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Posts from the 'Inciter Articles' Category
June 6th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
From the feedback we’ve heard from clients over the last month or so, the idea of blogging as a way to build your business isn’t yet hitting home with all the VIPs of small business.
So let’s bring it home.
First, go to Google. In the search bar, type the name of your industry and then add the word “blog” to it. Chances are, there are people already blogging in your market space. They could be competitors, industry analysts, consultants, media pundits, self-styled consumer watchdogs – anyone who has an opinion and a burning desire to share it.
We just did this with one of our corporate clients in the Voice-Over-IP world, and found no less than 20 blogs in the first page of search results. (That’s because a few sites had multiple blogs running!)
To this, you may say, “So what?”
Imagine you’re at a big event for your industry. Imagine you have no presence there. Imagine all the people who report on your industry – from trade groups to investors to the media – talking to each other, and you’re not part of the conversation. You’re entirely left out of it, because it appears you have nothing to say.
Is this good for your business? Of course not.
A blog, then, is a seat at your industry table. And when you’re at the table, you can join the conversation. Heck, you can even change the direction of it.
The point of blogging is to create a space for dialogue, and you do that by writing something that gives people a reason to respond.
You’re reading news and doing business within your industry. You have opinions about what’s going on in your industry. Your blog is the place to air your opinions, share your sources, and invite feedback.
And here’s what happens as a result:
- More clients and prospects come to your site to see what you’re talking about.
- More analysts come to your site to do their research – and they have more reasons to get involved with you than the competition that isn’t blogging.
- More industry reporters and media folks come to your site, use your comments as fodder for their own material, and reach out to you for more information.
- More industry bloggers add you to their blogs and blogrolls, creating inbound links to boost your natural search engine rankings and a bigger buzz about you in your industry.
- More visibility in your industry means more customers, clients, opportunities, and ultimately, more revenue.
To sum up, blogging can be as simple as:
- Reading an industry news story
- Having an opinion on it
- Typing up your opinion and supporting it with your unique set of knowledge
Could you, and the rest of your team if you have one, do this in 15-30 minutes or so, once or twice a week? Or even a month?
If so, you’ve earned your seat at your industry table.
Now, make the most of the opportunity.
WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:
Lani & Allen Voivod, aka ‘The Content Lovers,’ help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos ‘A-Ha Themselves!’ in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, ‘The Inciter,’ at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Blog Bits, Inciter Articles | 1 Comment »
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May 14th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
Dear success-minded professional,
We understand you’ve been wondering how to get more prospects, customers, and clients to your business.
You’re definitely not alone.
However, because you’re reading this, it’s clear you’re thinking beyond your next one-shot marketing effort to The Big Picture, where all of your marketing pieces work together to drive people to one central, informative, evangelizing hub:
Your website.
Smart thinking, friend. Very smart, indeed.
Since a lot of the business you’re getting these days is coming from online sources, you’d be best served to consider marketing tools that are more content-driven. Press releases, articles, lists of valuable tips and advice, and a blog, to name a few.
The reason why we recommend these tactics is threefold:
- Using targeted content to reach your ideal audience allows you to leverage the content over and over, to make it COST EFFECTIVE.
- Content-driven marketing makes search engines very happy, and this makes it EASIER for people to find you online.
- Instead of being assaulted by “generic” or “in-your-face” marketing efforts, your audience receives information they’re searching for, that’s valuable to them, and that offers a friendly, helpful voice and style. THIS BUILDS TRUST AND GOOD FEELINGS, which invites a relationship, which in turn becomes that coveted “warm ‘n fuzzy” emotion, driving prospects to your front door.
(Knock knock! It’s your next opportunity!)
Now, some people have questions about what it means to leverage content successfully.
Let’s use one targeted article as an example, “5 Tips to Finding the Perfect Widget.” This one article could be used:
- To send to publications looking for content to fill space around their ads – which positions your business not as an advertiser, but as an expert with thoughtful information to share.
- To send to article directories online, creating links to your website that raise the site’s profile in the search engines.
- To send through a press release service, creating links to your website on online news services and providing additional print publication opportunities.
- To post on your website (and/or blog) as keyword-rich content, to get search engines to come back to your website more frequently and give the site greater credibility and traffic.
- To excerpt and use on a postcard or direct mail campaign, which would direct people to your website to read the rest of it.
