Web Ink Now

Not Another Junky Blog

Tania Venn, director of PR at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, the largest full-service professional junk removal company in the world, oversees a team that creates content with a focus to reach customers who may not think that they need a junk removal service.

“Once they hear about what junk removal could do for them and how it could impact their lives, they become interested in our service,” Tania says.

Tania and her colleagues focus on what information would be valuable for buyers as they create content for the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Not Another Junky Blog and then use their Facebook page and Twitter feed @1800GOTJUNK to let their followers know of new posts.

Making junk interesting

I hear all the time from marketers who tell me something like "My business is boring. Nobody cares about what we do so how can I create content?"

Tania's example shows any market or company can be made to be interesting. We're talking about junk removal here, people!

"We think about what’s relevant," she says. "That could be tips and suggestions for people on getting their space back. It could be about decluttering and how to do a garage sale. We also focus on environmental sustainability, what happens to the stuff we haul away and creative ways to reuse junk." Right on the homepage there is a counter showing the number of pounds 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has saved from landfills. As of this writing, the ticker reads 2.264937 billion pounds.

They also create content about what's timely, either because it is in the news or tied with the time of year. "With the holidays coming up we'll post about making space to have your in-laws over and making room for new things you might get as gifts," Tania says. "And with New Years, everyone has resolutions. We know that the top ten New Year's resolutions includes 'getting organized' and 'simplifying'. We also look at what's trending. For example, there is a trend called trashion, when people make fashion out of trash, so we'll write about that."

Writing for buyers

Unlike when a blog is written from an egotistical perspective and turns into a bunch of advertising messages, Not Another Junky Blog, because it is written for buyers, focuses on real problems that people have with junk in the home.

"We know there’s an emotional component to getting rid of the stuff that you have," Tania says. "Our customers have an emotional release and an amazing magical feeling of 'that crap is not there anymore' when their junk is taken away. They don't realize until it's gone how good it feels. We hear it time and time and time again from our customers. So we build that into our blog because it answers what customers are looking for." The 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business is a franchise model, so the content they create also appeals to franchisees who learn about clever ways to market in their local area.

When you focus on buyers' problems as you create content, frequently you'll write about something that doesn't have anything to do with what your organization actually does. This is true at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

"We might talk about how to set up your own garage sale," Tania says. "That wouldn't get us business necessarily, but we’ve got the experience and we can share that with people. We know that readers may not be able to afford our service right now, but some day they will be able to. They'll have learned something from us that can help them out, something that can help them get rid of some of their junk, but they can do it themselves."

Measuring success

It's not just the billions of pounds of junk that the company saves from landfills that's measured. Tania knows that the content published in Not Another Junky Blog and shared on Facebook and Twitter is working because she uses analytics to measure content success too.

"I look at how many people view our blog on a daily basis and a weekly basis," she says, also paying attention to any content that becomes particularly popular with readers. "We've learned that we need to create content in order to be recognized on the web. It's a way of engaging with customers. It's a great way to get information directly to who you want to reach rather than going through the media."

Hey, if Tania can make junk interesting, there's no excuse for you not making your company interesting!

Seattle Police blogs Marijwhatnow guide to legal marijuana use in Seattle

Here's proof cops have a sense of humor and that the Seattle Police understand the power of online content to educate and inform.

On Election Day, November 6, 2012, the people of Washington State passed Initiative 502 making it legal after December 6 for adults over 21 years old to possess up to an ounce of marijuana (or 16 ounces of solid marijuana-infused product, like cookies, or 72 ounces of infused liquid, like oil) for personal use.

So, Washington residents wonder, what does that actually mean for me?

I just love the post Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use In Seattle on the Seattle Police blog SPD Blotter. The post provides a practical guide for what the Seattle Police Department believes Initiative 502 means.

Brand journalism with the Seattle PD

This is some terrific brand journalism!

Here are a few of my favorite Qs and As from the Marijwhatnow post.

