Archive for the ‘newsletter’ tag
4 Lessons in Creating Dynamic Social Content
Why would I care? Why would I share? These are two key questions that Droga5’s chief creative officer, Ted Royer, says his agency considers when creating social content for brands on Facebook.
Royer and Carlos Figueiredo, associate creative director at Publicis Kaplan Thaler, hashed out what makes engaging Facebook content during a Creative Week panel titled “Newsfeeder: The Most Creative Posts From Facebook Brands,” moderated by BuzzFeed’s CCO, Jeff Greenspan. We’ve gathered a few of the key takeaways from the conversation for you as well as specific brand takeaways.
1. Don’t Be Dull
Brands want to be your friends, and like a good friend, a brand should have something new to offer every time it interacts with its audience. Essentially, a brand should be as interesting as its audience’s friends are and have a wealth of things to say.
If a brand is going to engage in social media, it can’t be boring. In other words, it shouldn’t be the guy who walks around at a party and repeats the same joke, praises himself and shares only stories about him. What works in a TV or print campaign (three ads transmitting the same message) usually does not work in social media.
Brand Tip:
Create a content calendar that has different types of content offerings every day. Try to diversify as much as possible (photos, memes, videos, links, questions/quizzes, games, etc.), and utilize user-generated content as well.
2. Create Multifaceted Brand Identities
Sometimes brand narratives are dictated by what is said in traditional media. But often those narratives that are created for TV or print are not true enough to the brand to play in the social space—they are one-dimensional and leave no room for real conversations or natural growth.
Agencies must help brands bridge the gap between traditional and digital advertising, going deeper into the brand story to create compelling social content. To go deeper, it is essential to understand the brand’s mission and identity. If you think about your brand as a character (or persona), developing a rich personality for it, you’ll better understand the types of content your brand should and should not be publishing as well as the topics it should and should not comment on.
Brands have to carefully determine which conversations are appropriate for them to join. As things happen in the world, think about how they relate to the brand. Even if a brand isn’t talking about the specific event, understand the environment and adjust content publishing accordingly (e.g., don’t tweet about your award as a natural disaster is happening).
Brand Tip:
Always ask, Does the social content I’m creating fit the role and tone of voice I’ve developed for my brand? Does it have the authority to publish?
3. Test and Learn
Instead of your investing millions of dollars in a new, traditional advertising campaign you’ve just dreamed up, social media offers a place to test and learn with smaller campaigns. If these ideas are well received on the appropriate social channel, the brand can start developing a full-blown social and/or traditional campaign. Vet things by your own audience. Figure out what you did right, and continue to play with and develop the idea.
Brand Tip:
There are established and emerging platforms that are free to join that provide innovative ways to offer content to audiences. Lowe’s did this wonderfully with Vine. If the test-and-learn campaign doesn’t work, it’s been exposed to only a small audience. But if it works, that content can be extended to the audience’s audiences and beyond. Don’t be afraid to try!
4. Unlock the Truth
Social content should be thought of in the same way a stand-up comic would think about a joke—as immediate and fairly disposable. People should laugh and move on. Regarding the Newcastle #nobollocks campaign that Droga5 created, Royer said the idea was to be too honest and reveal the machinery behind the bullshit through feisty, attention-grabbing images and refreshingly true statements, like “Newcastle winter IPA. Our worst selling beer in the summer. #NoBollocks.” One of the April Fool’s Day gags that Publicis Kaplan Thaler created for Scope, about bacon-flavored mouthwash, was shared almost three times more (112,803) than it was liked (30,971).
Not every brand can own humor, however, or should try to play in that space. Recognize the role of the brand, and create from a place that is relevant. Comedians and writers are trying to scrape away the inessential to reveal a truth, and truth is by far the most powerful thing a brand can bring to life. The best content reframes something already known, and the content that is shared the most is the content that helps promote one’s own identity and strengthen one’s social bonds.
Brand Tip:
Be careful about the tone your brand takes, and don’t reach for humor. Branded attempts at humor often can backfire or simply fall flat. Be true to the brand.
Speed, honesty, humor, usefulness and relevance are some of the most important aspects of creating dynamic social content.
Is your brand creating the dynamic content that audiences want, or is it just creating content that furthers the brand’s own agenda?
