SEO Podcasts

The Transcript

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, as well as the complete show archive by pointing to Copyblogger.FM in your browser.

If you are joining us this month for our content challenge, or even if you aren’t, the group, the audience over at Copyblogger.com is doing a challenge to come up with better headlines. We start by coming up with more headlines. The challenge for the month is to come up with, let’s say, 20 or 30 headlines, brainstorm a whole big stack of them, and then keep adding to that every day by brainstorming a couple of additions.

One of the things we’ve heard back, and this is not surprising really, is that coming up with that many headlines is just hard, it’s just kind of a brain teaser. Today I thought I would revisit an exercise that I did way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I went to college. I had a poetry class, and we did a riff on Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I don’t remember what the exercise was, but it was a poem to use that same idea, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Banana, I think it was.

So today, I am giving you Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Headline. This is intended as a way for you to kind of shake up your creative mind, shake out some additional ideas for headlines that you can try. Now, you might not use all of these ideas, you might only use one or two, but it’s a way for you to generate more ideas, so you can pick the ones that really jump out at you, the ones that you say, “Okay, that’s actually … seems like something I might want to read.”

If you’re doing the content challenge, and that’s awesome, I would love it if you were. This will help you get that done. If you’re not officially doing it, you can certainly sit down and brainstorm a big stack of headlines. It is so useful, no matter what you do to create content, to just have a bunch of headlines that you can start from and start writing something, or recording a podcast, or whatever it is that you do. Let’s get it started.

1. Start With a Number Or Tweak an Existing Headline by Adding a Number

The number one tweak you can make to an existing headline or jumping off point for a new headline is to work with numbers. You might have seen there are lots of numbers-oriented posts and content all over the web. The reason is that just numbers and headlines just seem to work really well together. Now, my favorite way to handle a numbered list post, or, 13 different ways to do X, Y, or Z, is to write the piece first and then pull the number out of that.

I’ll write a comprehensive how-to post about something and then I’ll just go back and count, “Okay, I’ve got 17 ways here, so this is going to be 17 ways to do a better job of X.” Starting from the content and then working back to the numbers, for me personally, is a best practice, but it doesn’t always work this way. For example, this podcast, I knew that I wanted to just have a little play on the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of a Looking at a Blackbird, so I knew that I wanted to come up with 13 ways to tweak a headline and come up with a new idea.

You can go either direction. Just realize that most of the time you should be willing to tweak the number to fit the content, rather than the content to fit the number. If you can only come up with 87 really good ideas and you had originally thought about a 101 list post, I would go ahead and go with the 87. Keep it strong, really make sure that the content is keeping the promise that the headline is writing the check for.

2. The Cosmo Technique, Taking the Structure of a Magazine Headline and Adapting it for Your Topic

Second tweak, this one is one of my favorites. I mention it nearly any time I talk about headlines, because I find it just handy and it’s something you can do right away, you can do it immediately. That is to head over either to a physical magazine stand or you can head to a virtual magazine stand, like Magazines.com, and look at very popular magazines. Look at their headlines and then just tweak those for your topic.

This is sometimes called the Cosmo headline technique, partly because Cosmopolitan magazine is really, really good at giving you headlines you can tweak for any topic at all: fitness, parenting, relationships, finance, business-to-business marketing. Their headlines structures are so tight and so solid, and so it’s a great place to go and you just take the shell, the skeleton, the structure, and then you just change the words around until it makes sense in your topic. It’s a really good way to knock out a bunch of ideas very quickly.

3. Play With the Promise. Amp the Promise Up with Strong Words Then Try a Quieter Version that Sets a More Realistic-Seeming Expectation

Technique number three is to play around with the promises you make in the headline. Sometimes some words imply a big promise, like breakthrough, or sure fire, or instant. Those are just words that imply a big promise, they imply that the content is going to deliver on something big. Play around with using some big promise words and then generate a couple of more alternatives, dialing down the promise, making it less hype-y, for lack of a better word.

To take a big promise and, what would that big promise look like if you managed expectations on it a tiny bit and dialed down that promise? Play with the promises, go big, go a little softer, and see which one feels more compelling to you. It’s not always the big promise headline. Sometimes a more realistic headline is the one that will actually get more attention, but you have to play around with it and experiment and just try different possibilities.

4. Try a Warning the What Not to Wear Headline

Technique number four is the What Not to Wear headline. In other words, the negative headline. This is a headline that implies some kind of a warning that strongly suggests that people avoid some terrible fate, a headline that tells people what not to do, or what to avoid. These are always compelling, they are always interesting.

5. Answer the Protest March Questions: What do They Want? When do They Want It?

Technique number five is to answer what I call, the protest march questions, and those are, What do they want? and, When do they want it? So, How to teach your first grader to tie his shoes in less than an hour, okay. What do you want to do? I’d like my first grader to be able to tie his shoes. When do I want to be able to get that done? I’d like to be able to get it done in under an hour. What do they want, and when do they want it? Answer those questions. Those are just always very solid headlines.

