Today was the first beta session of our completely new (and I believe completely timely) Duct Tape Marketing program, Total Online Presence.
John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing founder) is leading this first beta session with a group of approximately 20 small business owners.
These business owners will be providing feedback and suggestions throughout the program - this feedback will be used by John to shape the final program that will then be passed on to us - the Authorized consultants - to package and deliver to SME business owners in our areas. We expect the new program to be available in January 2013.
I am going to follow along with the weekly beta sessions in real-time, in order to give a sneak peek into what you can expect - and to pass on some tips that you can use right away as you build your own total online presence.
Session 1: Building Your Content Platform
This first session (of six total sessions) starts out with some introductions from the small business owners participating in the sessions. It's great to see such a diversity, not only in location (from California to Ghana), but in terms of types of businesses. Attorneys, educational institutions.
The most surprising group (but maybe not so surprising in retrospect) are sales and marketing professionals trying to increase their own knowledge of online marketing, and provide value to their employers and/or clients. But it's easy to forget that the transition from a primarily traditional marketing world (market at and interrupt) to an online world with completely new rules of marketing (educate and inform) was not that long ago.
It's interesting to hear some of the experiences of these small businesses so far when it comes to online marketing. Many have realized over the past year that they really need to embrace online marketing to be competitive. To move forward, they've read books, taken courses, and read online - but are still confused and simply don't know where to start, and how to put everything together to create a step-by-step cohesive program.
Online Portal:
This is what I consider to be one of the best parts of this new program - the online portal. This format is very similar to our Marketing Catalyst program. It is essentially an online university that supplements your consulting program - including:
- Video overview for each session
- Resources
- Links to tools
The online portal is great, because you'll be able to review videos and readings at any time during the program, and you'll have all the recommended tools to use linked in one place. So for session one, every tool you'll need to use to build your content plan will be listed under the Session 1 tab. The best part - you'll be able to access this portal ongoing following the program.
Session 1 Content Platform:
We no longer talk about setting up a website by itself, we talk about setting up your Content Platform.
Setting up a content platform essentially takes away the mystery from online marketing, and sets you up for a systematic online marketing process. What does your content platform include?
- Listening
- Research
- Blogging
- Lead capture
- Landing Pages
- Amplify
Here are some key take-aways from this session:
Listening:
Before setting up your content platform, it's important to first "listen" to what's being said out there about your industry, your company and your competitors.
Who should you listen to? Customers, journalists, influencers (industry leaders or gurus), competitors, industry associations and groups, industry blogs
How do you listen? Twitter search, Google alerts, Google Reader, sign up for blogs
For Corner Your Market, we use Hootsuite to monitor Twitter searches, RSS feeds to monitor blog posts from small business and marketing leaders, such as Duct Tape Marketing, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Meerman Scott, Hubspot, and others.
I personallly like Google Reader. It's kind of like putting all your newspapers, magazines and blogs into one place. You can just go there every morning and scan them to see what's new. The key is to set it up with the right feeds in the first place so you're scanning what you really want to see.
Research:
When we talk about content, we have to have a total plan and identify the chapters of content we need to be focused on. These chapters, tend to be the important keyword phrases, subjects and topics that our prosepects and clients are searching for when they are looking for a business like yours.
When many small business owners think about developing content, an image of staring at a blank white screen is conjured up. But in reality, you have to have a set and strategic process to the type of content you produce. This is actually good news to most business owners, as the prospect of staring at a blank screen every day wondering what to write is a daunting prospect indeed!
Five types of research for developing your content:
- Brainstorming
- Keyword research (Tool: Google Analytics)
- Competitive research (Tool: SEO book)
- Trend research (Tool: Google Trends)
- Analytics research
A note when it comes to competitive research - some "competitors" may not really be your competitors, but for various reasons may be ranking ahead of your site for your keywords. The important part here is to understand what they are doing that is causing them to rank higher. More and deeper content? Better use of keywords?
Tools to use:
Complete inbound marketing tools like Hubspot have research and content ability built right into the tool. But before you go about using into these tools, you have to first understand the basics of content.
Blogging:
Today, every website has to have a blog, and we highly recommend using Wordpress for your website (this website is built on Wordpress) because it's not only a powerful website content management system, but blogging platform as well.
Some of the key plugins to add to your blog that make it easy to share and deliver content include:
- Related content
- Sociable
- SEO from Yoast
John talked about how he blogs (and he definitely knows what he's talking about - his blog ranks #6 on the Top 100 Small Business Blogs with more than 117,000 followers).
Here's what John uses:
- StudioPress theme framework called Genesis
- Hosting by Synthesis - built just for Wordpress - it can handle the high traffic to his website
- Plugins mentioned above (Related, Sociable, SEO from Yoast)
- Routine to amplify content to Digg, StumbledUpon, Social Media, etc.)
Not sure where to start or what to blog about? Subscribe to blogs in your industry and see what they're doing. And one thing most people don't think about - you can get some guest bloggers. These could be people in your field who are not direct competitors. For example, at Corner Your Market we could invite graphic designers, web developers or event planners to do guest blogging.
Lead Capture:
We want to engage every person who comes to our website to engage in a relationship. You want every single person who comes to your site to give you an email address.
In order to do this, there must be a value exchange. What will they give you their email address for? An eBook? A webinar? A tip sheet? This means you have to commit to creating that valuable piece that you will give away.
- Add forms to your content to capture information
- Use landing pages
Amplify your Content:
Once you've created your content, you need to share it. You can promote and share your content via social media and bookmarking sites.
Next Session:
Next week, John will lead the group through the next session on Organic Search Engine Optimization. I'll be following that session, of course, and will report back to you with a sneak peek on what you need to do to get prospects to find you online.
For those of you who just can't wait to hear more, I encourage you to check out our webinar that provides a great introduction to the entire program along with our free eBook, The Essential Guide to Building a Total Online Presence.