The Ultimate Guide in Writing an E-book
Writers nowadays don’t have to fear the fearful publishers who require countless of editing and proofreading before considering releasing the book copy to public stands. This is because writers can publish books themselves online or subscribe for ebook conversion services. Surely e-books make a lot of difference in the world of content development. In this [...]
Author information
The post The Ultimate Guide in Writing an E-book appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Why Email Is Still Alive [Infographic]
Social media’s earliest medium — email — may still be an effective marketing tool for businesses. This infographic shows how email marketing campaigns have benefitted from new technology and have also found a niche among media outlets and small business owners.
News-aggregating communities are a big part of the trend because they speed up the process. Scoop.it users create 19 pieces of content per month through the news curation tool — the equivalent of 52 newsletters per year — while MailChimp users create an average of 6.2 email campaigns per year through the email building and tracking service.
Email newsletters are especially effective for media outlets. According to the studies cited in this infographic, newsletters sent by the organizations have the lowest spam abuse rates and are opened twice as often (30.9 percent) as average email campaigns.
Below are more statistics on how newsletters can drive business for publishers and brands, as well as a few tips on when to post.
Infographic by Scoop.it.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
When Promoted Hashtags Are Campaign Killers
No matter how lofty a brand’s goals are when it uses hashtags, there are always individuals ready to use them to drag it into the gutter.
McDonald’s is on its second go-round with promoted hashtags gone awry, this time with #UnwrapWhatsFresh. The hashtag was created to support McDonald’s new Premium McWrap, which features chicken (grilled or crispy) and fresh vegetables served in a warm tortilla.
The hashtag was promoted on Twitter, but instead of talking about healthy eating, a number of people were tweeting these sweet nothings:
Luckily for McDonald’s, the hashtag wasn’t completely hijacked by authors tweeting unsavory thoughts, but it did remind us of #McDStories—a disastrous campaign that inspired countless tweets from former employees and customers alike revealing horrific details about the company that would instantly spoil your lunch.
Tweets courtesy of Huffington Post
I’m not here just to pick on McDonald’s. It isn’t the first brand to have its hashtag hijacked, and it certainly won’t be the last. But do these media “disasters” make promoted trends and hashtags unwise or risky investments? Or could all engagement be good engagement? Should the blame fall on hijackers for voicing their opinions, or is the onus on the brand to ensure that the promoted content is authentic enough to generate largely positive discussion?
The Success of Failure
Just a cursory search of the #McDStories hashtag will produce dozens of articles about how this campaign blew up in McDonald’s’ face, and at first glance that’s pretty accurate. But what is success when it comes to promoted hashtags? If it’s awareness, how much negative effect on a brand does it have if the virality is fueled by negative tweets?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m thankful I wasn’t in the shoes of anyone working in the company’s PR agency during that time. I don’t believe that McDonald’s wanted the campaign to garner such a negative reaction, but I also don’t think it came as a surprise to the brand. In the end, engagement, positive or negative, will increase the reach of a hashtag, pushing it closer to the tipping point of going viral. It’s up to the brand to manage the conversation as best it can.
#YourBrandStory
The larger issue here, and one McDonald’s may have skirted with its #UnwrapWhatsFresh campaign, is the necessity for a brand to remain true to its story. If we’ve learned anything about social media, it’s that you can’t bullshit your audience (pardon my French). McDonald’s has faced harsh criticism for much of its existence but more recently in the past few decades, as the health craze has gained momentum (seemingly in parallel with our nation’s growing obesity problem; go figure). If an audience feels it’s being misled or flat-out lied to, it will react, and now it has its own online audiences to preach to.
The #McDStories hashtag, also known as #McDHorrorStories, is easy to pick on; if you take into account the indigestion and overall malaise that is felt shortly after having consumed McDonald’s (at least for me—your experiences may differ), most people don’t have positive stories about their experiences there. #UnwrapWhatsFresh is less obvious but still smells inauthentic. When the average person thinks of McDonald’s, they don’t think of fresh. I realize that McDonald’s is trying to promote a lighter side of its menu (and I applaud the effort to provide healthier options), but the brand’s effort to straddle the health divide is opening up too many opportunities for ridicule and negative sentiment.