6. The Monster Post 101 Ways to , The Ultimate Guide to

The sixth technique is the monster post headline. So, 101 ways to do X, Y, Z, keeping in mind what I said earlier that if you actually only come up with 87 or even 64, just go with the smaller number, it’s still impressive. The ultimate guide to, is another very time tested post formula. It can work very well, it’s used a lot, but it still has good promise. Think about what monster, massive, gigantic piece of content could you create and write a headline for that. Kind of an additional pro-tip on those, sometimes those can be turned into really interesting larger pieces of content also, like eBooks, tutorial series, autoresponder series, something like that.

7. The Brief Guide Identifying the Small Set of Key Steps to Getting Started

Countering that, the seventh possibility for a headline is the brief guide headline. This is a headline that promises the most important steps to getting started with a particular topic or a particular thing that the audience wants to do. Really think about selecting, winnowing down from all the possible advice they could get, what’s the most important, most salient how-to you can provide, and then create your own brief guide to getting more whatever it is that they might want.

8. The X Questions to Ask Before You (This is Often Nicely Paired with a Checklist, Cheat Sheet, or Worksheet)

Closely related to that is number eight, and this is the X simple questions to ask before you … The eight simple questions to ask before you publish your blog posts, the six simple questions to ask before you do your workout today, whatever it might be. This is very related to the earlier one, which is it’s very step-by-step, it’s very concrete. You’re telling your audience what they should do and in what order. This is a great kind of content type to pair with a checklist or possibly a worksheet, so that you can actually give them a cheat sheet to remember the eight simple questions to ask before they move forward with their project.

9. The Question Without an Obvious Answer. Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? Remember: The Audience Needs to Understand the Relevance!

All right, technique number nine is more difficult to pull off, but they work really well when they work. That is the question that doesn’t have an obvious answer. I’ll give you an example from Copyblogger, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? That one was written for us by Sean D’Souza and I like that because your first thought is normally, “Well yeah, law of supply and demand tends to suggest that when you lower price, you increase demand.” Then there’s a question mark and I think, “Well, maybe not. Maybe that’s not true.” There’s not an obvious answer there and I’m going to want to click through and find out why.

In one of his books, Bob Bly found this great one from Psychology Today, Do You Close the Bathroom Door Even When You’re the Only One Home? Now, I have no idea what that piece of content is about, that article in Psychology Today, but I think I would probably read it, because I’m just really intrigued. Now, these are tricky headlines, because curiosity is an important factor, but the pure curiosity headline, where the person really has no idea what they’re going to get on the other side of that, that, it tends not to get good results.

If I’m reading Psychology Today and I get that headline, I’m going to read it because I read Psychology Today to find out what makes people tick, right? I read to find out more about human psychology. That’s going to share an interesting fact about human psychology with me. That headline is very relevant for Psychology Today. It is not relevant for Copyblogger, and I think if we got clicks on that, it would be to ask us if we had been hacked.

However, Sean D’Souza’s headline, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? is very relevant to Copyblogger and any reader of ours is going to know, “Oh, well that’s interesting, that’s going to be an article about the relationship between pricing and sales. That’s a topic that I think about and I’m going to click through and I’m going to see what Sean has to say about it.” If you have the question without an obvious answer headline, it has to be clear to the audience how it relates to what they come to you for. Otherwise, it just gets confusing and confusing is not helpful.

All right, so I’m going to wrap up the last four suggestions for you with the four U’s of copywriting, or the four U’s of headlines, which are useful, urgency, unique, and ultra specific, and I’ll walk you through how each of these might be something that you could use as a prompt to come up with some headline ideas.

10. Useful: What Will the Audience Get Out of Reading, Listening to, or Watching this Piece of Content?

The first U, letter U, stands for useful. This is a really major tried and true thing to keep coming back to for your headlines. Which is, to ask that question, What does the audience get out of reading this piece, or listening to this podcast, or watching this YouTube video? These are the how-to’s, the tutorials, the guides. These are also the warnings and the pitfalls.

If your headline makes it really clear what the person’s going to gain from checking out your content, you’re going to have a good headline. Even if, maybe your other skills are not incredibly fantastic, that’s probably the most important one to master. Some people apply the so what test, so you keep asking yourself, “Well, so what? Well, so what?” You should have a good answer for that. It should be an answer that makes sense to your audience.

11. Urgent: Increase the Sense of Urgency with Time Pressure or Warnings

The second letter U stands for the word, urgency. This is about getting people to check out your content today, rather than never. Urgency language can include things like, introducing, or announcing, that suggests, “Okay, there’s something new here, I want to look at it.” It appeals to that sense of novelty. Another good urgency phrase is why you must, and this is often paired with the word, immediately. So, you know, Why you must secure your WordPress based website immediately. That’s an important post, because there are actually super bad things that could happen to you if you don’t do it.