Can I legally carry around an ounce of marijuana?
According to the recently passed initiative, beginning December 6th, adults over the age of 21 will be able to carry up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. Please note that the initiative says it "is unlawful to open a package containing marijuana... in view of the general public," so there’s that. Also, you probably shouldn't bring pot with you to the federal courthouse (or any other federal property).

SPD seized a bunch of my marijuana before I-502 passed. Can I have it back?
No.

What happens if I get pulled over and I'm sober, but an officer or his K9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I’ve got in my trunk?
Under state law, officers have to develop probable cause to search a closed or locked container. Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle. If officers have information that you’re trafficking, producing or delivering marijuana in violation of state law, they can get a warrant to search your vehicle.

December 6th seems like a really long ways away. What happens if I get caught with marijuana before then?
Hold your breath. Your case will be processed under current state law. However, there is already a city ordinance making marijuana enforcement the lowest law enforcement priority.

Will police officers be able to smoke marijuana?
As of right now, no. This is still a very complicated issue.

The SPD Blotter

I love the use of humor in the post. Sure, it provides valuable information about the new law, but in a fun and approachable way.

And hey, we're talking about the cops here!

The SPD Blotter began in 2008 and is maintained by the staff of Seattle Police Department Public Affairs Office.

The Marijwhatnow post was written by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, a journalist who, as he says in his bio, covered “the always-exciting cops and crime beat at Seattlecrime.com, PubliCola.com, KIRO Television, and The Stranger.”

Spangenthal-Lee joined SPD in March 2012 to tell those same stories on the department's SPD Blotter blog and publish real-time information on breaking news through SPD’s @SeattlePD Twitter feed.

Isn't it great that the Seattle PD hired a journalist to write the blog and update the Twitter feed?! I've talked about hiring journalists many times over the years such as this 2009 post An open letter to journalists: You have an amazing career opportunity on the Dark Side.

Here's how Spangenthal-Lee describes his role: "As a reporter, I've stood out in the rain at crime scenes, rode around in patrol cars late into the night, and pored over police reports in order to dig up and tell stories about just what goes on inside the Seattle Police Department, and the streets of our city."

Nice. Maybe I'll have to take a field trip to Seattle to sniff around and learn more about this story.

photo credit: 1ncognito via photopin cc

Metrics to Show How a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Drives New Business

This is the third in a three part series on how professional services firm Sales Benchmark Index has made the transition from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. I conduced several lengthy interviews with I love the approach Greg Alexander, CEO of the company to learn the inside scoop. If you haven’t done so, read the first installment Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing and the second How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them.

Content based on the buyers' business

Greg knows from his buyer persona research that 75 percent of his US potential clients are on a calendar-based planning cycle. "July through October is when they go through their annual operating plan," he says. This is the time that buyers are most receptive to Sales Benchmark Index services and when the majority of sales tales place. "They are trying to figure out things like how many sales people do I need? How should I place the territories? What should the quotas be? How should I pay them? A lot of the research is centered around those issues."

Because Greg's sales happen July through October, he has a calendar-based approach to content creation.

"From November through June the approach is to give away lots and lots of intellectual property to build up the subscriber base," Greg says. "We believe that permission to have a conversation with buyers is a valuable asset. Within the blog we will write about a problem. We'll offer up a tool that we used with one of our clients to solve that specific problem. All we ask is that they click on the link. We put it behind a form, and then they get the tool for free. During the November through June time period, we don’t bombard them with follow up marketing activity."

As the subscriber roles grow, Greg's team shifts focus during the selling season when buyers have a greater need for information because they are planning next year's budgets from July through October. "During that time period, we shift the focus of the blog to having subscribers participate in our annual research tour, which we call Make the Number: How Your Peers Plan on Allocating People, Money and Time for the Upcoming Year."

Make the Number allows potential clients to have a personal review of benchmarking data and research. "This is an onsite seminar," Greg says. "If you want access to all these tools, and you've been a subscriber of ours for months and sometimes years, one of our experts will come on site and give you a presentation for 90 minutes to the executive team on kind of a set of best practices heading into the New Year. So it allows somebody to compare and contrast the sales strategy before the New Year begins."

