Advantages Of Hiring A Salesman Who Doesnt Speak

Well let’s see…

1. The office is quiet
2. You don’t need to spend on phone and traveling expenses
3. You don’t have to worry about what to do if you have too many customers pouring in

Heck…there are no advantages! Having a salesperson who doesn’t communicate is absolutely pointless! Having marketers that are not making a noise about your business or actively doing something to promote your products are equally of no use. Then why have a website that’s doing nothing to make a noise about your business and actively market itself on the social web to sell for you?

Conversation is the very basis of the social web we are all a part of today. If you have a great website but you are not actively reaching out to people on the web and not joining in the conversation it’s virtually like setting up a shop in the neighborhood with no salesperson and making no attempts to reach out to the community letting them know you are here.  Perhaps setting up your website establishes that you have a presence on the online world but to make that presence felt you need to connect with the social web and …make some noise so to speak. How do you make some noise? Keep publishing.

Blog, tweet, comment, update statuses, make connections online, start communities, publish articles, send out press releases, create videos, create podcasts… keep speaking online … and you will be noticed. Stop speaking (publishing) and you will be ignored. The web is a crowded market place and just as you would find street vendors shouting on top of their voices to grab some attention in a bustling bazaar, that’s what needs to be done on the web to draw the right people using content and publishing to create conversation.  Having a blog doesn’t get you noticed, blogging actively get’s you noticed. Achieving something like winning an award for your business doesn’t bring traffic to your website, telling others through your blog or press releases and shouting about it on social networking sites will.

There are no advantages to having a salesman or marketer who doesn’t communicate and actively promote. There are no advantages to having a website that no one is talking about on the social web and no one knows about.

Make some noise. Keep publishing. Jump start your content marketing and start a conversation. It’s easy to ignore the silent website, it’s hard to miss the one that everyone is talking about and doesn’t stop talking itself.

BuzzFactory Launches – Create Your Own Content Marketing Package

That’s right! BuzzFactory.net has just launched a “Create A Custom Social Content Marketing Package” as an alternative to the existing solutions. You can now create your own social content marketing strategy and BuzzFactory.net will make sure it gets executed on every month like clockwork.

The online visibility solutions we have been offering are carefully tailored mixes of content and social marketing  activity which we know to work towards creating an online buzz for most needs. However, we understand  not every business has the same requirements and we’ve often tweaked the solutions to develop a mix of content and promotion activities that would suit a very specific requirement.

The new “Custom Social Marketing Solutions” offering on the website allows you to take the helm and create your very own content marketing strategy by selecting from a range of content development options, promotion and social media marketing activities which would help create the buzz around your brand on the web that you are looking for. The content options include:

• Engaging blog posts
• Keyword rich articles
• Guides
• White papers
• Reports
• PDF download documents
• Press releases
• Slideshare presentations
• Email drafts

Combine this with active social bookmarking across major social sites and promotion of content across social networking sites, Twitter, Linkedin and you virtually have a customized social content marketing strategy that’s ready to be put into action. Based on this submission we’ll get back to you with a proposal and a pricing quote shortly and if it all looks good, you’ll have a team to execute your plan for you.

Have a content marketing plan you need a pricing quote for? Use the “Custom Social Content Marketing Solutions” form and get a pricing quote soon!

Targeting Your Community Through An Online Magazine

National Geographic magazine has always pulled in readers who have the explorer instinct. Popular Mechanics has managed to retain its fan followings through the decades. Cosmopolitan gets picked off the stands by today’s women fresh off the press and Playboy….well let’s just say has managed to strike a note with men world wide.

The point is, each of these publications has used the power of great content to engage a target audience for years and as a result has been a crucial marketing message platform for the hundreds of businesses that have advertised and connected with readers through them. Thousands of magazines have provided niche audiences with the content they seek and delivered an advertisement platform for the businesses who target these niches…but the magazine game just like newspapers and other publications is changing rapidly. It’s gone online and with iPads and Kindles flying off the shelves in consumer stores, the amount of time an average netizen spends reading online is only bound to climb quicker. Which means,  you better be there when they are searching.

