us.

Sendible

This is a helpful tool that lets us monitor comments, both positive and negative about our company or brand. It also lets us engage with new and potential customers, track our email campaigns, and respond to what folks have to say about our company online.

As savvy business owners and managers, it’s a no brainer to take advantage of these handy social media management software tools that help us save time and free up a few brain cells for other ventures. Let the social media auto-pilot begin!