Greg has had tremendous success with the calendar approach to content creation. "Just to give you some stats here on the power of content marketing, in prior years we might do between 50 and 100 visits during the July to October period," he says. "But this year, we'll have done over 220 of them. We know that about half of them eventually, inside of six quarters, become clients of ours. When people buy a professional service like ours, it's intangible. So we use the Make the Number meetings to turn what we do into a tangible by actually introducing people face to face. It makes it easier for the buyer to buy."

Measuring success

I love how Greg's team measures every aspect of his content efforts. After all, this is a company that helps sales and marketing executives be more effective, so you can imagine how they focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own inbound marketing.

In fact, they measure down to the blog post level (something that they learned from HubSpot, whose marketing software Sales Benchmark Index uses). "We grade posts based on things like how closely each are related to the problems of our buyer personas," he says. "We count the number of words in sentences, targeting six and 14 words per sentence. And we grade the effectiveness of the title. Then there are the hard metrics like the number of comments and social shares and links generated, and view counts."

Greg also analyzes what he calls "branded versus non-branded keywords" looking at how many people come to the blog on a monthly basis for each. A branded keyword is when somebody hits the blog for a term like "sales benchmark index" (they entered the company name into Google). A non-branded word would be if somebody searched on "sales territory design".

"Important phrases for us include 'territory design,' 'lead management', and 'sales incentive compensation'," Greg says. Note how these terms are fairly specific, but not so long tail as to be obscure. They specifically target 'lead generation' as a term because the phrase is so competitive. "We go after 'lead management', and we’re doing better as a result of that. We're looking at the number of incoming links and we use the HubSpot Link Grader Search Engine Optimization Tool. This year we've generated 579 new domains linking to us with 27,780 individual links that came from those domains. The thing that I'm probably the happiest about is the quality of the links has gone up. HubSpot graded the links earlier in the year at 47 on a scale of zero to 100. Now the average link rate is 82."

I wanted to know about the ultimate success measure, so I asked Greg how revenue was tracking. "We're up over a little over 50 percent this year," he told me. "That's our revenue number and our head count, which in professional services is a key metric. In consulting, utilization numbers are really important, too and we're running at 80 percent utilized right now, which is great. I can directly attribute much of that gain to inbound marketing and content marketing."

Advice to other organizations on how to implement inbound marketing

With his measurable success, I wanted to know what advice Greg would offer to other CEOs interested in adopting an inbound marketing content strategy.

"This is a mental shift to realize that you're really in the publishing business," Greg says. "If you embrace publishing, then the transformation that we talked about here will happen. If you're a CEO and you still believe that you're in another business, I don't believe you're going to make that transition. Unless you grew up in the publishing world, there’s much to learn. It's a steep learning curve. I've spent my time studying how successful publishing companies build their business. I understood things like audience acquisition and things I never knew about before. It helped quite a bit. You've got to learn how to be an effective publisher."

Disclosures: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met. In addition, I am on HubSpot advisory board and serve as Marketer in Residence at HubSpot.

How to create awesome web content and achieve top search engine rankings

This blog post highlights a very successful marketer - Larry Waight of The Lodge at Chaa Creek, an eco-resort in Western Belize - who has achieved high search engine rankings for many important keywords. This content marketing effort generates a remarkable 80% of new business for the Lodge. This important case example is among the best I've seen if you want to learn how content drives business. This is brand journalism at its finest.

As anyone who has built a web site knows, there is much more to think about than just the content. Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all important aspects of a good web site. Unfortunately, in many organizations these other concerns dominate. Why is that? I think it’s easier to focus on a site's design or technology than on its content.

One of my favorite examples of sites with poor content but big budget design and technology are the global hotel chains. Go to any hotel property from the majors: Hilton, Sheraton, Marriott, or any others from around the world. They all look the same! They have almost no original content about that property!

Yes, appearance and navigation are important. But the best sites focus primarily on content to pull together their various buyers, markets, media, and products in one comprehensive place where content is not only king, but president and Pope as well.