12. Unique: Can You Use an Unusual Word? Can You Challenge Conventional Wisdom? Remember: Don t Let Unique Turn into Confusing

The third letter U stands for unique. This is about catching attention and catching attention with things like, something unique, something that people haven’t seen before. You can get this done with possibly an unusual language choice, including one of my favorites which is, use words like weird. Now, we’ve all seen that terrible stupid ad on social media, this one weird trick to doing whatever.

Don’t use this one weird trick, because it’s horribly overused and associated with something that looks not very high quality. There are lots of other ways you could use the word weird, that would cause people to just pause for a second and say, “Huh. Weird. Well, I wonder what that’s about?” Think about playing with that. Any unusual language choice is going to make people just take that moment and stop and look at it.

Another very tried and true way to work the unique angle is to challenge conventional wisdom. To take something that everybody believes is true, and turn it on its head. You have to be able to do this legitimately. Don’t just be a contrarian to be contrary. This actually has to support a real and useful position. Otherwise, you’re getting attention, but you won’t keep attention, because you’re not perceived as being reliable.

Again, I just want to caution you that when we want you to try and put a unique element in your headline, that’s not the same thing as confusing people with your headline. A lot of people go for unique, and what they end up with is unique and confusing. Again, it just won’t help. If people are confused, they tend to get a little bit nervous and when people are a little bit nervous, they don’t act. Anybody who’s a little bit nervous about what they’re going to find on the web will just tend to not click. It just feels safer to not click, rather than going to that weird thing that I’m not sure what that is. Be unusual, be different, be unique, but don’t be so different that you’re confusing and scary.

13. Ultra-Specific: Precision is Interesting. Replace Vague, Waffly Words and Round Numbers with Specifics

Our thirteenth tip is to be ultra specific, that’s the fourth U, ultra specific. This kind of brings us full circle, because one of the best ways to get ultra specific is to use a specific number. Let’s talk about numbers for a moment. We have a tendency to want to round numbers, so we want to write posts with, Ten things you should know about this, or, 100 things you should know about this.

It is often more compelling and more interesting if you go with kind of a knobbly number. If you go with a non-obvious number. 17 is a much more interesting number than 20, and 17.2 is more interesting than 17. Getting incredibly specific with numbers, with the facts, getting really, really pointed about what you have to say … very, very useful, very compelling. It just makes it feel like this is somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Of course, you always want to back that up by, in fact, knowing what you’re talking about. If you see vague words in your headline, then take advantage of that and create a second iteration of your headline that makes that word much more specific, that really speaks to a specific individual. Use specific, crisp, clear, especially verbs and nouns, rather than vague, waffly, fluffy ones.

Those are 13 prompts or tweaks that you can use to look at your stack of headlines and grow it by quite a bit, double it, triple it, perhaps. I will go ahead and post all of these in text. If you go over to Copyblogger.FM, you can get the complete list in text just for your general reference. I would love to hear from you. If you guys have some headlines that you have tried one of these out on, let me know, drop them in the comments, always interested to see what you’re working on. And keep an eye on the Copyblogger.com blog for the next content challenge, which will be coming up in early February. Thanks so much guys, take care, and talk with you soon.

The Transcript

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plug-ins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices along with the occasion rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can get additional links and resources at Copyblogger.FM along with the complete archive for the show.

This month we’ve been talking a lot about content marketing strategy over on the Copyblogger blog. You’ve probably already noticed that publish a lot of stuff is not a strategy. Publishing lots of content or do your best to make good content is a worthy endeavor. It’s a good tactic but on its own it’s just not likely to do much for you. I think that a lot of the more visible critics of content marketing seem to think that that’s what content marketing is. You make a whole bunch of spaghetti and see what sticks against the wall.

Well, you know of course that’s not going to work and we know that’s not going to work so let’s look at some things that will. Today we’re going to talk about strategy, and content marketing strategy is not just for fancy ad agencies or massive marketing departments, it also doesn’t have to be this jargon fest that sometimes those kind of organizations make it into. I thought I would talk today about some of the points of failure that I see all the time in people’s content marketing strategy and then how you can do better.

The Painful Question You Have to Answer to Stay Out of “Me-Too” Content Death

It wouldn’t be Copyblogger if the first point of failure that I talked about wasn’t a quality problem. It really is the problem that I see the most often. I have somebody who, they might leave a comment on the blog and say, “I don’t know what’s going wrong. I’m producing lots of high quality content and nothing’s happening.” I click through and there’s no voice at all. It’s completely generic. It’s the same exact information I’ve seen on 10,000 other sites. There’s nothing new and there’s no real answer to the question, “Why would anybody go to you when they already have so many high quality things that they can already read?”

