4 Examples of Content Curation Done Right

In recent years there has been a lot of buzz about content curation, given its power to help fuel content marketing and better engage an audience. In fact in 2014, CNBC listed at as the #1 most overused word of the year. By now most marketers have heard of curation conceptually, but may not be familiar with how their peers use it in the real-world.

Here are four examples of how organizations, profit and non-profit, small and large alike, are effectively curating third party content to achieve business results.

Becoming a Green IT Leader

Verne Global, a wholesale supplier of data center space based in Keflavik, Iceland, and Washington, D.C., wanted to be recognized for its low energy footprint. The firm needed to educate prospective customers about the viability of green IT and the business value of the Icelandic data centers, powered by 100% renewable resources without a price premium. Facing a familiar problem for a startup, Verne Global had limited resources to invest in marketing, build awareness for green IT, and establish its expertise for operating energy-efficient data centers.

Verne Global data center

Verne Global began by taking advantage of free buzz generated through social media. Rather than relying on the company’s website, Verne Global launched a news and opinion site: Green Data Center News. This site has become the hub for IT-related energy efficiency information from sources around the world, recognized as a gold winner in Network Products Guide’s 8th Annual 2013 Hot Companies and Best Products.

The firm is building its global presence by becoming the go-to destination for high value content, developed both internally and curated from third party sources. More than 50% of Verne Global’s inbound requests for media and PR now come from Green Data Center News, and it usually only takes an hour a day to update — often from a mobile phone. Curation is an investment multiplier, a way for any firm to enhance brand awareness. As Verne Global builds its audience, customers who want and need green IT services will follow.

Establishing Thought Leadership in Communications Technology

As a leading innovator in communications technology, products, and services, Alcatel-Lucent delivers intelligent networks that administer communication tools and secure IP infrastructures. In the continually changing communications market, Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise group needed to display thought leadership and provide fresh, innovative ideas for customers and prospects. Their key to success was not only consistent, relevant messaging, but also unique, diverse opinions on a variety of relevant topics.

Alcatel-Lucent launched a curated microsite, the IT Strategist, to find, organize, and publish topic-specific content. This curated site emphasizes CIO/executive level strategies, designed to help organizations improve their businesses with up-and-coming communications technology.

The site now organizes content from top sources, producing between 5 to 30 curated articles per week that provide target audiences with relevant content from across the Web, along with the company’s own research reports and news articles. IT and business leaders can turn to one thought leadership hub for multiple perspectives on IT strategies and communications technologies.

Curated content has not only increased web traffic on the Alcatel-Lucent corporate website, it’s allowed them to better monitor industry chatter, provide ideas for new original stories, and provide “great Twitter fodder,” according to Ed Youngblood, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s Director of Content Strategy.

Reinforcing Customer Loyalty with Self-service Content

Lenovo Corporation, a $39 billion global Fortune 500 company and leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technologies had a problem supporting Windows 8 systems. It needed to deliver all support information within a single app, preloaded on Lenovo PCs and tablets. The app enabled users to manage their system health, access Lenovo Support forums, find customized accessories, and check the status of their warranties.

The content support team turned to a curated content hub to reinforce its support capabilities and build customer loyalty. The team supplemented original, Lenovo-created content with third-party sources produced by popular local technology publishers and bloggers around the world, delivered in any one of eight natural languages — Brazilian, Portuguese, English, German, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

As a result, millions of Lenovo users have one place where they can check what’s new with their system and with Lenovo. They can access support when needed, and keep up to date with tech developments and opinions from a stable of Lenovo experts, partners, publishers, and bloggers.

Promoting Economic Development

The Economic Development Council (EDC) of Western Massachusetts has a basic mission: helping stimulate a vigorous regional economy by encouraging and sustaining capital investment and job growth. As the premier go-to resource for business development, the EDC needs to stay top of mind for local companies and those interested in entering the region. Digital information is naturally part of the mix. The organization began publishing a blog but quickly found that staff members did not have the ability to continually produce high quality content.

Content curation became a resource multiplier. With a curation system in place, staff-members could collect, organize, review, and select both news and opinion articles from multiple online sources. What was heretofore a ninety-minute daily task was reduced to fifteen minutes.

The curation program increased the exposure of blog posts while also reducing demands for producing in-house content. Whereas it previously took Graney’s staff 90 minutes to gather and curate articles, it now takes 15 minutes per day. For EDC and its stakeholders, the increased traffic on its website has not only drawn display advertising, creating additional revenue, it demonstrates how the EDC helps promote the economic benefits of doing business in western Massachusetts.