Content drives action

Contrast the vast majority of hotel sites with that of The Lodge at Chaa Creek. I had an opportunity to stay at Chaa Creek a few weeks ago and I interviewed Larry Waight about how he creates his awesome content.

Direct link to the video How to create awesome web content and achieve top search engine rankings on YouTube.

Larry researches what people are searching on such as Belize honeymoon and Belize all inclusive. He then created content on his site or Belize Travel Blog specifically for these phrases which are ranked highly in the search engines.

Solving buyers problem with content

Most interesting to me is how Larry creates content that is about Belize, not just about the hotel.

This is an essential element of Chaa Creek's marketing success. Search terms such as Belize winter solstice 2012 and bird watching in Belize drive people to the lodge who were searching on general travel information. Brilliant.

On his Belize Travel Blog, Larry also writes not about the lodge itself but about Belize travel such as Ten reasons why Belize makes for Honeymoon Bliss.

Brand Journalism

One of my favorite examples of this technique of writing about the things people are interested in is how Larry has created a bunch of content about the local Mayan sites nearby the hotel such as Xunantunich Maya Temples. And, get this, he even writes about the Tikal Mayan site - which is in Guatemala – another country! - about two hours from Chaa Creek.

All this content drives people to the hotel site and blog through the search engines and many people will then choose to stay at The Lodge at Chaa Creek. Indeed, some 80% of new bookings to the Lodge are from this content marketing effort.

This is one of the best examples of content marketing I've seen. If you want to learn more about how Larry creates content, do take the time to watch the video.

It was Larry's introductions that got me to Belize which shows the power of connecting with people via social media. Thanks Larry! I'm planning on returning, with my family next time.

Disclosure (updated September 12, 2012): I connected with Larry several years ago through both Facebook and Twitter. This year we communicated via Facebook about a visit to Belize. To facilitate that, Larry introduced me to the Director of the Belize Tourism Industry Association who invited me to speak in Belize at the Belize Marketing Summit. Because I was going to be in Belize anyway, Larry invited me extend my visit and stay to The Lodge at Chaa Creek for a few days, covering part (but not all) of the costs of my hotel stay. However, this blog post is in no way a paid endorsement. I chose to write this because I truly believe the Lodge at Chaa Creek is a terrific example of success.

Obama says his biggest mistake as president has been communication

Yesterday, President and First Lady Michelle Obama spoke with CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose in the White House Blue Room, where they discussed the failures and successes of his administration as he heads into another election, among other things.

Rose asked President Obama about his biggest mistake as president.

"When I think about what we've done well and what we haven't done well," the president said, "the mistake of my first term - couple of years - was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

Direct link to Obama reflects on his biggest mistake as president on CBS.

After the election in 2008, I wrote a post Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama presidential campaign. My number three was: "Clearly and simply articulate what you want people to believe."

It's fascinating that Obama has identified his failures in this area as president. (While the President used the phrase "tell a story" in the interview, I am expanding it to "communicating" in this post.)

While I think he did an excellent job during the 2008 campaign, I certainly agree with the president that he hasn’t done a good enough job communicating over the past three and a half years as president.

Learning from the President Obama's mistake

These lessons are applicable to all. Many companies don't do a good job communicating. They don't focus on buyer personas and use the techniques of brand journalism and content marketing to tell a story.

Or, like the president, CEOs communicate during a product launch to make sales (the election cycle in Obama's case) but not once the product is released and used by customers.

Unlike the President however, many CEOs don't recognize this as a failure. Often, the people at the top think a good product is enough.

What can your organization learn from the President's mistake?

Note: This is a marketing blog, not a political blog. These are not political observations, but thoughts about marketing and communications.

So, what about you?

Nearly every day, I read a great blog post or find some other content that I like and I want to learn more about the artist who created it.

Remarkably, many people don't bother to tell me who they are! Why? Because these folks haven’t developed an effective "about" or bio page.

Often when people visit you for the first time, we want to know about you, so it is important to provide background.