Getting Honest
McDonald’s, as well as a number of other half-health-conscious restaurants, has to get honest about its business. Domino’s is the poster child for owning up to a negative brand story and using that negativity to craft a new brand story. Domino’s used to be like most fast-food restaurants—making the food as quickly and at the lowest cost as possible in pursuit of high volume and profit margin. Unfortunately, the lack of pride in the product resulted in feedback claiming it was “mass-produced, boring, bland pizza.”
Instead of deflecting or ignoring the negativity, Domino’s embraced it, publicly admitting its faults and using them to fuel a marketing campaign called The Pizza Turnaround. It documented its reinvention, changing its recipe and tracking down the detractors in hopes that they’d try its #newpizza and reconsider.
“You can either use negative comments to get you down or use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza,” said Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s. “We did the latter.”
McDonald’s isn’t a stranger to this tactic. They recently won an Ad Age Viral Video Award for “Best Brand Transparency” for their work on “Our Food. Your Questions” where they show you step by step how a real McDonald’s hamburger goes through a transformation to become “commercial-ready” (since they never look like the commercial when you get them in real life). It’s informative, transparent (hence the award) and showed that McDonald’s doesn’t always shy away from the truth behind their product.
Back to the #Hashtag
There’s definitely an argument to be had about whether all virality is good virality (feel free to substitute awareness for virality). I bet United Airlines would argue that it’s not. But the reasons that hashtags like #McDStories and, to a lesser extent, #UnwrapWhatsFresh can backfire is that they cause a disconnect between the brand and its story. Is McDonald’s now a place where we go as a family to share (#MdD)stories? Can I start regularly eating a healthy lunch there? What is it, exactly?
Creating hashtags is no easy feat and not something left to an intern to brainstorm for 30 minutes. They embody a part of your brand in as few characters as possible, but they still tell a story. Make sure it’s the right one.
4 TED Talks All Brand Storytellers Must Watch
TED talks are a gold mine of knowledge. Because the TED website’s topics include not only technology, education and design (TED) but also business, science, activism, health, storytelling and everything in between, one can get lost on the site for days.
A number of these short talks (most are around 20 minutes) revolve around storytelling. While they don’t necessarily address brand storytelling, they do offer insights that a brand could apply to its efforts to engage audiences through its brand story. I’ve gathered four talks I found particularly useful, and I’ve included a brand takeaway for each. Enjoy!
1. Andrew Stanton—The Clues to a Great Story
Filmmaker Andrew Stanton knows a thing or two about effective storytelling and breaking storytelling conventions. But no matter the type of story, one rule remains: the storyteller has to make the audience care. Stanton draws on his experience at Pixar as well as his own life to explain what makes a good story, why the audience wants to be put to work, and the roles of drama, anticipation and uncertainty in a gripping story. If for no other reason, watch the talk to hear a great opening for a presentation.
What brands can learn from this talk
The success of a brand, at least from a marketing perspective, isn’t defined by a collection of isolated events, executions or campaigns. Instead, it is determined by how well the brand exists over the long haul—how effectively a story can be woven around the brand and told in a way that makes the audience care, propelling them forward and enticing them to “read on” (so to speak). “If things go static, stories die, because life is never static,” Stanton says.
Ensure that your brand is consistently creating content, whether it be Facebook posts, tweets, an email newsletter or videos. You’ve heard the saying “Keep your audience engaged” time and time again, but it’s imperative for your brand’s ongoing narrative. When your content ends, so too does the act of telling your brand’s story.
2. Chimamanda Adichie—The Danger of a Single Story
Novelist and storyteller Chimamanda Adichie, a native of eastern Nigeria, has learned firsthand how listening to only one story can lead to critical misunderstandings. She tells of how her U.S. professor felt that her portrayal of Africans in a novel wasn’t authentic, because they were well-fed and driving cars; and of her own guilt when on a visit to Mexico, she realized that her belief in the story of Mexicans sneaking across the border and fleecing the U.S. health-care system was far from accurate. Stories are powerful, but they can create untruths when they become the only story.
What brands can learn from this talk
Stories can and often will define a brand, for better or worse. While it is important for a brand to unearth its story platform—the story at the heart of the brand—and tell it in ways that inform and excite, hearing only one such story can cause misunderstanding—even if it’s a good story. Audiences hearing a single negative story can receive an even more destructive message.