The Results of Content Curation

Content curation is integral to an overall content marketing initiative. There are multiple benefits for content development, including capturing insights from outside sources, building thought leadership and trust by sourcing the best content in your subject area, increasing the quantity and consistency of your content pipeline, lowering the resources required to fill a content pipeline, and increasing Web traffic. Content curation is an investment multiplier.

With the recent rise of content curation, it is important to know the direction that content marketing is likely to go. Download The Future of Content Marketing and stay ahead of your competition. 

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The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a Living

If you’re a writer, you might have heard this most of your life:

People don’t make a living writing. You should find something practical to do with your life.

Smart, capable writers grimly pass around war stories on Facebook. Penny-a-word assignments, clients who don’t pay, disdain for our craft, and disrespect for our profession.

And yet, look around at this digital world so many of us spend our lives in — it’s made of words. The technology to produce digital content exists because we create words worth sharing.

Text, video, audio — it all needs great writing if it’s going to be worth spending our time on.

If writing is your profession and your passion, you can accept crap assignments for crap money and crap treatment.

Or, you can choose something better. Because there is something better.

In the time I’ve been writing professionally, I’ve noticed some necessary traits, abilities, and strengths that make the difference between life as a well-paid writer and life as someone who likes to write but can’t seem to get paid for it.

Here are seven of the most important.

#1: Love

This might seem squishy, but if you’re meant to be a writer, you know what I mean.

There is no substitute for the love of writing. For the passion of getting the words right: the head-scratching and the pacing around the house and the endless drafts that aren’t quite right yet.

If you don’t love language and your topic and the act of putting words together, none of the rest of this really means anything.

I could have just as easily used Compulsion, Obsession, or Bullheadedness for this section. Whichever word you choose, it’s about refusing to settle for weak writing, because the words matter.

#2: An attitude of service

Writing for self-expression can be high art, pursued for the sake of your own experience of truth and beauty.

As soon as money changes hands, though, the audience — the reader, listener, or viewer — becomes the focus.

Professional writers work from an attitude of serving their audiences. Serving them with truthful, beautiful words, yes. But also with language that meets their needs, language that clarifies rather than prettifies.

Novelists, copywriters, and content marketers all live in service to our audiences. No matter how clever or perfectly poetic we may find a phrase, if it doesn’t serve the audience, it goes.

#3: Confidence

It’s always struck me as odd that many of the most capable writers are also some of the most insecure.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. Confidence comes from putting the work in to become a genuinely authoritative expert. It comes from research, craftsmanship, and seeing the difference you make to your audience.

Serious craftspeople are humble and proud at the same time.

The pride and confidence come from hours of deliberate practice — the kind of work that expands your abilities and challenges you to grow. The humility comes from the knowledge that a true pro is always improving, expanding, and refining.

#4: Training

Many writers imagine that if you have a good writing voice and a strong opinion about the serial comma, you’re qualified to work as a professional copywriter.

Not so fast.

Great copywriters and content marketers are fine wordsmiths, but they’re also strategists. They understand what types of content work to attract attention, to stand out amid the sea of content clutter, to motivate buying behavior, and to help the audience make the journey from interested bystander to loyal customer.

Solid content and copywriting strategy come from training (and practice). You can get a lot of that training right here at Copyblogger, of course.

And for writers who are serious about professionalism, we have a course designed to train you about the craft of professional content creation. (The “art” is up to your talent and abilities.)

#5: Discipline

You may be a brilliant wordsmith and master strategist, but if you don’t devote yourself to the butt-in-chair time needed to produce a significant quantity of work, you won’t get where you want to go.

To a great degree, discipline is a set of habits that can be cultivated. As a writer, you can string together rituals, create the right work environment, and adopt the behaviors of productive writers.

As a working writer, you also need to throw in a set of habits that will ensure that you meet your deadlines, keep clients updated, and invoice your clients promptly.

If you care enough, you’ll do it. The habits can be difficult to put into place, but fortunately, once they’re in place, they tend to keep you on the right track. (That’s the difference between habits and will power.)

#6: The willingness to become a marketer

There is some money in writing fiction. (For the lucky few, there’s a great deal of money. Emphasis on few.)

There’s also still a little bit of money in journalism and feature writing, especially if you have excellent contacts.