How to make a blog "about" page

If you are taking the time to create content, you need to have a great About or Biography page that might include such things as your photo, a bit about who you are (with a focus on your passions), maybe a short biography, perhaps a few affiliations, and anything else you deem important for people to know. You might even do a a short video introduction. Here's my bio page.

Make it easy for people to contact you

You never know who might want to reach you. Sure, you'll likely get a few unwanted messages. But you may get invited to speak at a conference or a request be interviewed by a journalist. So you should include contact information such as an email address.

If you are worried about your email being available on the public web you can cleverly mask it. For example, I sometimes list mine as david (at) DavidMeermanScott (dot) com. Humans know what this means but machines do not.

Avoid the About page template that ships with your blog platform.

The worst About pages tend to be ones where people use the template. Try to avoid this because these frequently force you into categories of information that may not make sense for you like "gender" and "hobbies." Instead, make a page on your blog and create an original About listing.

Never pitch again

How do you generate new business? Or find a job? Or get ink in mainstream media?

Do you cold call? Do you send email pitches? Do you hang out in your tradeshow booth and approach passersby? Do you go to networking events and hand out business cards?

Each of these methods for generating attention requires you to approach others -- potential new customers or employers or journalists -- to tell them about what you do in the hope that they might be interested.

These classic outbound marketing techniques are all we really had prior to the ability to become brand journalists by creating valuable information on the Web. Yet many people operate as if we are still in 1993 and the only options available are outbound strategies.

Inbound Marketing

Many organizations are finding tremendous success by planting hundreds or even thousands of new business seeds in the form or blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, photos, how-to guides, research reports, Twitter feeds, and other forms of Web content.

In a technique called Inbound Marketing, each of these marketing assets gets indexed by Google, Bing, and the other search engines so when people enter search terms related to your business, they find you via your valuable information. When people find something interesting you created, they may share it on their social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and the like.

Here are some real-world examples of Inbound Marketing in action in healthcare, from a rock star, in finding a first job, in retail products, for PR agencies, in politics, and for B2B products. You can acheive similar results.

INBOUND 2012

I'll be delivering a keynote at INBOUND 2012, a 3-day inbound marketing conference and training event produced by HubSpot.

More than 2,000 inbound marketers, entrepreneurs and executives are expected in Boston August 27-30 and the agenda includes keynotes, breakout sessions, parties, learning, and fun. I'm speaking the first day but will be at the event the entire time.

HubSpot has kindly offered readers of this blog a 25% discount on tickets to INBOUND 2012. Use the code DMS25. This link has the discount code already applied.

Disclosures: I am Marketer in Residence and on the advisory board at HubSpot. I wrote the foreword to the book Inbound Marketing, by HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, which is part of my New Rules of Social Media book series.

Getting fired: Ten years later and much happier

Almost exactly ten years ago I was fired. Sacked. Let go. Terminated. Made redundant. Booted out. Canned.

Getting fired was an incredible gift. I just didn't know it at the time.

After NewsEdge was acquired by The Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), my position as vice president of marketing was eliminated.

I like to think that my ideas about Web-based marketing were a little too radical for my new bosses. Perhaps.

Or as is the case in many acquisitions, maybe the new bosses had a pre-determined list of who from the acquired company were redundant to people already in the parent company. Likely.

Or maybe I just pissed somebody off. I was an unknown. I wanted to impress and might have been too aggressive. The people already in the company were familiar and I was unknown. In business the familiar usually wins. Possible.

Anyway, after six years at NewsEdge, I was out on the street.

This was in 2002, one of the worst job markets in history.

It was awful.

But it was also incredibly powerful and amazingly liberating.

It's too easy for me to say from my vantage point today that it was just a matter of starting my own business. The truth is that after 15 years of working for a living, it took some time to get my head around the idea that I could support myself by my own wits.

I had always been an employee. Except for doing yard work for neighbors when I was a teenager, I had never been an entrepreneur.

I did look around for another full-time marketing VP job, but it was a terrible economic situation after 9/11. There was nothing I could find in the Boston area.