Because of the topic that Copyblogger has, I see a lot of sites that really make me say, “Well, okay, why should I read your site when the world already has ProBlogger, and Copyblogger, and Search Engine Land, and Moz? What is it you feel you’re contributing to this conversation that’s not being found on those sites?” It’s a hard question to answer but if you don’t have a good answer, you can’t win. That is a lot of what Copyblogger is about is helping people to create content worth consuming. If it’s text content, it has to be worth the time somebody takes to read it. Of course if it’s video or audio, it has to be worth that time that it takes to watch or to listen. You’re asking for time and attention. These are resources that cannot be replicated. It’s not like asking for $10 and then what you have isn’t very good and they’re out $10 bucks.

When you waste somebody’s time with your content, you have wasted something that cannot be replaced so it’s a big deal and people treat their time and attention as a big deal. They should. You have to be worth that time and attention. If you aren’t, partner with somebody who is because there are people out there creating great content. They just don’t want to trouble themselves with learning the business elements. If you don’t think the quality of your content is too good, you know, read Copyblogger and come up with a strategy to improve that.

But I’m going to assume for the rest of this conversation that you have got some good stuff, you have got a real voice. You’re speaking to a real audience about something they care about and there’s a reason to tune into you versus somebody else even if it’s just your personality and the way you look at the world, which is a perfectly acceptable answer, by the way, to that question.

The Path to Purchase, and How to Make it More Appealing

The second point of content marketing strategy failure I see a lot is there’s either no path to purchase or the path to purchase just isn’t very well thought out. Long, long ago in Internet time marketers used to buy content. They used to buy it on Google. They would buy traffic. They would buy eyeballs to come look at their site and that traffic would come check the thing out. They would read a sales page. They would buy or they would not buy and we were done. That’s how it used to be. It used to be really simple; buy some eyeballs, put a well written piece of copywriting in front of those eyeballs, convert or don’t convert. That’s not really how it works anymore, which is a good thing because that got really expensive.

Today, 21st Century, 2017, people are going to find you all kinds of ways. People are going to find your content. Some of them will find it on social, and some on search, and on different social platforms. Some of them, their aunt will send them your email with a link in it. It’s your job to make sure that however people find you all the roads, once they get to you, lead to Rome as the old saying used to say.
Now, this is not really just cram everybody who comes onto your site into your email list and then hit them with an ad every day until they unsubscribe. That is a thing. That is a strategy people use and it seems to work for some people but it’s not really content marketing strategy. It’s actually much more closely related to the old strategy of what they used to call spray and pray. Somebody finds your site and then you just spray them with offers until they buy or they flee in horror.

What we want to focus on, when we have this path to purchase, is the “what” from Brian Clark’s trio of “who,” “what,” and “how.” Who do you speak to? What kinds of information do you give them? Then how do you do it? In other words, your voice, your craft, your creativity. That “what,” the middle chunk is really the bulk of your content marketing strategy. What information does this person need? What order do they need it? Do they need it quickly? Do they need it slowly? Do they need really massive, meaty pieces of content, whitepapers, and case studies? Or do they need something more bite-sized? What’s their journey?

Whether you’re a big organization or a small organization, you have to map that journey out. You have to put yourself into the shoes of your prospect and figure out where they are when they come to you and then what are the steps that they need to go through in order to move further. Where are the buying points on that path because a lot of times there’s more than one? A lot of times there might be small purchases that they would make along the way that would lead to something larger.

Now, Brian Clark has written a lot about this. He is continuing to write a lot about this so I will give you some links over at Copyblogger.FM if you want to pursue this in more depth, which I would encourage you to do.

At the heart of it, you have to understand precisely what a person needs to think. What do they need to know? What do they need to feel? Then what will they need to do before they actually purchase from you. Content exists at as many points as possible precisely to lead the person to get to the next step on that specific journey. Content exists to help them know things that they need to know and to present an argument to think about things in a certain way. That’s what content is for.

How Funnels Work with Content

Now, we should also talk about something called funnels and many of you know what funnels are and some of you don’t. They’re just little sequences of relevant information and they lead to an offer. It might be three pieces of email or four pieces of email that would be sent, opening the conversation, presenting some relevant information, and then letting people know, okay you can pick up the solution to your problem here and here’s what it costs, et cetera.

Now funnels are not really the same thing exactly as the path to purchase. Funnels are sort of little stopping points or tiny little diversions on the path to purchase. They’re the last few steps so each funnel you could think of as a little path from the trail to a place where they can actually get to the holy land of making a purchase. A funnel gives them the right information at the right time but it’s not the whole thing.

The people who are really doing this well have like a rich content kind of a path that people can walk down, explore. They can go different directions with it. They can try different things. They can follow their own interests and then at various points on that path there’s a way that they can take that little nicely paved funnel into making a purchase. Then they might stay on the path and make a different purchase or they might just go home and be happy and be a customer and they might be done. That combination of really strong, robust, interesting content path with some well crafted funnels to take them toward a purchase a little more smoothly, it’s not the same thing.