Creating a successful online magazine on the web is a fantastic way to reach out to a very targeted audience and with publication platforms such as wordpress available, it puts everyone on a level playing field as far as being able to start one goes. What sets apart a successful online publication from the rest is the quality of articles and ability to update frequently because unlike a weekly, fortnightly or monthly, online magazines need to keep churning out great content daily. If you can do that and provide valuable content around a subject area, you can build a successful publication and have access to the audience drawn to it. Here are a few tips if you’re considering starting an online magazine to reach out to your target audience:

1. Put yourself in the audiences shoes and think about the kind of articles, layout, categories and sections you would love to see on the publication and structure the content around this
2. Put the reader first, branding second. Don’t base your articles purely on the brand or products that you wish to promote through the site, cover a wider area around the audiences interest and think of ‘what would interest them?’ before ‘what can I say about my products’. For example if you sell time-share vacations in Italy, then it’s better to base the publication on wider Italy Travel magazine idea than to restrict it to only time-share posts.
3. Balance the content by creating a mix of well researched informative articles around the subject along with lighter pieces which people tend to share on the social web. It could do wonders to your traffic.
4. Get readers to contribute to articles and share experiences. The advantage of having a magazine online is you can make it as interactive as you want so audience participation in interviews, discussions, comments and content is great.
5. Offer RSS feed subscription, options for the content to be shared and email updates. If your content is great, it will distribute itself.

All considered, the online magazine or web publication is one of the best content marketing strategies around today. It’s targeted, non-intrusive, effective for SEO and becomes a long term online marketing asset for any business that can manage it consistently. For all you know, you could own the next Forbes, People, Vogue, Newsweek or Good Housekeeping on the web!

Is Your Business Blog Stagnating? How To Re-Focus And Revive

Nearly every business website has a “Blog” link and every once in a while when you click through to the blog you’ll see the last post or article was published “12th January 2009″ or “March 15th 2008″. That can be a buzz-kill for someone who is looking for the latest publication by the business only to find a stagnant blog which hasn’t been updated since who knows when? If your on-site blog section is one of these you’re not alone, there are many out there and maintaining an active and engaging blog for long spells of time isn’t the easiest task in the world. While every business blog is planned and kick started with enthusiasm, creative ideas and frequent posts after some time tend to lose momentum and often hit a dry spell. The first step is to determine the cause of why the blog has lost momentum and isn’t creating the buzz around your website like it was supposed to. The common causes are:

1. No Time: The contributors to the blog prioritized writing new content during the initial stages but as other tasks and duties catch up with them they find they can’t commit the time it takes to research, come up with ideas for posts, draft, check and publish them on a regular and consistent basis.
2. Out of Ideas: A plan was defined for the kind of topics which will be covered on the blog and after a while one finds themselves at a road block where coming up with fresh articles or posts within the defined topic scope was so difficult the writing stopped happening.
3. No Takers: The regular publishing was happening but it seemed like it was all pointless since there seemed to be no readers, no comments, no feedback. As a result motivation to continue died out and the blog froze in time.

At the end of the day, a blog where activity from your end has died out is not going to work. It needs consistent and work before the blog starts working for you. It needs fresh content, new ideas, regular updates, replies, changes in direction, promotion, distribution and more.  Once you’ve determined what’s slowing your blog down here are some quick tips on how to overcome those causes and revive it:

• If there’s no time, you have to find the time or the bandwidth to commit and make it work. Re-allocate it to someone within the company who can dedicate the time to post. Developing a successful blog takes time and patience. It’s never instant traffic magic and one needs to dedicate time over several months to keep at it and getting it to work. Alternatively, (and pardon my being so outright salesy) hire us to manage the blog for you!

• If you find yourself out of ideas, look around at other online publications within your area and look for inspiration (don’t ever copy, it just works against your objectives). Also try re-focusing your topics and content to cover a wider scope and still be engaging for your target audience. For example, a business that sells “designer light switches” for homes and offices doing a blog on “designer light switches” is bound to run out of topics soon and runs the risk of getting boring.  Re-focusing the blog to cover articles on “interior decor ideas for homes and offices” widens the scope, keeps the content interesting and reaches out to the same target audience which would be interested in the switches.

• If there are no takers and it appears no one has read your posts, you have to make it happen. Blogs don’t gather subscribers and regular readers overnight. It can take a long while. Till then, you need to promote every post, bookmark them on social sites, share them on social networks, tweet about them, link them and push it out to the first set of readers while hoping they in turn will share them with others. Push your content out to others and over time, they will come to your blog.