If you believed the single story of energy drinks as a category, you’d believe that all brands are selling a glorified concoction of caffeine and sugar. But Red Bull has a vise-like grip on its brand story—about living life to the fullest—thus propelling them to social success and incredible brand affinity.
As a brand marketer, you must ensure that your audience hears a variety of relevant stories and forming ideas and opinions about those that come from the brand itself. That means you’ll have to not only create content but actively engage with audiences, particularly negative ones, to steer all conversations toward the truth.
3. Karen Thompson Walker—What Fear Can Teach Us
Walker, a fiction writer, explains that fear is a kind of unintentional storytelling we’re all born knowing how to do. We imagine our own futures, accurately or not, by creating stories. Doing so can alter the paths we choose to take. And as is evident in the story she tells of the shipwrecked sailors, how we read the stories we create in our minds can determine whether we achieve our desired outcomes.
What brands can learn from this talk:
Creating content worth sharing often requires faith and courage. Few brands are brave enough to go out on a limb, and instead create uninspiring content that prevents most people from reacting in any way, positively or negatively. It’s the fear of the unknown and the stories that brand managers create in their minds that bind their creativity and limit their spontaneity. What if the content is too edgy? What if the article ruffles too many feathers? Won’t responding to the irate customer’s Facebook post just make the problem more obvious?
Instead of fearing the unknown, take a look at the types of content and brands that have succeeded in the post-advertising age. From Red Bull to Oreo and Warby Parker, the brands that aren’t afraid to push the creative envelope, embrace unique and innovative marketing techniques and actively (and equally) respond to customers’ praise and criticism are the brands that have succeeded.
4. Joe Sabia—The Technology of Storytelling
In less than four minutes, iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces the audience to Lothar Meggendorfer and explains how Lothar’s invention of the pop-up book is helping us tell stories today. He also makes me realize that I’m underutilizing my iPad.
What brands can learn from this talk
“The art of storytelling has remained unchanged…but the way in which humans tell the stories has always evolved, with pure consistent novelty,” Sabia says. Emerging technology has allowed brands to tell stories in many ways. Consider all the storytelling options available to your brand. You aren’t required to embrace and be present on all channels, but don’t limit yourself to traditional mediums because that’s all you know. There are so many tools available that are more effective and less expensive than traditional, interruptive means, and inevitably there will be even newer tools that have yet to be imagined.
5. Author Edit (1/31/13): J.J. Abrams—The Mystery Box
Ack! What a gross oversight! In the initial publishing of this post, I completely overlooked this fantastic talk by J.J. Abrams. It was one of the first TED talks I saw that addressed storytelling. Abrams grips the audience with his personal story about the mystery box and his passion for the infinite possibilities that lie in a story.
Which TED talks did I miss?
Kickstart Your Writing Gear – Tips For Newbie Bloggers
All systems are ready to go. Your new blog looks great: the user interface is polished, the layout is perfect, all the widgets are working like they’re supposed to and you already have a snappy social media promotion campaign in the works.
Now, here comes the hardest part- writing content for public consumption.
Writing is a very thought-intensive activity. It takes time and a whole lot of effort just to put words down on paper (or the word processor). People would think that the process is a tedious superhuman feat- often procrastinating, leaving their blogs to languish forgotten without anything interesting written in them.
Blogging, for some, is not just an outlet for thoughts and ideas, but also, a source of livelihood. It can facilitate business deals, promote exclusive product deals, advertising services. Throw in product reviews, and referral programs and your blog’s money-making potential is almost unlimited.
So, how do you find time to write for your blog? Here are some tips which you can use:
1. Keep a notebook with you at all times.
Ideas and inspiration sometimes strike unexpected. A notebook is a handy contraption for catching that idea that has been floating around in your head when you were on your way to work this morning. If you are a bit on the techie side and want more variety, then you can check out a number of note-taking apps for mobile devices like EverNote or Catch Notes.
2. Write about what you know and what you love.
Or to be more precise, be passionate in your writing. It is hard to find words for something that you are not interested about. If you are new to blogging, it’s better to start off with topics that you are familiar with- these are the subjects that will get your writing juices going for the rest of your blogging career.
