BLOGGER TRAINING 101 - Article Title: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Article Title: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Every site you submit articles to may have different editorial style guides. Here are some helpful tips to help you get your submission accepted faster: Double-check spelling and word usage in your article title. Commas are allowed, but only in the middle of a title. Do not put a period at the end of your article title. All colons (:) and semicolons (;), long and medium dashes, pipes (|), and slashes (/) are to be replaced with two short dashes (--), or changed to word equivalents. Ampersands (&) and parentheses () are allowed. Quotation marks are allowed to emphasize a part of a title, but not the entire title. Please remove quotes around the entire article as they are superfluous and of no benefit to the author or reader. Microsoft Smart Quotes: Please remove them. They break RSS feeds, emails, etc. Never put an article number in the title of an article. Example: [Wrong] Dog Grooming Tips-Article #3 Example: [Right] Dog Grooming Tips Tip: The reader is most likely not privy to how many articles you may have written on a subject. It also creates useless title bloat. Never purposefully use commonly misspelled words in your article title to try and gain traffic from humans who misspell words in their searches. WHY? It's sneaky and it can ruin your credibility as an expert author. Never put a year or date in the title of an article. This greatly reduces the "shelf-life" and marketability of your article. Tip: If you want to update or "freshen" up your article, update the copyright date in your resource box as a marker that will tell the reader when you originally wrote the article.

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BLOGGER TRAINING 101 - Article Title: Length and Brevity Suggestions

Article Title: Length and Brevity Suggestions

Ask yourself: "Is my article title long enough?" Consider expanding your article title by forty percent (40%). Evidence suggests that longer article titles produce more views per article vs. short article titles. Longer article titles can also increase your reprint rate and value. The narrower the focus, the more specialized the reprint website and the more qualified the visitor/reader. This results in a greater referral rate of traffic to your website. Tip: Your article title can be up to 100 characters long. Make your article title just a little longer than what might feel comfortable and you will often see a higher return from your article in terms of how much traffic it can attract for you. A good article title length is greater than 70 characters but less than 100 characters. Also, Ask yourself: "Does my article title use clear and concise wording?" Get to the point. Do not use exclamatory wording like "You Don't Want to Miss This" or "This is a Must Read" in your article title to induce urgency. It usually just induces annoyance. If your article is good, you don't need it in your title. Focus on the article topic. Rambling on and on in your article title shows a lack of respect for your readers time. Most people make the mistake of spending 99% of their time on the article body and 1% on the article title. Instead, put 20% of your time on the article title and 80% on the article body. Don't use slang. It will often backfire, especially if your English-speaking reader did not grow up in your same country or with your same life references. Be direct and be sensitive to cultural misunderstandings when choosing your article title. Brevity is golden. Start with a long article title with multiple hooks into your key topic and then continue to ask yourself how you could tighten up the article title without sacrificing your intended article title promise.

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BLOGGER TRAINING 101 - Article Title No Sales Pitch Please

Article Title: No Sales Pitch Please

Ask yourself: "Does my article title attempt to sell something other than information?" Your article title should never be a sales pitch for your website, your product, your company or even you. Your expertise in the delivery of information on your topic will "sell" you to the reader. Save the sales pitch for your Resource Box. The Article Body is where you GIVE; The Resource Box is where you TAKE. Thou shall never TAKE in the Article Title. Your objective is to create a relationship of trust and credibility with your readership. You will not get the opportunity to sell to your reader until they know, like and trust you. In your article title, you are trying to sell your reader on the benefits they will receive if they continue reading your article. Put your creative sales focus on selling your reader the benefits of the information in your article, not your business.

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EMAIL MARKETING

Five Steps to Stronger Email Relationships

Explores five key steps SMBs can use to maximize email marketing.

1. Approach list building strategically

There’s no shortage of tactics for growing email lists, but it’s all too easy to get caught up in them at the expense of a fully developed plan. Does your 2012 email strategy account for how and when to apply certain tactics, and when to test others? Does it include a consistent process for analysis and adjustments?