But for the most part, if you want to make a living as a writer, the fastest, most enjoyable way to do that is to write content for businesses that want to find more customers.

It’s interesting, lucrative, very much in demand, and it will get you researching and investigating as many different topics as you like.

You might think that this kind of writing is boring to do. Far from it. Creating really good content (as opposed to the mass of junk that makes up 95 percent of web copy) will call on your skills as a storyteller, investigator, wordsmith, and historian.

A well-qualified content marketer needs all the skills of a great feature or fiction writer — combined with solid marketing strategy.

You also, of course, need to get comfortable marketing yourself. This can be surprisingly tough even for writers who create superb marketing for their clients.

“Create a bunch of content and hope someone wants to do business with you” won’t work for your writing business any more than it will for your clients’. You need to apply the same strategies and frameworks to your own business that you do to theirs.

If this doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t let that worry you. It doesn’t come naturally to a lot of good writers. But it’s something that’s well within your ability to learn. And we have some resources that can help.

#7: Support

One of the tough things about living as a professional writer is that the path you walk is one you make yourself.

There’s no one to tell you which direction to go, no one to give you sign posts along the way, and no one to outline your day for you and tell you where you need to be and when.

That’s also one of the fantastic things about living as a professional writer. But sometimes Fantastic is also Difficult.

Writing is a lonely business. And it can be just a little lonelier when you don’t have colleagues to bounce questions off of or share your gripes and triumphs with.

When you do find a community of writers, though, it’s a lovely thing. They’re some of the most funny, smart, and quirky people you’ll ever meet. And it just feels good to hang out with people who get you.

(Because your friends and family actually do think you’re sort of a weirdo.)

Where to find professional writers and content marketers

If you need a talented, passionate, skilled writer with terrific knowledge of marketing strategy, our Copyblogger Certified Content Marketers are ready to help with your projects.

You can find a complete list of them here: Certified Content Marketers.

Or, are you a writer who wants to become a professional content marketer?

For you, we’d recommend participating in our Certified Content Marketer training program. It’s usually closed, but we’ll reopen it soon for a short time to invite a new group of students inside.

We’d love to see you there. Add your email below and we’ll let you know when we’re enrolling a new group of writers.

Find out when our Certified Content Marketer training program reopens:

Editor’s note: The original version of this post was published on August 30, 2014.

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The Poor Man’s Marketing Stack: How to Hack Marketing Automation

There are over 2,000 marketing technology companies today.

Each one doing something a bit different, filling some unique yet critical need.

That means on a daily basis, marketers might choose from 100 different software programs to fulfill relatively basic tasks.

That inspired somebody, somewhere, to misappropriate the word ‘stack’ from the development world to describe how a particular company might be aligning all their pieces of a marketing and sales pie.

The result often becomes a head-bangingly frustrating process where you’re piecing together several to deliver a single campaign.

Sure, you could opt for an all-in-one solution like HubSpot. But it’s also F&*#@*G expensive.

What if you don’t have that kind of loot?

Here’s how you can use even the most basic, inexpensive or free pieces of software to replicate sophisticated marketing automation and business process hacks.

How to Eliminate Bottlenecks with App-Connecting Tools

Marketing automation, when implemented properly, has the power to increase leads by 451% and boost sales by 34%.

But… a shockingly high 85% of B2B marketers admit to not using it correctly.

The secret ‘inbound marketing lie’ that no-one wants to admit is how F-ing time consuming this stuff is.

Not to mention, if you don’t have the right tool setup, it’s nearly impossible to pull off.

HubSpot is amazing. I’m a super happy partner and advocate. It makes marketing automation relatively easy to implement at scale. But most can’t (or won’t) fork over the ~$10k a year. That’s completely understandable.

When I started consulting, there was no way my clients or I could afford it either. (Although there is a compelling argument for making your money back relatively quickly if you’re using any all-in-one, database driven tool properly.)

That led to an endless search for tools that played well natively. Existing integrations between key pieces of software, like hooking up Gravity Forms with MailChimp, can make your life 10X easier.

But it’s difficult to construct an entire marketing funnel with only tools with native integrations. And it’s not realistic, as other departments or teams within your organization will probably have their own tools that need to work seamlessly with yours.

Fortunately, tools like Zapier and IFTTT (If This Then That) began popping up to help solve this problem.