Smart, cost-effective, guerrilla-like, and a work horse of a strategy, right?
Good luck with your growth, vision, and marketing efforts. We’re rooting for you!
Warmest regards,
Lani and Allen Voivod
aka the “Content Lovers”
Now playing at www.EpiphaniesInc.com
“A-Ha Yourself!”
Posted in All About Content, Fun With Marketing, Inciter Articles | No Comments »
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February 14th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
by Lani & Allen Voivod, aka The Content Lovers™
You listen to music, right?
So you’ve probably heard a medley before. Or you’ve heard songs that use “samples” of other songs to create new and interesting music. Or maybe you’ve even heard Mel Torme sing “Mack the Knife” to the tune of “New York, New York.”
If so, you’ve got the basic idea of the mashup - a different way of getting your knowledge, passion, and expertise out to the world.
According to Wikipedia, a mashup can be:
- “a musical genre of songs that consist entirely of parts of other songs” (a famous example featured music from The Beatles’ White Album combined with the vocal track from rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album)
- “a website or web application that combines content from more than one source” (i.e. combining real estate listings with maps from Google Earth)
- “a video that is edited from more than one source to appear as one” (like that commercial with Gene Kelly dancing with the vacuum)
And it’s starting to appear in the marketing content world as well. Here are three prominent examples of traditional marketing vehicles mashed up to create new and unique methods for sharing your knowledge with your ideal audience.
1. Press releases and articles. Press releases are the foundation of generating publicity for your business, product or service. But why write a press release when an article would serve the same purpose?
Here’s one example. A landscaper we know told us there are things we can do to prepare our lawn for a lush green summer - in January. Really?! During snow season? Apparently so.
Now, imagine he writes an article with the top five things you can do to prep your lawn for summer. And at the end, he writes, “For more lawn prep tips, visit my website at …” Now, the media’s way more likely to run that article, compared to a garden-variety press release.
2. Blogs and websites. Yup, you may not need a traditional website anymore. With WordPress, you can use their “Pages” functionality to create the same types of webpages you’d find on a basic business website - “Products,” “Services,” “About,” “Contact,” and more.
And, in fact, it’s more important than ever for you to have not only a website, but a blog as well, as Lani recently wrote in an impassioned rant for the “Blog Bits” category at www.AhaBlog.com.
3. Ezines and audio. We’re not quite hip to “podcasting” yet, but we do know folks like Kendall SummerHawk, who does her weekly “Marketing Wisdom” article via HTML email and in Audio Acrobat streaming audio. Her audience gets to experience her the way they want to!
So what kinds of content delivery vehicles can YOU mash up to “A-Ha Yourself!” in fun and profitable ways? Send your examples to Inciter@EpiphaniesInc.com, and we’ll feature the best of the best on our blog!
WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:
Lani & Allen Voivod, aka ‘The Content Lovers,’ help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos ‘A-Ha Themselves!’ in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, ‘The Inciter,’ at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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November 28th, 2006 by Lani and Allen
If you’re like most rigorous goal-setters, your business planning is SPECTACULAR.
Which makes you totally unlike us.
In true “leap and the net will appear” fashion, we jumped into business back in 2004 with a couple of retained corporate clients and a coffee pot. No plan in sight.
We’re not bragging. In fact, most of our 2006 has been spent rectifying the bedlam.
And as we’ve gone through the growing pains, we’ve realized there’s one plan that’s vital for us and any other business interested in connecting with the outside world.
It’s called a Content Plan.
What IS a Content Plan?
A Content Plan focuses on informing, educating, and entertaining your ideal audience. It involves them in your story, inviting them to care about you on an emotional level.
And since people buy on EMOTION, this is a very good thing.
Strong Content Plans take the “Know, Like, and Trust” factor and formalize it into an honest and genuine relationship-building habit.
And here’s the secret sauce:
Everything you send out becomes another reason or opportunity for your prospects to invest their time and money with YOU.
(WARNING: Content Plans don’t work if you don’t genuinely care about the audience you serve and the goals they have.)
What’s in a Content Plan?
The details rely on your core competencies and your audience’s needs and desires, but yours may involve one or a combo of the following:
- An industry blog
- Focused press releases
- White Papers or Special Reports
- Articles for trade publications
- Live workshops
- Speaking engagements
- Newsletters
- Teleclasses
The point is to start with one, get good and comfortable with it, then add another one that builds purposefully on the first.
