You can get access to this free training and all future Community Connect training events at http://AskDeniseWakeman.com

Community Connect is a free training series sponsored by the Marketing Trailblazers Community at https://www.marketingtrailblazers.co

The post Community Connect: Planning and Scheduling Content – Video appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

Then what happened? Be honest. 

Did you take action?

I learned quite a bit about you (my audience) from the recent survey I conducted about repurposing content. (If you missed the survey, you can still take it here.) Though it didn’t surprise me too much, I learned the number one thing that stops most people from taking action and reaping the benefits of repurposing their content.

Can you guess what it is?

Like many, many online entrepreneurs, do you feel overwhelmed by what you imagine it will take to repurpose your content and then decide you just don’t have the time to do it?

I hear you. And, I feel your anxiety since I too have experienced this on more than one occasion in the last 20 years of doing business via the Web. I’ll address this further in a bit.

There were 62 responses (to date) and while I was shooting for at least 100, the data stayed pretty consistent after receiving 50 or so. I’m confident I got a good cross-section of people to take the survey since it was promoted on all my social networks as well as sent to a select group on my email list.

Click to Get Your Free Repurposing Checklist

Here’s the scoop in a nutshell

• LinkedIn Publishing is by far the most popular way of repurposing blog posts with 33% of the votes.
• Nearly 50% of respondents repurpose their content occasionally when they remember or have time.
• By a wide margin, you want to know how to create a strategy for repurposed content, followed by how to leverage repurposed content.

Where it got interesting and even more informative was in the two open-ended questions about what frustrates you most and a request for what I missed (didn’t ask).

What do you think was the most common response about what frustrates you about content repurposing? (I gave you a hint above!)

Yep, you guessed it: “I don’t have time.”

“The time it takes.”

“The time involved.”

21% of those who responded cited lack of time as why they rarely or never repurpose their content. It didn’t surprise me. I’ve heard this excuse since 2005 when I started teaching people how to blog for their business. 

Other top reasons included: fear of duplicate content penalties, not having a system, not understanding how, and not seeing any benefit.

If you’re not repurposing any of your content and believe it’s a waste of time or takes too much time, or there’s no benefit, please read this post now: Repurposing Your Content – 13 Ways to Reach More People. 

In future articles, I will address the fear and myth of duplicate content as well as how to create a system. Now, I want to return to the issue of time.

You do have time for repurposing content

My philosophy about time is this: you make time for what is important to you.

If you don’t have time to do what it takes to get visibility for your business and create more paths to your virtual home on the web so more potential clients can find you, then it’s clearly not that important to you. That’s OK. It’s your choice. However, if your business is stagnant, you don’t have enough clients to sustain your business, and you get little traffic and few conversions, then maybe, just maybe, it’s time to choose to make more time for marketing your business.

One of the most productive use of your time is to repurpose your evergreen blog posts. Why? It takes a whole lot longer to start writing an article from nothing than it does to modify an existing article and republish it on a different platform. Guaranteed. 

While there are many, many ways to reformat your content, I’m not suggesting you spend time doing them all for every blog post. Really. 

You can increase your reach if you simply pick two or three places to repurpose and republish. If you have an assistant, this is a good task to delegate. In many cases, you’ll get more visibility publishing on a site like LinkedIn Publishing or Medium or Slideshare than you did on your blog post. If you don’t want that, fine. Please disregard everything you’ve just read!

My advice to clients and students is always to try just one new thing at a time. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Choose one new platform, pick a blog post and figure out what you need to do so it fits that platform. Try experimenting with a different image, a different title, or a new call to action. Then, promote the new content and see what happens.

Stay tuned for more on this topic. Repurposing your content is an efficient way to reach more of your ideal prospects without creating unique new content for every platform. I’ll show you how in the coming weeks.

Click to Get Your Free Repurposing Checklist

The post The #1 Thing Stopping Most People from Repurposing Content appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

As a business owner, you know how it goes…you’ve got to constantly learn and adapt to new ways of marketing your wares, develop and reach new fans, and stay ahead of your competition. 

The same goes for your blogsite, especially if it’s an integral part of your online marketing strategy (it is, right?). Whether you want to or not, you’ve got to blog like a pro.

What’s hot in design, what works for SEO and blog promotion, how to get more traffic and better conversion…it’s not a static situation and it’s easy to fall behind when you’re busy running your business and serving your audience. I’ve been blogging for my business since 2004 and while the core principles remain pretty much the same, so much has changed as well. It’s a daily Adventure in Blogging!

The theme for the recent 30 Day Online Visibility Challenge revolved around optimizing your blog for better business results. While it’s not as sexy as list building and social media, spending time updating your blog, the plugins, layout, visual branding and how you promote your posts, is an exercise I recommend you make time for at least once a year.

To keep my Challenge participants up to date, I’ve been curating articles about blogging on Google+ and have a collection about Better Business Blogging.  I culled through them and picked 10 articles to share with you with the hope that you will pick up some new ideas, strategies and tactics to amp up your business blog, too.