They’re pretty basic once you get the hang of it. Simply connect two applications, create a ‘trigger’ (the thing that starts this process in motion) and an ‘action’ (what happens when the trigger is, well, triggered).

For example, Gravity Forms (an excellent WordPress plugin) can then automatically send new form submissions to your favorite CRM like Contactually – even though there’s not native integration between these two applications.

Best of all, with a little ingenuity, you can use them to re-create a marketing stack and begin automating your marketing.

We’re going to walk through examples in a minute, but first the theory.

Get Started by Outlining Your Marketing Funnel Steps

In an ideal world, strangers find out who you are and develop interest and trust in your brand before agreeing to become a customer.

Digital marketing 101 talks about creating a seamless customer experience by creating tactics that align with each stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness: A stranger becomes aware of some problem in their life.
• Information: They begin looking for ways to help solve said problem.
• Evaluation: Recognizing a need, they begin actively searching for a solution between different alternatives.
• Decision: They make the conscious decision to move forward with the alternative that best meets their criteria.

Sophisticated tools can help you hit all of these points without ever switching around. But that’s gonna be tough with inexpensive software that typically specializes in one small area or another.

So instead, the goal is to recreate what these other platforms can do, moving people logically from one step to the next when they’re ready. Ideally, in the most automated and simplistic fashion possible.

The goal is to recreate what HubSpot and other sophisticated (read: expensive) marketing automation software does, for a fraction of the price.

Sounds nice in theory, right?

But practically, how would that look?

• Awareness: A new lead converts on a landing page, getting added to your email marketing software.
• Information: As the lead begins searching for more information on your site and interacting with other resources, they should be added and removed from other automated marketing sequences to continue nurturing.
• Evaluation: Once the lead begins getting serious about considering you as a solution, they need to be updated in your CRM system as such and qualified (if appropriate).
• Purchase: If they decide to move forward with you, things need to be paid, they need to become a customer or client, and their project or account needs to be set-up immediately.

The important thing to note here isn’t the tools themselves, but your process or workflow. Once that’s defined, you can figure out which tools might be best to slot in each category. For example, even the free Google Contacts might be a good CRM choice (and it integrates easily with Zapier).

Enough small talk though.

Let’s take a look at each stage of this funnel to see how you can use Zapier to recreate steps that typically only expensive marketing automation platforms deliver.

Awareness: Landing Page to Email Marketing

Rule #1 of Permission Marketing (which pre-dated Inbound Marketing by, oh, like a decade) is to get somebody to give you their info in exchange for something of value, allowing you to continue following up with that person over time.

This can be old school, like an email address. Or new school, like their Snapchat… um, err… I have no idea what these kids call it.

In any event, the process is the same.

We already spoke about Gravity Forms, which can be used to power basic eBook forms to collect submissions.

But how about something a little more complex, like a webinar?

Zapier integrates easily with GoToWebinar, allowing you to capture new registrations (and even new attendees).

This is perfect if you’d like to add these new registrations to an email list.

Even better, is if you create an automated workflow in for a specific email list for the upcoming webinar. That way, you can continually send out new messages to the contact to make sure that they attend the event (thereby boosting your Attendance Rate).

MailChimp is perfect for this. The pricing is very affordable, especially considering the beautiful templates, ease-of-use, and pretty decent automation options. Plus, that damn Chimp is so cute.

Simply select the upcoming webinar, add the new registration to a specific list in MailChimp, and you’re done.

Easy peasy.

But… what happens if people DO (or DON’T) show up? What happens if they DO (or DON’T) take you up on that customary end-of-webinar call-to-action?

You gotta update their status.

Information: Email Marketing Updates

Let’s say that you’re getting clever now, and that you’d like to create two different sets of messages based on if people did or didn’t attend your webinar.

Obviously, getting this right is important because if somebody receives the wrong email it could damage your credibility.

There are a few ways to do this, but the most straightforward is to simply create two additional lists in your email marketing service – one for those who do show up, and one for those who don’t.

THEN, you’ll want to unsubscribe people from the initial list (like the original webinar registration one) and add them to one of the new lists you created based on their actions.

Most basic email marketing services don’t have this feature already. However you can create a simple Zap to take care of it for you.

Another example where this comes in handy is if you offer a free trial or demo.

In that case, you don’t want a new lead (or even customer) to continue receiving promotional messages. Fortunately this same simple little hack, creating different lists for different segments of people, being unsubscribed automatically when they join a new list, can take care of a lot of the headache.