I think sometimes this gets interpreted as entice people with like one piece of content that you paid a writer for and then slam them with offer, after offer until they completely regret ever giving you their email address. It’s a way. It’s not the best way. Content marketing strategy is really much more about presenting the right information well presented at the right time to the right people and then creating that possibility for action. That means making an offer in the copywriting sense at a moment that makes sense in that sequence.

Not understanding that path to purchase is a point of failure I see a lot with content marketing strategy either kind of rushing the gun so it’s all offer and very, very little useful content, or sometimes you see people who meander around from New York City to I don’t know, San Francisco on this wonderful content path and there’s never any place to make a purchase. Neither of those really work. You have to be strategic about how the road leads to the result you want, which is to create the transaction.

Why We Get Stuck Using the Wrong Tools for the Job

Another really common point of failure that I see is people use the wrong tool for the wrong job. Something that I find really interesting about this whole path to purchase idea is that as the person who discovers your content and discovers your site kind of walks along the path, they go through different states. At a certain point they sort of, eh, they’re not really sure they have a problem. They’re not that interested in it. Then they go through various states of being more and more interested in a solution and possibly considering your solution to their problem. When they’re in these different states, you’ll want to be using the right tool for that moment in the process.

To give you one example of what I mean, there’s a moment in that path when the person really, they either don’t know you or they don’t have much relationship with you. Maybe they’ve heard of you. Maybe they’ve sort of seen you around somewhere but they certainly don’t feel closely connected to you. That’s the point where you’re using tools like social media, and blog posts. You might be using YouTube or podcasts. These are all great tools for getting audience attention, for getting people who either don’t know you at all or haven’t really had a lot of content with you to pay attention to who you are and to realize that this provider might be a very, very good solution for whatever this problem is that’s been bugging me. These are the tools to find the people who don’t really know you yet.

As so often happens with tools, we get comfortable with these. Like we get comfortable on Facebook, I see a lot. You get comfortable making blog posts and then that’s all you do. All you do is more Facebook posts and you’re not making any sales so you triple the amount of blog posts you write or the amount of Facebook posts you make. Well, that tool isn’t super well optimized for that work. You can do more of that work if you want to but you’re not going to get the results you want because you’re using a tool that’s ineffective. All of the attention-getting tools tend to be noisy. They just tend to be in a kind of open web environment that has a lot of noise. It’s a little bit like trying to have a conversation about the meaning of live in the middle of a busy street. It’s technically possible but it’s not really the optimal environment.

The Right Moment(s) to Ask for the Sale

I believe that that’s why email works so well, and study after study shows that it does do so well, to take the conversation, when it’s time, to focus attention a little bit more and start talking about, “I don’t know if you realized but I have something to offer that solves your problem and here’s how you can pick it up.” In other words, a copywriting offer.

Email is a super tool for channeling attention. Social and the public web are great tools for getting attention. Emails are a really nice tool for managing attention, and channeling it, and directing it, and saying, “Hey, I know you’re busy. I know the web is crazy but you might want to check this out and that out.” You don’t only send people to offers. You also send people to other good, relevant stuff that you’re creating.

When you do send them to an offer, what you send them to is something that’s called a landing page. It’s a web page that’s optimized for taking somebody’s attention and their interest. It’s gone beyond attention at this point. They’re actually interested. They’re actually engaged and translating that engagement into a behavior like making a purchase. If you try to make the sale in email, that’s really tricky because people get fed up trying to take in a longer, more complex message from their email inbox. Our attention spans are kind of fragmented with email. It’s great for channeling attention but it doesn’t hold attention as well as other tools do. You use the right tool for the right task.

How do we know what are the right tools for a particular point on this path to purchase? There are definitely a lot of places you can go to learn more about different options and good practices. I won’t say best practices in this case because it does change. The best place is really to just observe your audience.

Now you can always ask them but sometimes how we behave doesn’t completely match what we say because sometimes how we behave doesn’t match how we think we behave. You can, for example the classic example would be, you can ask your audience, “Would you buy an eBook on this topic for $20,” and they will say, “Yes,” and then you give them an offer for an eBook on that topic for $20 and nobody buys. What they do and what they say are not always the same.

When you observe, you know. When you observe it happening, you know. At least for now you know. Things do evolve but they don’t evolve in the sense that they start off as a tadpole and then they turn into an elephant. It kind of stays in the same realm of species type. Things do evolve. Your audience is going to change. They’re going to change where they like to hang out but it’ll tend to be recognizable from one stage to another, especially if you keep paying attention.

How to Discover Exactly What Your Content Marketing Strategy Should Look Like

As you keep giving that your attention, you’re going to be able to watch, and see where it moves, and how it moves. You’ll see which tools are working well for you, email, social media, which specific social platforms, what kinds of contents. Then you’re going to see what might be underperforming for you. Maybe it worked well last year but this year, you know, not exciting. You’ll get some good ideas about what to experiment with next. If you watch the audience, the answers always, always lay with audience.