If your blog has been stagnated for some time now, have a closer look into what may have caused it, re-focus your blog outreach plan and revive it. If you stick to it, it will start working for you.

BuzzFactory Turns One Year Old Today

Happy Birthday BuzzFactory! A mood of celebration is set to take over here this weekend and why not? We finally turn one year old! It’s almost impossible to believe that it’s been just one year since we signed on our very first customer. So much has happened so quickly since it’s been one great first year and we’re going into the next one with a promising start and a lot of excitement.

When I started thinking about venturing out into a start-up all my previous experience in online marketing thought me  “Great Original Content” is going to be at the very core of every businesses web marketing strategies. It’s the fuel which drives search marketing, SEO, inbound marketing, social media marketing, online marketing campaigns, e-mail marketing campaigns and just about every outreach component which can drive more visibility online around one’s business. Original content which can engage people on the web is an ongoing everyday requirement without which a business doesn’t have much to work with and few busy professionals can commit to creating such content as frequently and consistently as required for online initiatives to work for them. However, with a bit of support, a defined daily plan and a dedicated team to execute on it there is little that can’t be achieved.

With each of our customers since 15th of May last year we’ve learned from them, absorbed their passion for their business areas and supported their content marketing and social media marketing initiatives. We’ve constantly experimented, innovated, learned and evolved as a business and for just one year, BuzzFactory has grown tremendously in terms of capabilities.

If we seem overly positive about the future and what the next year has in store it would have to be attributed to our experience working with our existing customers each of whom we’ve become a part of over time. We are extremely grateful to the amazing early customers we have (ones listed on our site and ones who are not) who have been incredibly supportive, referred BuzzFactory.net to others and  carried us through the first year. It’s been a joy working with each one.

Keeping in with the spirit of turning over the year, the existing site, gets a cosmetic makeover and takes on a new look as it’s re-launched.  Cheers to turning one and here’s to many more!

The Shortcut To Social Content Marketing Success

The truth is there is no real shortcut to developing long term inbound search traffic and steady business through a website. The few overnight successes that you hear of where traffic suddenly spikes is often just that….a temporary spike because something you posted really took off and became viral. The effects of these one time spikes are also more often than not….temporary. Social marketing is a process that needs very engaging content creation and a lot of activity on several social sites (where your target customers are) consistently and every single day. It’s often this commitment in terms of time which many find they are not able to do as much as they would like to and in that process, there is no daily activity and the social marketing efforts stagnate.

If your experience is similar, drop us a line and explore how we may be able to help you maintain that daily activity required while you focus on strategy and other areas of importance. In effect, this may just be the shortcut you need.

iPad Kindle Or Crunchpad – Is Your Business Publishing Yet?

The iPad has been all the rage this past week and whether it’s a raging success or not, for now everyone is talking about it. It’s not just Apple who is taking a crack at this market, Amazon’s Kindle, Tech Crunch’s Crunchpad and dozens of other companies have prototypes for tablet pcs / e-readers which looks like it’s all poised to become the hottest gizmo since the iPhone…and why shouldn’t it be?

Reading has rapidly moved to the web. I personally do a lot of reading online every single day across a variety of personal interests from aquascaping, music theory, travel to social media, marketing and more. Even if i’m experimenting with dishes in the kitchen I have a recipe open on my netbook nearby. It’s only natural that we’re all going to take to e-readers and tablets sooner or later. From the current buzz, my guess would be sooner. So the question to start asking is not “should I go in for the iPad or Kindle? The question that urgently needs to be answered is “is my business publishing online and is it ready for the tablet boom?”

Online magazines, blogs and online publications are bound to be consumed that much more. If currently most reading is done while at your pc or at work, e-readers are simply going to ensure reading happens on the bus, on the subway, at airport waiting lounges and in bed. In marketing terms, it just opens a wider window of opportunity to have wider audiences discover your business. Online publications with compelling content will be key to engaging consumers and the earlier you can establish a leading publication within your industry space, the better prepared you can be for the inevitable boom. So how ready is your business on the online publication front?

The Blog – Social Content Marketings Ultimate Platform

I was wondering to myself the other day ‘why is it that so many business websites still don’t have active blogs when it’s such a fantastic marketing resource and so well tuned to SEO?”. After talking to a couple of business owners and marketing managers and digging into why they didn’t consider a blog, one possible reason which surfaced is the restricted view a business blog is often looked at. When you mention blog the wider general understanding is:

The blog is a diary-like online platform to post a personal opinion or account of daily events so that others can read right?