Evaluation: New Lead to CRM to Qualify (or Disqualify)

So far you’ve been nurturing this new lead with a few different campaigns or tactics. Everything’s gone well so far and they’re ready to get serious.

For product or software companies this is straightforward and easy: they download the discount or join the free trial and either purchase (or not).

However it’s a little more complicated for service companies.

How do you know if the lead is any good? You can’t just agree to speak with everyone nutjob who fills out your form (and there will be plenty, believe me).

You can start by filtering your results, setting up qualifying questions in your forms to make sure that you’re tailoring your follow-up process accordingly.

For example, you can set-up different zaps between products based on how people answer a specific question.

Now you can begin segmenting the people who ARE interested in your services, with the tire kickers who are primarily interested in wasting your time.

But you still have no idea if they’re even a good lead or not.

To be on the safe side, let’s automatically send an email to someone in your company to qualify each new prospect who’s interested in your services.

Simple! Just use Gmail based on the form filtered submission you just set-up. You can even pre-craft the message, pulling in form data, along with helpful links for the person who’s helping you to know exactly how you want them to be qualified (delegation FTW!).

You can send this email to an assistant, employee, or whomever, and at the same time create a new project management task to make sure they’ll see it immediately as it comes in (along with a due date to make sure each lead is followed up with ASAP).

With a few simple steps and some foresight, you’ve just set-up and delegated the first few steps of your sales process.

Congrats!

But you’re still not quite done yet. What happens when those people decide to pay you money?

Decision: New Client to Point of Sale and Project Management

Again, product or software transactions are insanely straightforward.

When someone wants to become a customer, they whip out a credit card and it takes a few seconds. Then you can update your email or contact lists accordingly with the previous tips.

However what if this is a larger transaction?

First, you can automatically create a new Freshbooks invoice when someone fills out an appropriate form. You can even have someone fill this out internally while on the phone with a new client-in-waiting.

Freshbooks already integrates with both Stripe and PayPal (along with a few others), so you can even take this a step further by automating all of the tasks related to onboarding new clients too.

For example, let’s create a new Dropbox folder for each client when a successful first payment is made.

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Pretty helpful. But let’s keep going.

Let’s also create a new TEMPLATED project in your favorite project management tool (like Asana in this case).

Just like we did earlier with the email message to qualify a new lead, you can select a pre-built template for the new client to get everything set-up in seconds (rather than hours).

Best of all, there’s no shortage of tips or tricks here. If you take notes during your Kick-Off Call with Evernote, a task can immediately be created in your PM tool to make sure these notes are added to the client’s project accordingly.

A Time-Saving Caveat

Tools like Zapier or IFTTT open up a brand new world of possibilities.

It’s super interesting and you can geek out on this stuff for HOURS if you’re not careful.

Just think about all of the possibilities you can accomplish if even the most basic software options like Gravity Forms and MailChimp can do this stuff.

But don’t start with the tools.

Instead, start with the process. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? How should people move seamlessly through your own marketing funnel?

Begin by setting up the basic stuff and testing as you go. Once you’ve got the process down, it’s easy to dive into the details and begin customizing each little aspect.

For example, just start by automating how each new lead is followed up with. Then you can get clever with implementing different marketing campaigns that funnel down to this step.

Not only with this approach save you tons of time on the front-end, but you’ll drastically increase your odds of this system delivering better results too.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad’s blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.

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Why CMOs Need To Be Bullish On Programmatic Advertising

Before I get to my thoughts on why CMOs need to be bullish on programmatic advertising, let's first take a look at just what programmatic advertising is. 

We define it simply as “Automated advertising buying coupled with machine learning.” However, there are no shortages of definitions of the term programmatic advertising.

“Programmatic ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.” —Digiday

“Programmatic advertising helps automate the decision-making process of media buying by targeting specific audiences and demographics.” —Marketing Land

The first definition helps explain it in very simply terms whereas the second helps explain what it does. 

In terms of the different types of programmatic advertising, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)—which is an industry organization geared toward ensuring standards across the advertising ecosystem—there are two types of programmatic buying (the process in which you’re buying advertising):

1. Programmatic Direct
Also known as Premium Programmatic Advertising, this is an automated technology-driven method used for buying, selling, or fulfilling advertising. It provides for an Automated Guarantee Systematic automation of sales process. No insertion order (IO) or master services agreement (MSA) covered within the partnership.