Why Do I Desperately Need a Content Plan?
Out of the 47,321 ways you can communicate with your target market, a Content Plan helps you:
- Focus on 3-7 that are most aligned with your business goals.
- Get ’em on your calendar in a strategic way.
- Roll ’em out one at a time, so by your next fiscal year, you’ve got a treasure trove of audience-focused information, marketing assets, and public PROOF you’re an active expert and THE leader in your field.
The end result?
Because you’ve taken the time to forge a relationship with your posse, you become their go-to resource when they’re ready to invest in the product or service you offer.
If you DON’T have a plan for how you’re connecting with your audience? You’re just another generic storefront – one of thousands yammering about why consumers should buy from you.
Ick.
In essence, a Content Plan is an official dis of the Transparent Pitch, in favor of a win-win method and mindset.
Content over time. Regular, repeated, varied forms of follow-up touches of useful, gotta-have information. It’s a beautiful thing.
And at the end of just a year – even if you haven’t done it perfectly! – you’ll have created a veritable, profit-boosting empire within your niche.
Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers,” help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos “A-Ha Themselves!” in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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October 13th, 2006 by Lani and Allen
Imagine the perfect employee. One who delivers your message precisely the way you want, every single time. Middle of the day or middle of the night, this standout performer never complains, never calls in sick.
This perfect employee is your website. But a lot of people waste this employee’s assets by building a static online brochure that fails to connect with their audience.
If you’re about to launch your website, re-launch it, or even if you haven’t taken a good hard look at it this year, here are the three things every page on your site must do to be successful:
- Every page must be a stand-alone, one-on-one conversation. You might expect your audience to come through the “front door” - your home page. But search engines, people who link to you from their sites, and people who send links to friends and business associates may send your audience through the side window - straight into your Products page, for example.
Treat each page as though it’s the front door, and be there to invite them in. Look ‘em in the eye, and tell them what’s interesting to them in a conversational tone.
- Every page is an invitation to learn more about what they need. People don’t come to your website looking to make friends. They come first for information, to find out what you can do for them and their business. And rather than telling them what you want to say, invite your audience to learn more in a strategic way.
If you know your audience well, you’ll know why they’re coming to your site, what they’re looking for, what their greatest pain is. Each webpage should answer those questions.
- Every page MUST be driven by one clear call to action, or one absolute purpose. Before writing or editing the words on your webpage, answer this question: What do you want your audience to do, think, and feel when they’ve experienced this webpage?
The answer to that question is a filter. Run every word of your webpage through that filter. If the purpose of the webpage is to get the visitor to buy a product, every story on that page should be a conversation that invites the reader to click on a product. To get an ezine subscriber? Illustrate in as many creative ways as possible why they would want to sign up - and be conversational and gentle about it.
When your audience comes to your website - any page of your site - give them exactly what they need, so they know you’re someone of value. That’s the job of your website - 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:
Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers,” help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos “A-Ha Themselves!” in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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September 28th, 2006 by Lani and Allen
Advice.
Aren’t you just sick of it already?
Everyone wants you to succeed in achieving the life and business of your dreams, and they all claim to have the key to getting there.
Only problem is, everyone’s advice is different.
Melanie ‘The Entrepreneur’s Success Coach’ Strick says you need to create Unstoppable Goals.
Adam ‘The Marketing Mentor’ Urbanski says you need a marketing action plan.
Andy ‘The Original Blogging Evangelist’ Wibbels says you need a blog.
Alexandria ‘The Ezine Queen’ Brown says you need an ezine.
James ‘America’s Hottest Young Speaker’ Malinchak says you need to get into public speaking.
Lorrie ‘Red Hot Copy’ Morgan-Ferrero says you need savvy copywriting skills.
And so on…and so on…
Now, here’s the funny thing: They’re all right. All of them!
Each one of them has a perfectly valid, legitimate, and useful way to help you achieve freedom, fame, fortune, or whatever you really want out of life.
But look deeper.
Because beneath each specific system or program, you’ll find three critical elements to success. It’s these three tenets that will lead you to your Promised Land.
- Consistence. However you decide to stay in touch with your ideal audience - emails, blogging, workshops, bulletin boards, you name it - do it regularly and repeatedly. Set a schedule, stick to it, period. It’s the key to building trust, and most importantly, it forces you to take yourself seriously. Consistence breeds confidence, and confidence breeds action that gets results.