…..Wrong! And this is what turns off many who think to themselves “What am going to post everyday and how will that help bring customers?” A blog is a highly versatile publishing platform. It can be what you want it to be and is only limited by one’s creativity. While some use it effectively to publish a daily account of events, others use it just as well to turn it into a learning resource with informative articles and some can adapt it to publish an online magazine with content that’s of interest to it’s readers. What you choose to publish depends largely on one’s business and more importantly their customers.

A very niche high tech company which needs to attract a very no-nonsense technical audience may need to publish more along the lines of technology publications maintaining a more serious tone and ensuring it’s valuable to the readers. A business targeted towards a younger audience may choose to publish a more rich media based one with a lighter first person tone to strike a chord with their readers. Finally the objective is to create a real social connection through the blog and develop a valuable online resource for your target audience.  That’s how your customers will discover you. How do you decide what kind of publication your business could use and how to leverage a blog? Simple….

• Define your target audience and customers (what kind of audience would you like your publication to draw?)

• Now put yourself in their shoes for a while and think about what kind of an online publication would attract your attention and have you go back for more on a regular basis? (What kind of content? What kind of tone? What are their current favorites? What can you learn from them? How could you make your publication even better?)

• Execute! Start working towards building that dream online publication  and spend some time every day thinking “how can I make it even better?” , “what would a reader like to see here?”… and make your publication the best there is.

Virtually every industry, business vertical or interest area including the niche one’s have successful online publications in the form of blogs, journals, portals, news sites and magazines. The blog as a platform is perhaps the most versatile marketing tool we’ve seen in a while. Use it well, and with a little effort you can also have one of those publications your customers value so much.

Be Silent Be Forgotten – The Way Social Marketing Works

I find myself in a situation which reminds me why we do what we do here at BuzzFactory.net and although what happened recently  it isn’t great for business, it makes for excellent learning. For the last two to three weeks I haven’t posted anything new to our blog. I have been occupied with blogging and keeping the social media channels buzzing for our customers but in the process neglected this blog since the last post which managed to generate a great amount of activity on the site and some positive interest in our solutions. I also haven’t been as active on Twitter or my accounts across some of my other social sites promoting this blog. As a result, I find myself in the rare situation where I am barely speaking to any new prospective customers this week and that is clearly a direct result of being silent on the social channels like twitter and this blog which is normally buzzing with activity. It clearly means when it comes to social media and online marketing

being silent leads to being forgotten

If you picture a kid in a bus who is constantly talking about something and barely silent for a moment, you may not really be interested in what he is going on about but the chances are you are going to notice him and tune into what he is talking about. Chances are, others in the bus have also taken notice. It’s a lot like this with online channels starting with your blog. If you keep a constant conversation going online through your blog, Twitter, social networking and bookmarking sites, it will draw some listeners and create some interest. A part of that interest may drive readers to contact you and explore further. It generates a active interest in what you are talking about and creates opportunities. However, when the conversation stops, the blog posts dry out, the Twitter accounts turn silent and there is no dialog online, the activity around your site also tends to diminish (with the exception of search traffic coming through content that has been well indexed and show up in search results which has long lasting effects). If that online silence is prolonged, you’re likely to be forgotten.

constant activity is key

Most of those we work with are looking for our blogging and social media marketing support not because they don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s because they do know how it works and they know how important it is to be able to post and stay active very regularly and that is something their time schedules don’t permit.  They know there is a direct relation between the ability to consistently publish fresh content having active social channels and the ability to generate interest, conversations around their business and new customers.

keep a continuous online conversation going starting with your blog

For now, it’s time for me to break that silence on this blog with this post and other ones to follow. Then get back to being active on Twitter and other social sites to let everyone know I’m back and stiring a buzz. Perhaps I’m not very talkative in person but when it comes online marketing I know for sure, too much silence is not good for business.

Original Content Vs Syndicated Content For Inbound Search Marketing – Hare And The Tortoise Remake

Recently while discussing social marketing and creating online buzz through blogs and articles with a few people I got the feeling while most people insist on original content for their blogs and websites to drive seach traffic not everyone was clear how it differed from using syndicated content. I thought it may be good to re-visit the reasons why the ability to generate fresh original content to drive inbound search traffic and get some clarity around it.

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.