2. Programmatic Real Time Bidding (RTB)
Two types of RTBs are Open Auction (audience targeting) and Private Marketplace Deals—which require a private marketplace and allow for fixed pricing and data overlays. We are beginning to see more and more of this type of programmatic advertising being used every day. 

Why CMOs Need To Be Bullish On Programmatic Advertising 

The shift to programmatic tactics means a few things for marketers and the industry as a whole. In essence, it has validated and delivered against the need for data-driven, and accountable ROI-based media delivery. Additionally, it has enabled an efficient method for publishers to monetize core inventory. 

In a nutshell, programmatic advertising aligns media with brand lift metrics for real ROI and only spends money where it will be effective. 

And it would appear that many of your fellow CMOs are planning on being bullish as eMarketer predicts that in 2016 programmatic TV spending will climb 127.8% to $710 million and by 2018 will account for 6% of all TV ad spending.

The New Currency of Advertising

Digital delivery and content is the new currency of advertising. Brands must find a way to connect while measuring returns on more than recall or click through rate (CTR). Only programmatic platforms can deliver that value.

Download The Programmatic Guide for Modern Marketers, Publishers, and Media Planners to learn how to deliver advertising that enhances the customer experience and a lot more. 

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3 Cs that Reveal the Quality of Your Blog Post

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of purchasing a diamond, you’re probably familiar with the four Cs that determine its value: Cut, Clarity, Color, and Carat.

As the Editor of a national online publication, I’m faced with the task of assessing the “value” of articles that are submitted to me every day.

The value of an article depends on its ability to resonate with readers.

Any editor will tell you that predicting what will strike a chord with an audience is an inexact science. But, over the years, I’ve developed my own system of three Cs that help me effectively evaluate the quality of an article.

I check for:

1. Clarity
2. Continuity
3. Connection

And the beauty is, you can also use the three Cs to decide whether or not your work is ready to be published.

Let’s break down how to use each of these factors when reviewing your own writing.

1. Clarity

Sometimes I read an article and can’t pin down exactly what the writer is trying to say. What idea is he trying to communicate? If it’s not clear, the writer hasn’t spent enough time creating a precise message.

Similarly, a writer may begin an article with one idea and then veer off on a related, but separate, tangent halfway through the text. We’ve all done it — even me.

For instance, my last post on Copyblogger was about getting comfortable with throwing away your words. In the first draft of that post, I also covered self-editing. Those two ideas are related, but the introduction of that additional idea weakened my main message. In my second draft, I deleted everything related to self-editing to bring clarity back to my primary message.

After you’ve written a first draft, here’s a three-step process for bringing clarity to a piece of writing:

1. Communicate one big idea. If your article contains two big ideas, save the second one for another piece of content.
2. Craft a magnetic headline. Your headline must make a strong promise based on your one big idea. If it doesn’t show how a reader will benefit from the article, rewrite it.
3. Cut extra text. Eliminate every word in your article that does not deliver on the promise made in your headline.

Once you’ve brought clarity to your article, you can move on to the next C.

2. Continuity

This C improves the structure of your article. Now that your headline makes a strong promise and you know the big idea you’re trying to communicate, it’s time to ensure your article takes the reader on a logical journey.

Here are three elements that promote continuity:

1. State your premise. For example, the premise of this article is that it’s helpful to have a framework to evaluate the quality of your content before it’s published.
2. Introduce and support your big idea. The big idea here is that measuring Clarity, Continuity, and Connection will help you create high-quality content. Use subheads and bullet points to reinforce your message.
3. Give readers a payoff. Highlight how the big idea will make their lives better and motivate them to take action now.

In short, your blog post needs to be structured in a way that naturally leads the reader to your desired conclusions and delivers a genuine payoff for them: a big “aha” moment.

3. Connection

This final C is the key to creating an article that readers will be inclined to share. It doesn’t matter how clear your ideas are, how well-structured your article is, or even how informative it might be … if your readers don’t connect with it, they won’t feel compelled to pass it on.

The fastest path to connection is showing vulnerability. The easiest way to get vulnerable? Share a story. It doesn’t need to be long, but the story must be honest — just like my confession above about the mistake I made when writing the first draft of my last Copyblogger post.

Speaking of that post, I told a longer story in that article about getting critiqued by a writing teacher who told me my work was completely vanilla. That made it very easy for readers to feel connected to me because we’ve all had a cringe-worthy experience like that, right?