3. Turn writing into a routine.
This means defining a set schedule for your writing. People have different working times, so it’s best to figure out exactly what time of the day (or night) you are at your most prolific. Then you must maintain this writing schedule conscientiously by working at it on a regular basis. By the time you get used to it, you’ll start to feel guilty whenever you missed out on your writing. Guilt works as a motivating factor here.
4. Use productivity tools and software.
Aside from writer’s block, distractions are among the most troublesome issues that bloggers must face on a day-to-day basis. Thankfully, there are a lot of productivity systems to choose from that can help you get back to your writing. For example, the Pomodoro Technique is a productivity method that can guide writers to manage their time well and to focus on the task at hand by dividing work into 25-minute increments. Apps and software like the Focus Booster extension, on the other hand, block distracting and time-wasting websites.
Got more writing tips for newbie bloggers? Share them with us!
You might also like:
Kickstart Your Writing Gear – Tips For Newbie Bloggers is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
Would you like to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to my newsletter? Or perhaps follow me on Twitter.
I’m also available for blog startup, content writing and consultation services.
Visit my other blog, Highly Favored for Christian inspiration and church newsletter tips.
Become a Better Blogger
The Most Amazing Internet Stock Of The Year
What do you think it is?
I’m a huge fan of Business Insider. I can’t think of any other media organizations that writes headlines as good as they do (Business Insider, if you’re reading this, pay your copywriters handsomely… they’re doing everything right). My daily email newsletter from them is always chock full of linkbaity headlines that get me clicking and clicking. This one, from yesterday, was one of them: And The Most Amazing Internet Stock In The Past Year Is… So, who do you think it was? LinkedIn? Apple? eBay? Priceline? Nope… it was AOL.
Called it.
Not really. I didn’t call it. I didn’t invest in AOL. And, if you click over to the Business Insider article, you can see the nice organic jumps and strides AOL made this year. That being said, I’ve been a massive fan of AOL since Tim Armstrong took over as CEO and Chairman in 2009. I’m not saying this because I’m a contributor to The Huffington Post (which AOL bought in 2011 for over $300 million) or because I have any kind of personal relationship with Tim Armstrong (I don’t). I’m saying this because I believe that Armstrong, Arianna Huffington and everyone else at AOL is building an interesting canopy of online properties that are diverse enough to give them a unique position in the new media landscape.
Breaking the rules.
I don’t think that AOL is necessarily breaking any new rules. I think they are, fundamentally, applying a very traditional media strategy to the Internet. They are buying and building properties, creating compelling editorial, building audiences and selling advertising on top of it all. There are sprinkles of newer thinking (like when The Huffington Post launched their GPS For The Soul app) and I’m hopeful that they can leverage everything they have with The Huffington Post coupled with their acquisition of Patch to crack the code on local (and hyper-local) content. There will be challenges in monetizing their current strategy as the world becomes increasingly more smartphone and tablet enabled. Advertising on these devices is still nascent and the formula doesn’t seem to be as effective as it is when compared to Internet advertising. So, this will be no cake walk, but – to date – I’ve been a big fan.
It’s what other media properties wished they had done.
You have to figure that The New York Times would love to have been the ones to have these types of properties that AOL now has in their portfolio. And let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not just The New York Times. Look at any kind of traditional publisher or broadcaster from newspaper, magazine, television and radio (there was a reason that Time Warner merged under the name AOL Time Warner in 2000 – even though that deal went south for a plethora of reasons). AOL now covers a lot of digital space when it comes to content. They’ve come a long way from the days of inundating your mailbox with CD Roms.
It says something.
It says something about how we see the Internet. I’m sure if you surveyed some of the smartest people in Internet land, few of them would have guessed that AOL had performed this well. We keep our preconceived notions with us. We think that businesses (especially, big businesses) can’t change. AOL isn’t perfect (I’m quite certain the comments below will be laced with commentary about AOL and their mishaps). I’m sure AOL is no golden child. AOL still has a ways to go until they have a war-chest of cash like Apple. The point is that it’s quickly becoming an interesting company (again) – especially in a world where we hold quality content in such high regard.