I used the bruises on my butt from having been kicked out the door to motivate me to do something new.

It was very difficult.

I was a guy who always had a nice fat corporate teat to suckle. I was used to a corporate nanny to provide for me plus a business card with a name that many recognized.

Now I was going to be a company of one person.

I started my own business to refine my concepts about Web marketing, work with select clients, and teach others through writing, speaking at conferences, and conducting seminars for corporate groups.

Aren't you still unemployed?

It took a long time to convince my family, friends, and colleagues that "marketing strategist" wasn't a euphemism for "unemployed." No, I'd say, I do want to make a go of speaking and writing and consulting for a living. Really, I'd insist, I wasn't just waiting for a full time gig to come my way.

It's an enormous cliche to say that you need a disaster like being fired to change your trajectory in life. For me that was absolutely true. Had I not been kicked out of Thomson in a crappy job market, I'd likely still be working in a full-time marketing role today.

I was given the gift of a new direction.

That was ten years ago. The result has been the best ten years of my life.

Reinvention is difficult.

But the hard work can pay off.

Thank you for your support during the past ten years.

Educate and inform instead of interrupt and sell

You have the power to elevate yourself on the web to a position of importance.

In the e-marketplace of ideas, successful people educate and inform. They highlight their expertise with videos, content-rich websites, social streams, blogs, ebooks, and images.

We also have the ability to interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, chat rooms, and forums.

The key is to focus on buyers' needs, not your own ego.

Stop hyping your products and services. Don't rely on interruption techniques. You'll regret taking advantage of people’s time and attention with unwanted communications.

Instead you need to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive.

Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.

Don't push product

Teach people something. Share your expertise.

It's counter intuitive: You sell more when you stop selling.

As you build your market people will find you via search engines and talk you up on social networks.

Risk

"Don't do that, it's too risky."

In business, people spend a great deal of time and money evaluating risk. It's one of those things they teach in MBA school.

But are we looking at risk in the right way?

According to the American Bar Association, there were 1,143,358 resident and active attorneys in the United States in 2007 (the most recent data I could quickly find). That's over a million people, many of them advising businesses on what to avoid because it is risky.

They lawyers say things like: "Don't let people blog and tweet because they may say something that gets the company in trouble." As I wrote last week, lawyers clamping down is especially true in highly regulated industries.

From the legal perspective, saying "no" might make sense (it avoids lawsuits). But thinking about risk in totality (instead of just what the lawyers think) is saying no the right way to do business? Frequently the businesses and the people saying "yes" to risk are the ones that succeed.

When the perceived risk is low, we tend to do okay evaluating a situation. Yes, it is risky to fly to the business meeting (the plane may crash) but we figure the risk is worth taking.

But when the risk seems high (starting a business or quitting your job to go freelance) we are unable to accurately evaluate the risk.

I think this is because we humans fail to evaluate the risk of staying the course. We don't evaluate the risk in *NOT* starting the business or keeping the job at the big company.

How's that big stable company working out for you?

Perhaps your parents advised you to get a degree from a good university and then work for a nice, stable, well-known company. We're told that is the least risky path. But is it?

If you worked for Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual or Enron or your company had to downsize or your division was acquired or manufacturing moved to Laos or your boss thought you were too smart and therefore a threat or the company moved to Atlanta or you hit 50 years old or any number of other scenarios - BOOM - you were out of a job. Unemployed.

When you put yourself at the mercy of an employer, you have significant risk. When you work in an industry in decline, you have significant risk.

The flip side of risk

In my experience, people fail to evaluate the risk of taking the opposite course. They look at risk without thinking the problem all the way through.

What is the risk of *not* starting your business this year?

What is the risk of *not* letting your employees communicate via Facebook?

What is the risk of *not* taking a few years off to travel with your rock band?

What is the risk of *not* learning that new skill?

What is the risk of *not* quitting your job and going freelance?

Consider the opening line of this blog post again: "Don't do that, it's too risky."

Maybe the better statement is: "You had better do that, because it's too risky not to."

photo credit: postaletrice via photo pin cc