Use the 3 Cs to transform the quality of your content

The three Cs remind you to remain audience-focused when creating content, and you can use them when you write content for clients as well as when you’re promoting your own business.

They’ll help you produce useful content readers will engage with and share.

What techniques do you use to evaluate your writing?

Share in the comments below.

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How to be a Newbie & Succeed

Here’s a challenge we all face, whether we’re bloggers or podcasters or freelancers or makers or hopeful entrepreneurs of any shape…

We’ve got to be experts to succeed.

Or, at least we have to look like experts, right?

Or, at least all the people that you follow are experts, right?

But in Fizzle’s forums I’ve had so many damn conversations over the past 3+ years with entrepreneurs at all stages of the journey. And I see people making a very common mistake in how they think about themselves.

Here, watch the video for the skinny (and my John Mayer impression):

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(BTW, if you like that video subscribe to our YouTube channel and like us on Facebook because I’m making more of these suckers.)

The gist is this: I see now that it’s common to think you’re further along than you actually are.

You might think you’re further along than you actually are if:

• You’re not making progress on your thing. You’ve got ideas but they’re not getting done.
• You don’t have results. You try stuff out but it doesn’t work.
• You aren’t asking questions. You’re pretty sure you know exactly what you should be doing.
• Your mood shifts often from very excited to super frustrated or depressed.
• You feel like you lack motivation.

Here’s the thing, it’s really common to believe you’re further along than you actually are.

Here’s how it happens:

That black dot at the bottom left is you — let’s say you’re just starting out.

BUT, you’ve been watching an expert for a while. Maybe it’s Seth Godin or Elizabeth Gilbert or (my favorite) Guy Fieri. The expert is the open circle at the top.

You see exactly where the expert is right now and assume that’s what you’ve got to be like if you want to succeed.

But you don’t see all the shit that’s made them who they are.

That dashed line is the journey the expert’s been on since they started as a newbie so many years ago. This line represents the challenges, fears, triumphs, failures and successes that the expert has attempted between where they started and where they are today.

But you don’t see that. All you see is where they are right now.

We don’t see the journey. All we see is where they are today. And that’s where we think we need to start from.

That’s dangerous.

The danger

I’m telling you all this because it’s really dangerous to think you’re further along than you are.

You’ll never ship anything. You’ll never try anything.

And that’s dangerous because as indie entrepreneurs we live and die by the work we produce… if we’re not creating and making and connecting with our audience we aren’t growing.

DON’T PUT YOURSELF UNDER ALL THIS UNNECESSARY PRESSURE.

Instead, embrace being a newbie. Accept being a learning. Realize that your path to success will be as windy and (cork)screwed as others.

It will take time, it will take sweat and it will be exhilarating.

A quick trick

Here’s one quick trick I’ve been using myself to embrace my newbie-ness:

Here’s a few examples:

• I want to get more politically active: It’s not like I’m going to be Ghandi, but I can at least host a documentary night with my friends.
• I want to do more wood working: It’s not like I’m going to be an episode of This Old House, but I can at least take a stab at making a coffee table.
• I want to be a public speaker: It’s not like I’m going to be Tony Robbins, but I can at least try to get a speaking gig at the local Rotary Club.
• I want to blog about motherhood: It’s not like I’m going to be The Dooce, but I can commit to writing 10 posts in the next 10 weeks.

It’s a simple trick, it may not work on you as well as it does for me, but it helps me get over my precious sense of how professional or cool or mature I am.

Shit man, it sucks to suck at stuff, and we all suck at first. I see too many of us freelancers and creative business people putting too much pressure on ourselves to be better.

YES, push to be the best.

YES, give it all you’ve got.

SURE, fake it till you make it and every other trite piece of advice out there.

Sure, do all that stuff. But maybe there’s a way through where you embrace your newbie-ness, get enthusiastic and be authentic instead of just another posturing internet person.

We at Fizzle will be right there along side you every step of the way.

Thanks so much for reading!

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Which Lead Generation Tactics Get the Best Results?

When it comes to lead generation, quality matters over quantity. But by the same token, people don’t like being sold to and they resent the notion that they’re simply “numbers in a database somewhere”. With that in mind, Ascend2 conducted research on the most effective tactics for both lead generation and lead nurturing. What they found out may surprise you.

Which Strategies Were Most Effective?