One thing about marketing online, because the world is changing so quickly and the digital world really, really changes quickly, it’s never stagnate and it never stays still. You get it figured out and then it kind of morphs on you. It can be stressful for sure but it’s also what makes it interesting. I think it’s what keeps people kind of in this business for the longer term because it is definitely a situation where it’s always evolving and growing. It would be very hard to get bored because it’s very hard to find something that works long enough that you can get bored.

I mentioned earlier in the episode, Brian Clark really thinks a lot about the strategy of content and about the different places that people stop along this path to purchase and the different states that they’re in as they walk that path. One thing you can do to find out a lot more about it is just stay tuned to Copyblogger. Brian has been writing quite a bit for us on this exact topic so keep tuning into those because those will give you a lot to work with.

You may or may not know, he also has written quite a few eBooks for us that are available in what’s called the My Copyblogger Library. These are all free. There’s, you know, a good chunk of them are written by Brian specifically about different points of strategy. For example, one of the ones I really like is called How to Create Content that Converts and that really dives into the different types of content, and when to use them, and what they look like, and what their function is. Again, right tool for the right job.

You can pick up the content marketing library if you haven’t yet. If you just go to Copyblogger.com there’s an education tab and you’ll see under that tab, Free! My Copyblogger. Just drop your email in there and you’ll get access to this complete comprehensive content marketing library. It’s all free and there’s a lot of very meaty stuff in there if you want to study this in depth, which I think would be very beneficial.

That’s it today, three points of failure for content marketing strategy. The first is just your content is too me too. It’s too cookie cutter. It’s not distinctive enough. The second is you don’t understand what your path to purchase is. You don’t have a well-paved path to purchase so that somebody gets from discovering your content to actually going forward and making a sell. The third is that we tend to use the wrong tool for the job because we get comfortable with certain tactics or certain tools and we don’t step out of our comfort zone. But we need to use the whole range of tools available to us if we really want to optimize the experience for the audience. That’s really what it’s all about.

That’s it for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I’ll catch you next week.

The Transcript

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s RainMaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always find more links, extra resources at the show notes for this podcast. You can find them at Copyblogger.FM, and that’s also where you can get a complete archive for the show.

The Benefits of Leaving Comments on Blogs, Podcasts, or Other Content Venues

Today, I want to talk about a subject that might seem obvious, or it might seem simple, and every single day I am reminded that many people aren’t very good at it. That is leaving a good blog comment. You probably know if you followed us at all for any length of time, Copyblogger turned off comments for quite a while, I think it was over a year. The main reason we did was we just were not seeing super high comment quality. Now, some people were leaving wonderful comments, and then a lot of people were leaving the other kind. Spam comments are one thing and they’re taken care of tolerably well by spam filters.

That wasn’t really the problem. The kind of spam that gets caught in spam filters was not really an issue. The issue was the volume of comments that were really intended for a different purpose other than connecting with the community. Some people on the Copyblogger team hate comments, not all of those people are named Brian Clark, and some people on our team love comments, and not all of those people are me.

The Kinds of Comments We Love

Every one of us loves the real community building kind of comments. It’s always great for all of us to hear from the people who really, truly make up the audience. Folks who are working on their content, interested in content quality, trying to make something happen, and maybe they have a question, or something catches their eye. Those are just awesome and we still love those.

Now, it’s probably worth talking about why leave a comment on a blog at all, other than just you ve got nothing else to do for the next two minutes. The biggest reason is that commenting on blogs still works. When I say works, what I mean is that one of the biggest questions people have is, How to expand their audience, especially when your site is new and young? How can you expand your audience, how can you promote your content, how can you get other people to find out who you are and what you’re doing?

One of the most important ways to do that is to create some conversations and relationships with other content publishers, with other people who have YouTube content, or blog content, podcast content, what have you. The web is a social place and the whole commenting system is a way that we can foster our community, and make connections with each other, and make new connections with people we haven’t met yet. That doesn’t work when people leave comments that feel dodgy or feel spammy.

I wanted to just give some suggestions for folks out there to leave the kinds of contents that are going to open up relationships with the people that … Whose work you respect. Of course, it’s a not very thinly disguised encouragement to come on over to the Copyblogger blog, or this podcast, or both, and leave comments so I can get to know more about who you are and what interests you.

I’m going to give you five things to keep in mind when you’re leaving a comment on someone else’s content. Again, really any kind of content. This also counts on social platforms. The first one is you want to put your best foot forward. Things like, make sure you’ve spelled things properly, make sure that your remarks are reasonably grammatical. Nobody needs to be perfect and things don’t have to be … You’re not submitting a paper to your eighth grade English teacher, but fluency counts and presenting yourself well counts. In my opinion, you must have a Gravatar. You get a Gravatar by going to the Gravatar website, it’s easy to Google, I will give you a link, and just give them the email address that you use when you post comments and put a picture of yourself up there. Your Gravatar needs to be your face.