It’s one to watch…whether you own the stock or not.
Tags:
Visual Marketing Is Here – 5 Ways You Can Use It To Sell Your Ideas
Editor’s note: Iris Shoor is co-founder and VP Product Marketing at Takipi, a service for managing software downtime in the cloud. Before that, Iris was co-founder and VP Product at VisualTao, a B2B web and mobile service acquired by Autodesk.
For a long while I thought about marketing as wordsmithing – putting an abstract idea into a sentence, picking just the right words. But then things started to change – less text please, more graphics – we’d rather see it than read it. This year more than ever, visual content is going mainstream. Pinterest is using imagery as its main content, and within a few months hundreds of different websites have adopted a ‘Pinterest like’ design. Companies are switching to Tumblr instead of traditional blogs, with little text and lots of imagery. Facebook is making your profile more visual with the Timeline and the new image gallery, not to mention Instagram. There’s a change in the air and this time you don’t need to smell it – you can actually see it.
I have to admit that I started using visual marketing not because I identified a trend but because as an architect by trade that’s the way I think – visually. I founded two companies (you can read more about our journey from 0 to 10M downloads here) where visual marketing is used as a main marketing strategy. To make things more interesting, both companies are as far away from being visual as you can possibly get – a B2B app for engineers and a Cloud/Big Data tool for developers. Here are 5 ways you can use visuals to increase traffic, get more buzz and reach more users:
“Say Cheese” – How A Team Picture Helped Us Get Better Reviews On The App Store
After every update to the App Store/Google Play we used to send a newsletter to our user base, highlighting the newest features and asking to review the version. On one release, after sending the newsletter we got 3X more reviews than usual (although there was nothing extraordinary about that version). It took us a while to figure out the reason. For that release we placed a picture of the team – the engineers who worked on the app right next to the ‘review us’ link. While traditional marketing uses people’s faces for just about everything (why do you always see smiling faces next to cheese, cars or real estate?), startups tend to restrict their team pictures to the ‘about us’ page. People are immediately attracted to human faces and react to action, when they feel it is called for by real people.
Want People To Remember Your Product? Look Different
When introducing a new product to a market, one of the main challenges is to have users remember your product and easily tell it from others. You want potential users to remember reading about your product two months ago, or recall seeing it being used by a colleague. Using a memorable image or a unique visual language is a great way to do just that. MailChimp is bringing their brand to life using a humoristic visual of a mailman monkey. DropBox is using childlike illustrations as a visual language, and by doing so differentiate themselves from other storage services. Heroku is using Japanese elements from Origami to Japanese mythology, so people would remember and emotionally relate to their product (which BTW has nothing to do with Japan).
[DropBox and Heroku using memorable visual styles]
Reality Check – Show Your Product In A Real World Context
Look at a screenshot of your product. Now take a step backward and look at the full picture. What does the user look like? Is the product being used at the office, at home or outdoors? Is it daytime or nighttime? When the product is displayed in context users can understand much more within seconds. This method is also more credible, as once you see a product used in a real world scenario it makes it harder to doubt it. For example, on Square’s homepage the main content is an image of the product being used in a farmers’ market. This picture is the main message and they’re not backing it up with text. With just a glimpse users can understand how the product works, where you’d likely use it and eliminate the ‘who needs it’ reaction.
Having A Hard Time Getting To Bloggers? Great Visuals Might Help
There’s no magic trick when it comes to getting media coverage. A great product and a trendy market surely help, but so do beautiful and funny images. A common mistake is to send bloggers product screenshots. Most screenshots don’t capture the essence and magic of a product. In fact, you’re asking the reader to work pretty hard to understand your product by looking at a screenshot. When placed in a minimized/cut version it will most likely become a ‘generic’ screenshot, looking like any other app or website you’ve seen before. Here’s an example from our first product where we tried to capture the essence of a localization feature with visuals, and without screenshots -
“Ouch, That Looks Painful” – Explain The Pain Using A Visual Analogy
Explaining the pain is always a main challenge when introducing a new product – no one really wants to hear what’s wrong with the way they work now. You can probably recall numerous videos of new products where almost half of the video is dedicated to telling you how much your life is a mess. With our second company, Takipi, the pain we’re trying to present is complex software debugging – looking for the source of a problem in the code. We’re not telling developers what they do today is wrong or difficult, but rather use a fun analogy for debugging and the pain they’re experiencing every day.