Email marketing is still king of the hill when it comes to lead generation effectiveness

It may come as no surprise, but for sheer ease of implementation and effectiveness of results, nothing beats good, old-fashioned email marketing. Websites and landing pages are close behind, with content marketing making noticeable gains. It’s also worth noting that the survey shows email marketing as one of the easiest tactics to implement.

Email marketing is one of the easiest tactics to launch

But notice the relative difficulty of other measures such as content marketing. Sure, it gets decent results, but at what cost? Effectiveness and difficulty are tied. Keep in mind, email marketing has been around much longer, and therefore we’ve had much more time to experiment and learn how to interact with prospects. Huge strides are being made in creating new tools that make content marketing more relevant and personable, but we’re still in the collective crawling stages with it.

And while we’re on that topic, take a look at testing and optimization. Low effectiveness, relatively high difficulty. Surprised? Don’t be. That’s because testing and optimization isn’t a lead generation strategy in and of itself – it’s something you do with the other strategies.

So now we know that email marketing is both one of the best converting and most cost effective measures – what next? Before you load up and catapult a bunch of messages to your prospects’ inboxes, remember that you need to nurture the leads you’ve gotten into your funnel at this point. Fortunately, Ascend2 also looked at the most promising lead nurturing strategies and what trends were getting the kinds of results their teams had hoped for.

Lead Nurturing Goals

When asked the question about the most important objectives of a lead nurturing campaign, the answers were varied. Most responded as you might imagine – to increase conversion rates or open up more sales opportunities.

Right behind these two responses was a surprising answer thrown into the mix – “lead qualification”. This idea namely revolves around ensuring that a lead is best poised to make a decision and convert. This means understanding the difference between “interest” and “intent” – many people are interested in something, but far fewer have an active intent at that point to purchase. As of yet, there are no tools which can seamlessly predict this kind of action, although there are many ways to go through the process. No matter what, it’s still a heavy burden on the sales team to discern who’s ready to act and who’s just a well-meaning enthusiast.

So when it comes to nurturing leads, which strategy came out on top? Here again, email marketing:

But what, specifically is it about email that people respond to? As it turns out, the best effects on lead nurturing come from creating relevant content:

But notice the other points below these – points which have far fewer reported success rates:

• Campaign personalization
• Targeting by persona
• Targeting by stage in the decision-making process

These are all the very things that email marketing excels at! You can use your CRM data to segment leads based on the persona they most closely match, as well as what stage they’re in when it comes to making a decision. You can personalize your campaign with all the relevant details in the world, but prospects still won’t bite.

The Crossroads of Relevance and Relate-ability

So far, marketing has tried to create the appearance of relevance in campaigns. We try to do this by personalizing emails to give the prospect more of a sense of “me-to-you” communication. We try to align them with personas like theirs in an attempt to get inside their minds and find out what motivates them to purchase. We look at how close they might be to making a decision and we market accordingly.

The fact is, marketers are both swift and smart in using technology to automate much of their follow-up and nurturing tasks. The problem however is that people know it. They know you’re just filling in blanks in a software program or trying to put them into neat boxes based on a few scraps of information that you’ve gleaned from them.

Of course that begs the question, “How are we supposed to create relevant content when people won’t tell us anything about themselves?” They will – you simply have to ask. When was the last time you connected with a prospect and really meant it when you said, “how can we help you?” We’re so conditioned to answer that we’re “just looking” for fear of being sold to.

Creating Better Communication

Maybe the better question is, “what’s challenging or frustrating you? What can I help solve for you?” If a prospect knows that you can relate to them personally, they’ll be much more open to sharing with you. And while it’s not currently possible to write content that appeals to everyone at every moment, it is possible to open up communication and get suggestions for new content, while acknowledging the source.

The bottom line whether you’re looking to attract more leads or help grow the leads you have is shifting your approach from pure sales and marketing to problem solving. Email is a prospect’s open invitation to get as close to them as you possibly can. It’s something they can access anytime, anywhere. And it’s the best shot you’re going to have at learning about their unique issue and demonstrating precisely how your product or service solves it. Not in a high-pressure, hype-filled way, but in a friendly, open, personal way.

We have all the right tools and processes – we just need to add in the human factor.

What are your thoughts on using email marketing for lead generation and nurturing? Have you found in your own experience that other tactics work better? Do you think we should spend less time automating and more time communicating? Share your thoughts and perspectives with us in the comments below.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

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