5 Key Takeaways from Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Summit

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I’ve never run a marathon, but after attending Hubspot’s Inbound Summit last month, I can say that I’m creatively winded. This year’s summit in Boston consisted of four days packed with 170+ educational sessions, five inspiring keynotes, over 14,000 attendees and countless networking opportunities. As a new customer and the Hubspot lead at my company, … Read more

The Psychology of Attention and How To Convert More Sales With Your Content

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the psychology of content attention

The name of the marketing game is attention. That is what you work for every day.  To get the attention of your target market.  Only then do you have the opportunity to convert them on your website. Before you walk away wondering what you have gotten yourself into, let me assure you that you are … Read more

The Facebook Video Strategy: Why You Need One Now!

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Many page owners have struggled with their love/hate relationship with Facebook. In the past, it was a great way to market your product or service though text and images. However, for page owners that didn’t keep up with the algorithm changes implemented by Facebook, happiness quickly turned into frustration. Facebook made it so only your … Read more

Taking Effective Calculated Risks for Entrepreneurs

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Leonard C. Green, entrepreneurship lecturer at Babson College, once said, “Entrepreneurs are not risk takers. They are calculated risk takers.”

He was absolutely right. When assessing a business decision, one of the first and most important things for an entrepreneur to understand is the difference between risk and calculated risk.

Risk is dangerous; risk takers go all in and wager everything they’ve got on a win or lose result. Calculated risk however, is the opposite of that, and involves doing everything possible to mitigate disaster.

Calculated risk takers are actually highly risk averse because, every step of the way through a decision making process, they further reduce their potential to fail. They take every available opportunity to save time, money and resource in order to cover themselves.

So how can entrepreneurs ensure they take the latter kind of calculated risks?

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Shave Hours Off Your Social Media Marketing with these 5 Tips

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Up to 94 percent of all small to medium business owners in the United States are leveraging social media for marketing what they have to offer to their audience. There are quite a few that are doing this extremely successfully. In fact, up to 60 percent of all the businesses embracing social media have claimed that this marketing has helped them acquire new customers.

In fact, the more success your business has, the better you are likely going to be at social media marketing. According to a recent study:

  • 91 percent of businesses increased their brand awareness
  • 82 percent generated more (new) leads

However, if you are just now beginning a social media marketing, it can be overwhelming and frustrating. In fact, you have likely found that to get any traction at all, you are having to spend hour after hour finding content, posting content and responding to comments.

The good news is there are a number of steps you can take – 5 in fact – to help and minimize the amount of time you spend on your social media marketing efforts.

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10 Online tools to create engaging content your readers will share

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Creating interesting, viral and informative content is a lot harder than it might appear at first,

and if you want to be able to do it, you’re going to have to dig deep. In order to become a

content creation guru, you need to master a wide variety of skills and tools. No, you don’t need

to wield a hammer or a power drill, but simply to get a hang of a handful of online tools that

will not only help you create the best possible content, but also attract readers and create a

loyal following.

 

The creation of content can roughly be broken down into three basic segments:

research, writing, and the creation of visual content. If you are not well-versed in all three,

don’t worry, because mastering the tools necessary to create it is entirely possible. Here is a

comprehensive list of all the online tools you need to use in order to create brilliant content.

 

Research Tools

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How To Start A Blog Without Techie Knowledge

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There internet is filled with websites that have

Free This
Simple That

I've tried a lot of out there and let's just say… most are not what I needed (easy)

Back in college (1992-1996) at the University of Texas at Austin, All the rage was GeoCities.

So I got the bright idea to get online and put up photos, music, and updates on a “website”… at that time I had no clue what a BLOG was and why you would want one as a one person shop.

I learned the hard way.

I started to play with Dreamweaver and Frontpage Express

O M G

It was so bad and painful.

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4 Questions to Generate Killer Content Ideas

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Creating a blog for your website is a great idea. It can generate links, comments and social shares. However, in order to generate all this ‘buzz’ you have to have content worth sharing and linking to and commenting on. This is often easier said than done.

While you can write on generic topics you find relevant to your niche or service, this usually doesn’t generate much attention. If you are ready to create epic content that gets the attention you want and deserve, ask these four questions.

What’s Everyone Talking About?

It can be hard to stay updated on all the trends online; however, there are a number of tools and tricks to use to help this along. You can set up Twitter lists, search for trending hashtags on Facebook and even use news aggregators such as Feedly to see all of the latest news from custom picked industry blogs.

Helpful Tip: When you talk about what people want to know, it will generate interest, clicks, shares and traffic so spend some time each day reading up on the latest trending topics.

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5 Ways to Beat Blog Writers’ Block

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5 Ways to Beat Blog Writers' Block

5 ways to come up with interesting topics and content for your business site blog, even in boring industries

Certainly creating new content for your blog is important for search traffic, link-building, and user engagement. But often, people either struggle to come up with interesting ideas for content, or else they're churning out masses of lightweight, meaningless fluff.

If you're creating content just for the sake of creating content, i.e. generating that meaningless fluff so that no one cares, and no one shares–Google sees that, and it's not good. From Google's perspective, if you have a lot to say, but no one shares it, what do you think that says about the value of your content? You get the picture.

If you're a pet store, it's easy–you can post cute pictures of kittens, puppies, etc., and people will share those forever. But what about the rest of us–what if you're in a relatively dry/boring/technical/niche industry? I'm going to share 5 tips on how to create content quickly and easily that gets engagement: shares, likes, and links.

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Psychology of Marketing

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Tapping into the Mindset of Your Potential Buyers

When it comes to being a successful marketer, it’s essential to understand why and how people think and act. It’s much more difficult to try and come up with creative and compelling content marketing if you don’t know what would compel your potential audience in the first place.

Before jumping on board and getting down into the inner workings of marketing it’s helpful to learn how people really operate. Understanding a few key principles of psychology can help make your marketing go from good to superb! Because when the right audience is reading and identifying with your content they are more likely to become a buyer, instead of just a potential one.

To attract, convince and convert more potential buyers into buyers with your marketing you really should understand the basics in the following psychology lessons.

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