With less than a third of email marketers saying they send relevant emails to segmented audiences with a clear conversion goal, this is an area ripe for improvement.

2. Set clear expectations for subscribers

As marketers, we don’t always see the disconnect between how our offers are presented and how prospects perceive them. For instance, many email forms ask for name and email, yet offer little context or information about send frequency, specific content options or recent samples. These forms might generate larger lists, but produce lower overall response and engagement.

We may know the value of the content behind the opt-in form, but is it obvious to first-time site visitors who see a pop-up window before even reading one paragraph?

3. Segment lists to match your priorities

Whether you’re segmenting lists based on behaviors, such as opens, clicks and downloads (or lack thereof), or stage in the sales cycle, or more specific demographic data, the bottom line is that segmentation is essential for tailoring content to different types of customers.

Matching segments to your organization’s ideal customer personas makes your content more engaging and your offers and campaigns more likely to succeed. So why are only about half of email marketers using these techniques regularly?

4. Automate your campaigns

Welcome, thank you and transactional emails are widely used by organizations of all sizes, but research shows a significant drop-off in other types of automated messages.

Lead nurturing, drip campaigns, re-engagement campaigns and autoresponders make it easier for marketers to create email series with the intent of building relationships; however, these types account for roughly one-third or fewer of the emails sent by survey respondents.

If your content mix includes “evergreen” information such as how-to articles or training videos that won’t lose their news value, automation is an option worth exploring.

5. Optimize and test regularly

To quote the report, “Continuous experimentation is the quickest path to peak performance.” Yet only 28% of small businesses regularly test and optimize email messages. Mid-sized and larger organizations fared better, although only about half of them are testing regularly.

Deadlines and full workloads are a common culprit, but let’s say you run a test that produces an 18% lift in response – you’d probably find time to test more consistently next time, right? Interestingly, subject lines are among the most popular email tests, yet they often produce the smallest gains, compared to areas such as landing pages and target audiences.

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BLOGGER TRAINING 101 - Article Title: Narrow the Focus

Article Title: Narrow the Focus

Article Writing and Marketing: Article Title Training Series. Ask yourself: "Did I bite off more than I can deliver in my article title?" I.e., Should I narrow my topic further? Your article title should be specific, to the point, and completely deliverable. If you are struggling with delivering all the information promised in your article title, consider splitting your topic into 2-3 separate articles. Acid test your article title: Will your readers feel satisfied and have their expectations met by your article body content after reading your article title? In terms of content supply and market demand for information, it is true that there is a huge demand for information on broad topics, but that comes with a huge supply of content to meet the huge demand. I.e. Your article can get lost in the shuffle. You may find a market advantage by answering the long tail demand of a niche topic by looking at the more specific, narrowly defined questions your market is asking for you to answer. To do: Study the concept of the "long tail". You can find the long tail on any topic by doing keyword or keyphrase research with any major keyword discovery tool.

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BLOGGER TRAINING 101 - Article Title Questions

Article Title Questions

Ask yourself: "Does my article title entice the reader to ask a question?" E.g. "Why?," "How?," "Who?," "Where?," "When?," etc. After reading your article title, a question should appear in the reader's mind. Your article body is where you deliver the answer to that question. This is a powerful concept because you have just engaged the mind of your reader, moving them from a passive to an active state. In the active state, your reader is more likely to find value in your content and thus visit your website. Never underestimate the power of "How To" article titles. There is clearly a huge demand for articles that answer common problems in an easy-to-read "How To" format. Don't be afraid to offer your readers more questions they should ask themselves when evaluating the topic of your article. Questions become highly relevant answers to your readers because your questions act like a personal coaching session. Avoid the shocking question that forces you to stretch the truth to answer the question in your article body. Instead, be creative and interesting with your article title question.

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