- Persistence. Consistence is the technician’s job. When you’re ready, you can outsource most of the work that puts you in front of your ideal audience on a regular basis. Persistence is the pivotal mindset of the successful professional. It’s the focus strategy, the dogged determination that fuels you over the long haul.
- Belief. We’ve left the tough one for last. It’s also a mindset thing, but somehow it never feels like it, does it? Especially when the word on the street is that belief resides in your heart and soul. Belief is the foundation of persistence, the unwavering knowledge and voice within that says ‘This WILL work. I CAN do this!’ You can go through the motions with persistence. BELIEF, however, is the ultimate polygraph test. It reveals your confidence, goals, and determination through the circumstances and details of your everyday life.
To be honest, it’s these three deceivably simple concepts that are kicking our butt this year.
We’ve never had a problem with consistence for other clients, but we’ve flopped on our own internal deadlines.
Our persistence has reared its head as ugly stubbornness on more than one occasion.
As for belief? It’s been an all-out struggle for us to get from the unconscious, fear-based mental muck to the nutritious, can-do brain food that supports a thriving lifestyle.
Even so, we DO believe these three principles will set us free - and you, too - if we all learn them.
Only then can they work their magic.
WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers,” help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos “A-Ha Themselves!” in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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May 24th, 2006 by Lani and Allen
by Lani & Allen Voivod, aka The Content Lovers™
Thanks to folks like Edison, Jung, Einstein, and Winfrey, we’ve all heard of the “Aha! Moment.” It’s that beautiful flash of insight – an epiphany! – that comes to us when we’re busy doing something else. Or perhaps more often, happily unbusy, doing absolutely nothing of quantitative value.
That flash of insight is, literally, a divine gift – especially when it comes to your business. It can create products, improve services, open up doors, unleash opportunities, or simply give you a solution to a problem that’s been nagging you mercilessly.
It’s a gift, but it’s not the goal. An “Aha!” is only the beginning.
An “A-Ha!” is your goal.
Tom-AHA-toes, Tom-A-HA-toes. What’s the diff?
How many true “Aha! Moments” do you suppose you’ve had in your life time? Three? Seventeen? Six-million-four-hundred-thousand-nine-hundred-seventy-two?
Now how many of those “Aha! Moments” have you had the time, tools, or energy to pursue?
Sure, maybe they got as far as your notebook, or you gushed them out in full detail to your spouse, best friend, or business partner (in our case, it’s all the same person!), but have you ever been able to cultivate even just one of your brilliant bolts to its full and thunderous destiny – one that would deliver a boom to your bank account?
Not easy, my friend. Not easy as all.
So while the “Aha! Moment” can be a thrilling, delightful experience, it can also squash your will to launch or grow your own business. Because too may “Aha! Moments” without the means or guidance to pursue them leads to painful – even hopeless – conclusions.
“Why bother? I can’t do anything about it right now anyway.”
“Great – another million dollar idea I’ll never set into action.”
“I hate my brain. I hate my business. I hate what I’ve done with my life!”
Wait! Before You Pull a Pandora and Leave Hope Locked Up in a Box Forever…
Meet the “A-Ha.”
More than just an alternative spelling (or a ploy by the Hyphen Industry to infiltrate your favorite sayings), the A-Ha is an exquisite hybrid of high-quality wisdom, knowledge, jubilation, and experience. It:
- Invokes the “Aha!” in all its untainted glory.
- Invites you to see the two words that comprise the “Aha!”
- The gentle, singular, user-friendly article “A.”
- That simplest expression of gratified laughter, “Ha.”
- Bridges the connection (with the hyphen) to reveal the ultimate dynamic equation:
INSIGHT + LAUGHTER = A-HA!
Of course, laughter IS happiness in action, so “Insight + Action = A-Ha!” works, too.
So What Does the “A-Ha” Mean for YOUR Business?
For most entrepreneurs, ideas and insights are never in short supply. But imagine if you picked your favorites – be selective! – and attached strategic, bliss-infused ACTIONS to them on a consistent basis.
Starting to see the light?
Bold Insight plus Joy-filled Action.
That’s the golden ticket. Stick that formula into your small biz arsenal, and before you know it, you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
A-Ha!
WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers,” help budding entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos “A-Ha Themselves!” in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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