Featured experts

If you like an article, follow the author on Twitter (linked) and be sure to give a shout-out to let them know!

Andrea Beltrami, Shelly Kramer, Andrianes Pinantoan, Rebekah Radice, Syed Balkhi, Elna Cain, Ann Smarty, Mary Iannotti, Steve Rayson, and Lindsay Kolowich.

The articles listed below are not posted in any order of importance. They’re all great! If you like an article and get value, please give it a thumbs up so I can learn what’s important to you. If there’s an article you’d like to add to the list, post the title and URL in the comments and I’ll review it.

The post How to Blog Like a Pro and Stay Ahead of the Pack appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

By the end of a mini-course on creating branded blog images, taught by Andrea Beltrami, I knew I was going to hire her to help me with the visual branding for my blog and other marketing images. She is sassy and savvy, both qualities I like, and most importantly, Andrea is talented with a keen eye for what works. I hired her and immediately received feedback about what I wanted, what would work and what wouldn’t, along with suggestions for how to improve my visuals all around. Andrea helped me create a simple, attractive and recognizable look for my blog and quote images. Now,  you can get a dose of Andrea’s badass visual marketing savvy.

In the mini presentation below, you’ll see before and after – images I was creating before Andrea created a simple, brilliant image template for me:

During the show, in the video below, we discuss:

• Defining your branding guidelines 
• Why your visuals need to be consistent
• How to convey your uniqueness online 
• Why you’re missing out on connection and deeper exploration if you don’t create visual content for your audience to devour

(clickable timestamps are on YouTube)

Not to Miss Moments

0:14 How to use visual branding to boost your visibility on your blog
3:57 When did Andrea discover design was her calling?
8:41 What is a style guide and how do you figure out what it is?
9:47 Guidelines are the bones of entire branding
12:07 How do we bring the style guide to a blog
13:56 When do you start integrating brand guidelines?
16:15 How do brand guidelines save you time?
16:50 How does consistency contribute to the know, like and trust factor?
20:01 How Denise developed brand for the Blog Squad in 2005
22:12 How does Andrea help clients tap into their uniqueness?
24:54 What are the five adjectives that describe you?
27:04 How does Andrea convey the importance of visual marketing to her clients?
28:08 What’s the biggest barrier to integrating visuals on a blog?
32:35 What’s Andrea’s most memorable adventure?

Download the Audio 

For your convenience, the mp3 is posted below, from the live Hangout with Andrea:

[smart_track_player url=”https://soundcloud.com/denise-wakeman/andrea-beltrami” title=”Badass Visual Branding for Your Blog” artist=”Denise Wakeman” color=”5181cd” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]

Learn More About Visual Marketing

How to Plan and Create Captivating Visual Content

How to Stay Visible Online When You’re Having an Adventure Offline

Microcontent – Use Short-Form Content to Amplify Your Message

About the Guest

Andrea ‘Dre’ Beltrami is a straight shooting, wine guzzling, sassy California girl who in 2012 traded in her miserable day job for her lifelong dream of self-employment. Over the last two years, Dre has helped solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs from around the world create a vision for their voice. She helps entrepreneurial badasses propel their online success by creating branding and visual strategies that reflect their unique personality and style. To learn how to create an instantly recognizable brand that conveys your passion, purpose, personality and voice head over to The Branded Solopreneur and join her Badass Solopreneur Society today. It’s your right to be heard and she can help you do just that!

Join Me for Future Adventures in Visibility

•  Watch previous Adventures
• Subscribe on YouTube 
• Subscribe and Review on iTunes 
  (if you enjoyed this interview, please rate and review it on iTunes!)

To get reminders about when Adventures are scheduled and when replays are posted, you can get on the list and follow me on Google+. Be sure to let me know you want to be added to my Adventures in Visibility Notification Circle so you get the invitation directly through Google+.

Do you have a question about how to create a more visible presence on the Web? Click here to record your question  and I’ll include it along with my answer in an upcoming show! 

The post Badass Visual Branding for Your Blog | Adventures in Visibility with Andrea Beltrami appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

Bringing in new readers is an integral part of blog marketing: It’s not enough to create awesome content – You need to spread the word for more people to discover your site.

However attracting new readers is not enough: You need to bring your current readers back too. In our era of information overload, no matter how awesome you are, your readers are most likely to forget about your blog unless you keep reminding them that you exist.

Your existing readership is what powers up your blog: Repeat users are more likely to interact (because they already know you) by sharing your articles and leaving comments. Therefore, you must never let your readers forget about you!

Here are 10 ways I am keeping with my readers in touch:

Always Look for More Ways to Build up Your Email List

Building up your list is the most efficient way to keep in touch with your readers: For example, you can auto-distribute your articles to that list driving them back to your site again and again.

We’ve talked about generating leads a lot but it’s never enough. The thing is, there’s no single recipe for how to generate more subscribers: It all comes down to lots of experimenting, tweaking, and creative brainstorming.