A Peek Behind the Comment Spam Curtain at Copyblogger (Warning: It s Not Pretty)

Now, once in awhile you can get away with something kind of silly like, a cartoon face. In fact, on one of the email addresses I use sometimes, if I have trouble commenting with my regular one, it has a cartoon face, and that’s sort of okay. What does not work is to have your logo, or to have something else where you’re hiding behind some kind of organizational identity. Because organizational identities cannot get into relationships, and the only reason to comment anywhere is to have good conversations and create relationships. There are now a few sites that will simply throw into the trash any comment that does not have a Gravatar or that has a Gravatar that is a logo. Similarly, we will trash any comment where you use your keywords as your name, or usually, if you use your company name as your name, we will just throw it away.

Part of putting your best foot forward and part of making a good first impression is that, let us know that you’re a person and not, literally a bot, or perhaps some very poorly paid freelancer who’s just going around the web leaving comments, because people believe it has some kind of SEO value. I have no interest in starting a conversation with, Best SEO agency Atlanta, and I’m just choosing Atlanta at random.

Now I will definitely talk to you if you work in SEO. I like a lot of people who work in SEO and any glance at my Twitter stream will show you that. What I don’t want to have a conversation with is a collection of keywords. It just makes you look like a spammy jerkface. Okay, so that’s putting your best foot forward, making a good first impression.

How to Make Sure Your Comments are Relevant

The second best practice is please know the site that you’re commenting on. Please actually take some time to familiarize yourself with what’s going on there. You want to comment on sites that you actually know something about. You want to be able to make comments that are relevant. You cannot create the relationships that we’re talking about creating with content publishers with this kind of shotgun approach. I see it all the time. It’s often outsourced, and it’s clear that somebody’s got their little spreadsheet and they’re going down to 30 or 40 blogs a day and leaving a comment. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You want to find a select group of sites that have content that you really resonate with. It really works for you, you’re really getting it, it’s meaningful to you. Then participate in an ongoing conversation there.

Because I’ll tell you a secret, the first time you comment, nobody is going to notice you, really. You’re just not going to stand out. Although, it does help to have your face in that Gravatar icon, because that starts to give the publisher something to hang onto. “Oh, that Susanna person seemed nice.” Now, when that Susanna person shows up consistently, not every day, not like being the first commenter … That it just becomes so obvious when it’s completely done as a tactic. I just see Susanna fairly regularly and I start to recognize her avatar and she’s participating in an ongoing conversation. Then I start to say, “Oh, Susanna’s cool, I like her. It makes me happy to see her on the site.” For example, and yes, this is absolutely a hint, you could participate in our content challenges at Copyblogger.

We just kicked off the January prompts last week. If you want to do that, let us know in the comments, you know, How’s it working for you? Let us know, “I tried this and then that happened,” or let us know that, “I tried the thing you recommended, but I ran into a snag,” or let us know, “I don’t know what it is about me, but I just can’t deal with the Pomodoro method, it gives me hives.” Just have a conversation that’s relevant to what we’ve been talking about.

Another nice way to do this is to ask a relevant question. Something specific like, “Should I try this technique that you’re recommending in this piece of content given the set of circumstances?” Now, you probably don’t want to have five or six pages of explanation, but enough details that we’re talking about a real world scenario, and not just the vague show.

It shows that you’re actually connected to the topic and you’re kind of working with the material and making it your own. That’s really what virtually every content creator wants to see happen. We want to see people who are taking the material and actually doing something with it. That’s a huge win for almost any content creator. We love to hear about what you’re doing.

Make Sure You Have Something to Say

That kind of leads to my number three point, which is, let’s please stop with the vague comments, the content-free comments. “This certainly seems like a high quality site, your advice with this is very good. I will try it.” That just goes right in the trash. It doesn’t say anything. It’s completely meaningless. I mean, it’s an attempt to be pleasant and I like that, rewards for being polite, but it doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. You can’t create a relationship with a publisher and a relationship with a community, and don’t overlook that element of it, until you actually start sharing something specific about what’s going on with you.

You should realize, if you’re going to use blog comments to widen your network and get to know more people who publish content so you can just organically grow your audience, you should know that as a content publisher, the reason that I have comments on my site is I want to know more about who’s reading, and who’s listening to the podcasts, and what kind of things bug you, and what kind of things work for you, where are you coming from.

The content-free comments, those vague comments, they’re sort of vaguely pleasantly complementary without ever getting specific, they seem like they’re no big deal, they don’t seem like they’re hurting anything, but they create all of this clutter. I gotta tell you, after awhile, they get incredibly irritating. So please just don’t. If you don’t have something to actually say, think about having something to say and post comments on the sites where you actually feel moved to add something to the conversation.