[Developers - know this feeling?]
Why Should I Comment on Blog Posts?
Having to think of original posts to draw in readers can be maddening. Having to actually write down that idea in a way that’s easy to read, while being relevant and informative, is draining. We also have to think of different ways to give the article more visibility, be it for the purposes of increasing your page rank, affiliate marketing, and many more.
So the moment we finish an article, we might end up leaving it as is, letting it accumulate views and comments on its own while we start on another.
As for other people’s posts, we just read what we want and move on. Some of us just don’t have the time to leave coherent and reasonable comments, even if we found the article useful.
By doing so, we are missing out on some things that will not just benefit our readers and other writers but our own sites as well. Here are a few reasons why you should comment on blog posts:
- To give feedback – Communication is crucial to blogging, and it can only get clearer when it’s a dialogue. Giving feedback allows the webmasters to know just what their audience is thinking. Conversely, if our readers give us feedback on the articles we uploaded, we can give them exactly what they want. We can adjust to the varied and ever-changing tastes of our audience.
Discussion can even lead to new ideas, making the process of writing even easier.
- To have complementary content – When the content of a post is being discussed, it’s hard not to have people giving their own takes. Additional tips get thrown around, complex concepts are clarified, and problems are solved.
If we forget something important in our article, we can just mention it in our own comments section, too!
- To build your brand – Being able to answer questions from readers (whether from our own blog or another’s) makes us look like experts in the field. People will go to us for our insights. Chances are, they will even visit our own blogs if they see us commenting on someone else’s.
We also establish bonds between readers and other writers when they see that we care enough to impart our knowledge to them.
- To increase social proof – People can’t help but check out things that other people go crazy for. They’ll think, “There must be something worthwhile in that post when there are a lot of comments in it!”
So if people do leave comments on our posts, we can reply to each one, thereby increasing the number of total comments. When other people search for articles like ours and see the number of comments, they won’t be able to resist clicking on our site.
- To enhance your site’s visibility – It might not be apparent at once, but comments can directly contribute to upping our blogs’ rank on search engines. More often than not, everyone discussing in the comments section will end up using the keywords for that particular post.
Since we’ll be engaging in actual conversation, it won’t be seen as spam. Commenters will be unintentionally helping in increasing our ranks, and they’ll be happy to do so!
So when we write or read articles, we should take the time to say something sensible in the comments section. Posts get better, pages get more views, and readers get happier. Everybody wins.
You might also like:
Why Should I Comment on Blog Posts? is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
Would you like to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to my newsletter? Or perhaps follow me on Twitter.
I’m also available for blog startup, content writing and consultation services.
Visit my other blog, Highly Favored for Christian inspiration and church newsletter tips.
Become a Better Blogger
CommentLuv Premium Giveaway – Enter Today!
CommentLuv Relaunched!
Did you miss your chance last year to get this awesome plugin? If so, don’t fret, it’s about to be relaunched and to celebrate, today, I’m giving you a chance to win a CommentLuv Premium single-site license.
This plugin makes it super easy to promote your blog whenever you comment on an enabled blog. With the Premium version, you get more freedom to choose from up to 10 posts and pages of your choice – not just your most recent posts. This lets you choose content that you want potential visitors to click and gives you an opportunity to get more exposure to those specific posts and pages.
But you already know all this and how great this plugin is – right?
For more information about CommentLuv, take a look at this post:
Check out what Andy Bailey has to say about the relaunch:
CommentLuv Premium Relaunch Video from andy bailey on Vimeo.
Now, let’s get on with the giveaway!
It’s super easy to enter – how’s how:
Before you enter, please note: this giveaway is just for the single-site license. If you’d prefer the unlimited license, visit this link for details: Unlimited License 1st Year Anniversary Special
You might also like:
CommentLuv Premium Giveaway – Enter Today! is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
Would you like to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to my newsletter? Or perhaps follow me on Twitter.
I’m also available for blog startup, content writing and consultation services.
Visit my other blog, Highly Favored for Christian inspiration and church newsletter tips.
Become a Better Blogger