Here are few ingenious ways to experiment with to gain more subscribers:

1. Build up your list using your email signature.

People who are emailing back and forth with you are very much used to hearing from you. They become perfect subscribers who’ll feel more like interacting with your emails.

Besides, emailing is the least monetized effort: For example, I send replies to about 50 emails a day (responding to pitches, giving free advice, helping people connect, etc). None of that effort is in any way marketed (The only benefit is building my connections). So why not try to get more out of that since I am already spending my time emailing daily. I use WiseStamp to create those calls-to-action in my signature.

2. Set up a giveaway

A giveaway is another absolutely awesome way to generate some new subscribers: Who doesn’t love free staff?

If you don’t have a product of your own to give away, partner with some brand (There’s a monetization opportunity out there too!)

Tomoson is one of the most legit and valuable sites when it comes to finding brands to partner with on giveaways and list building. Just search it for [giveaway] and then filter by category:

3. Host free webinars.

This is one of the most efficient ways to build up leads. Apart from building great content, developing informative webinars is an excellent way to keep your audience coming back. You can deliver value by sharing your expertise through live and recorded webinars with ClickWebinar, which provides a venue for online video conferences and webinars across any platform.

Webinars let people register (so they can opt in to hearing more from you when registering). Plus people who come to your webinar get to know you well, so they are more likely to recognize your emails and react positively to all of them. Hosting a webinar is one of the most effective site monetization methods too. So you can build up your list and make money as well once you get a bit comfortable with the process.

4. Use Leadshare.

The free service by Slideshare lets you overlay your slides with a lead generation form. I love the fact that it’s so well integrated: The forms are preserved when the Slideshare content is embedded (so you can basically bring those forms whenever you cover the topic again), when you add that Slideshare to your Linkedin account, when you add that Slideshare presentation to your long-form Linkedin article…

Bringing your form into Slideshare is a great way to cater for more marketing channels and generate leads from outside of your blog.

This article offers a few more tips: 5 Little Lead Generation Experiments You Can Run Right Now

Optimize Your Blog Comments (WordPress)

With all the different comment management options out there, I still prefer WordPress built-in functionality. The reasons are plenty… To name just a couple of more important ones:

• I like owning and hosting that content (For example, Disqus works great for notifying people of new replies, but with the new dashboard, you don’t really need to go to the actual article as you can like and reply to comments from any page where Disqus is running comments. It looks a bit like traffic stealing to me).
• I love the flexibility the multitude of WordPress plugins are offering me.

Speaking of WordPress plugins… Here are those two that help me build my blog community:

5. Give your commenters the option to opt in: I am using GetResponse because they have a great WordPress integration but I guess other email platforms have their solutions as well

6. Notify your commenters of newer comments: I use this simple plugin to send an email to every previous participant in the discussion notifying of newer comments. It’s an old one, but it’s still working for me! There seems to be a newer version, but I haven’t tried it.

Further reading: 9 Ways to Encourage People to Comment on your Blog

Use Social Media Hashtags, Content & Tagging

It takes just a few minutes of your time to make your article more shareable and let your readers bring other people (back) in (through the use of hashtags and social media tagging). Here are the 4 tips that worked well for me:

7. Let your readers tweet quotes from your page.

This works especially well when you do an expert group interview: Let your readers tweet any participating expert’s quote and tag that expert in the tweet: That will bring that person back!

Here’s a good example of what I am talking about: Notice if you click any “Tweet this” box, the resulting tweet will have a person who said that already tagged in the tweet:

Here are some tools and plugins to help you create those tweetable quotes within your content.

8. Use embedded content.

Embedded content is highly engaging: It adds social media proof to your content and lets more readers spread the word. You can’t overdo with it (not to slow your page down) but it may often be a good idea to engage more readers. For example, you may embed a Google Plus update and ask your readers to tag their friends if they think they might be interested in contributing.

I also find that Sitegeek.com does an awesome job engaging users into tweeting their opinions on the listed hosting company and then using those tweets as reviews:

9. Tag most important people when adding a project in Viral Content Buzz

Viral Content Buzz is the free platform allowing you to bring your content in front of social media influencers.

Sometimes, when I post an interview with an influencer for example, I’ll add their Twitter handle in the title or “retweet me” box and thus this person will be tagged in every Tweet VCB users create. This will prompt that influencer come back to my article again and again (to participate in the discussion or promote it again!)

Here’s the project:

Here are the resulting tweets tagging the interviewee:

10. Add the most relevant hashtag in the title of the article.

The thing is, in most cases, the page title is what gets tweeted, so if I use my hashtag there, the hashtag will make it to the tweet as well. I am using this trick for our Twitter chats for example: I use the official hashtag in the title of the article promoting the Twitter chat, so each tweet gets into the room where it has more chances to get retweeted. This results in more engagement and more repeat visits!

How do you bring your readers back to your site? Please share your tips in the comments!

The post 10 Ways to Bring More Readers BACK to Your Blog appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.