How Not to Be That Guy

The fourth kind of best practice or recommendation is really, you have to realize that this is a long game. Commenting on a blog or commenting on a podcast is not going to get you a flood of traffic, it’s not going to help you make your numbers this month, it’s not going to help propel your book to Amazon number one. If you’re using it as that kind of short term tactic, it just shows, it’s so apparent, and it feels creepy. Even if you follow the rules kind of to the letter, the spirit is off and it feels off and your comment s going to get trashed.

I’ll tell you what that reminds me of. If you’ve ever been to a networking breakfast, like a live thing, and you know that there’s always those couple of people, often guys, but definitely not always guys, who relentlessly hit everybody up with their thing. It’s usually a multi level marketing thing and everybody in the room groans when that guy walks in, because he never asks a question, he never has any curiosity about what anybody else is doing. He’s for sure not there to buy, he’s only there to sell his crummy thing that you could get anywhere.

Nobody likes that guy, do not be that guy. Don’t comment on blogs where you think somehow you’re going to sell something, whatever that means to you. Comment on sites where you’d just really like to make a connection and you’d like to get to know people better, and possibly do some work together at some point down the line. It just needs to really be about making a connection first.

Now, major bonus points if you’re in a situation where you can swing it. If you know the site, or you know that writer from some kind of a connection face to face, so at a conference, a live event of some kind, definitely do say hi. It is so nice to see somebody in the comments, or on Twitter, or a lot of places, if I’ve had a nice conversation with them at a live event somewhere. This applies just as much to conversations on social media, as it does to content comments. It’s really delightful when you can make that connection, it just makes such a difference when I have a real person to connect the Gravatar and the name to. If that’s something that you can do, it really, really is a wonderful way to make a lot better relationships, and make good connections. And then you can maintain those connections with things like comments.

What No One (Except Me) Will Tell You About Playing the Devil s Advocate

The last piece of advice, a lot of people will not tell you this, but I am going to tell you this, because a lot of people are not telling you the truth. Everybody actually hates the devil’s advocate. There’s always that one person who thinks it’s a good way to get attention to be super contrary and constantly say, “You guys are wrong, this is dumb, lol,” usually lol goes in there somewhere.

If you want to be contrarian about somebody’s ideas, whether that person has a big site, small site, I don’t care, do it on your platform. Your platform is a great place to say, “I know everybody thinks those Copyblogger people are smart, but I think they’re totally wrong about this and here’s why.” Then present a cogent, intelligent argument. Smart, well thought out disagreement will do a lot of good on your site. When you come take it to the comments on my site, it’s just kind of annoying.

Now, that in no way means that you’re not allowed to disagree, because that’s just silly and I’m not saying that at all. But, you need to think about how reactive, in fact, how inflamed the social web is, especially right now. If you make a habit of bringing attention to yourself by being contrarian, a) I think it’s a little bit lazy. I’d rather see you actually come up with some ideas. I’d like to see you come up with some recommendations, some … “I think everybody ought to do this, I think this is the way to go and here’s why and here’s my evidence.” A little bit of, Being a contrarian makes a good seasoning, but again, do it on your site. It’s just going to get you a lot more benefit and everybody hates that guy.

No one will tell you that, because we all want to think, “Oh, I’m all for constructive criticism,” and everybody’s for constructive criticism in theory. Nobody really likes it. So, if what you’re doing is commenting to create relationships, a real small amount of that goes a long way. Occasional disagreement is fine. Keep it respectful.

The Art of Constructive Disagreement

My dad, who is the world’s biggest crank, really just on the planet, will go on a major tear and then he catches his breath and says, “Well, that’s how I see it. You might see it differently.” I think this is such a good … That’s such a good way to look at things. Yes, it’s okay to disagree, you don’t have to agree with everything we say on Copyblogger, but if you make a point of showing up and telling us how wrong we are, you’re just being irritating. In most subjects there are multiple good approaches, and so a good content publisher is going to kind of choose one path, and they’re going to publish content about the path that they can speak to intelligently and authoritatively.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other paths, or no other paths exist, or every other path should die in a fire. But, if you have a real different way to do things, be respectful, learn what you can, engage in the conversation, make friends, and then present your way that you think is the right way on your site and pull your own tribe together. There’s no reason we have to fight, or squabble, or any of this silly nonsense. We can all hang out, and be cool, and each have our own point of view about things.

That’s it, five ideas for leaving better comments on blogs, on video, on podcasts, on any piece of content. They also work when you’re leaving a note or a comment on somebody’s social media platform. This is, as you can tell, a hardly disguised at all little bit of motivation. We love to see your comments on Copyblogger. I particularly love to see your comments on Copyblogger.

If you’re going to be joining us for any one of the content challenges, or all of the content challenges, or if you just see something that you find useful, or you’re not sure about, maybe something feels a little bit unclear, I love it when you leave us a comment. Let us know what’s working. Do let us know if something’s not clear or it’s confusing to you and you need something spelled out a little more, because that really helps us create content that works for you, and that’s what we want to do.

Thank you so much. I sincerely hope to see you in the comments. This is Sonia Simone with Copyblogger FM, take care.