Tag: Duct Tape Marketing

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‘Thought leadership’ marketing takes time! Here’s one man’s perspective on taking that time to ‘make media’ as he says…

This is a chicken or the egg causality dilemma for me: as I create more media, my media consumption has changed or my media consumption has changed, hence I’m able to create more media. I really don’t know which came first but what I can tell you is that I definitely watch much less TV, read more than I ever have in my life, and listen to industry specific podcasts.I rarely watch TV anymore and when I do it is usually a sporting event, a movie, or Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. I just don’t find sitting mindlessly in front on the TV exciting anymore. Rather than watch TV, I take time with my family or read. Speaking of reading, I read all the time. Whether it’s a book, a blog, or the newspaper, not only do I find enjoyment in reading – I also find blog topics and ideas.

Finally, I have become a fan of podcasts. In my never ending quest to find time to exercise, which I still don’t do often enough anymore, I’ve started to walk and listen to podcasts at the same time. I feel like I’m killing two birds with one stone. There are many great podcasts out there but two I would recommend are John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing and Copyblogger’s Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio.

via schneiderb.com

Brendan Schneider has put together a thoughtful post on ‘making media’ [you can follow the ‘via’ link to read the whole post] in which he talks about ‘Getting Things Done’, staying away from the ‘idiot box’ [as my father was so fond of saying’], and creating a SMS — a social media system — for managing his social media outposts. I have a lot of similar needs and biases as Brendan and my social media system is called the ‘e1evation workflow‘ — kind of a ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ cycle for ‘thought leadership’ marketing [my way of saying ‘make media’]. Comment or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about a ‘practical, tactical’ approach to social media how this applies to you and your organization…

John Jantsch
Image via Wikipedia

2011 marks my eighth year of blogging. In that time I’ve logged over 2500 blog posts, acquired around 143,000 subscribers and had this blog named by the likes of Forbes magazine as their favorite for both marketing and small business.

If this asset has delivered any measure of success I can tell you that the primary reason is that in that same time I’ve also read some or all of approximately 120,000 blog posts written by others. I’ve stated repeatedly that anyone that wants to start a blog, get better at blogging or make their blog a serious marketing tool for their business must first and foremost get very good at reading blogs…

Go to the source to read the article if you’d like to know John’s logic. Find it here: ducttapemarketing.com. Business blogging for both production and consumption are two of the most important activities in my day. ‘Connect with me’ if you’d like to know more about it…
John Jantsch
Image via Wikipedia

“These days I can’t get through a presentation on the use of social media in marketing without someone inquiring whether they should use Facebook as the primary web presence for their business.

“I mean, it’s free and look at all these cools tools you can add to your Fan Page.”

Let me be very clear on my thinking on this: Facebook is not the house, Twitter is not the house, your social profiles spread far and wide are not the house.

Your hub, your blog, your website—that’s the house. Build the house, fix the house, decorate the house and invite the party to the house, because it’s the one thing you can own and control. It’s an asset you can grow rather than space you simply rent.

Your activity in social media is all about building a persona and brand that draws people to the house, whether you’re a plumbing contractor, consultant, or someone that wants to create a path to a better career. Build rich and engaging hubs on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or wherever your prospects hang out, but remember you’re always going home.

Focusing too much attention on your Facebook play is like spending a bunch of time decorating and fixing up a neighbor’s house while they are traveling Europe for a year or two. It may be a nice place to throw a party or entertain, but you don’t really own it.” Source: Facebook Is Not the House :: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Of all the social media luminaries, John Jantsch may be the one I most closely identify with. Why? His style is so practical and tactical and he communicates in a way that inspires me.

John nails it again with this post. Building your internet presence solely on Facebook is like building your home on rented land. Not recommended. At the same time, Facebook is a force too powerful to ignore. My advice? ‘Hold on Loosely’ as the great philosophers .38 Special advised…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJtf7R_oVaw

I strongly encourage you to go to the source and get the rest of John’s perspective. Comment below or ‘connect’ above to discuss how this applies to you and your organization…

John Jantsch
Image via Wikipedia

John Jantsch recently wrote on the topic of “Profiting from other people’s content”. He says…

“Don’t be alarmed by that title — I’m not talking about stealing content for gain, I’m talking about adding the filtering and aggregating of content to your content consumption, creation and sharing routine.

Pretty much everyone has bought into the idea that they need to produce lots of valuable content in order to build the trust and search engine eyes of today’s online prospect. One way to supplement your content strategy while still providing lots of value, is to get good at finding and filtering other people’s content that your prospects and customers will find useful as well. (Done right, the other people will thank you for giving a wider audience to their content).

It should go without saying that giving credit to the original source and full attribution to the author when appropriate is a must.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

John talks about his “consumption, creation and sharing routine” — my mantra is ‘listen, publish, promote’ which is a little more elegant in my book but we’re both trying to say the same thing and use an alliteration in the process. If I were John, I might go for ‘consume, create, communicate‘ — in fact, I might start using that instead. Either way, the point is that gathering good content effectively and commenting on it is a great way to build your personal brand. I’ve been using this strategy for years — most recently, I amped it up by using Posterous [another tool that John advocates] and saving more content directly to my blog instead of shared bookmarks as I used to do. Here are the results:

I think the results are really quite good for an ‘army of one’, don’t you? I do all my ‘creation and communication’ as a result of my daily ‘consumption’ — because my system is easy to implement and use, I work it frequently. I call quoting other sites ‘curation’ and my rare original thoughts ‘creation’. The curation works to draw people to my creation. Does it work? You betcha [you’re reading this, aren’t you?]. The average person drawn into my blog through effective communication reads 3.3 pages and spends 2:52 minutes on the site, while only 4.75% ‘bounce’ to another site. Over 71% are new visitors…

Jantsch goes on to give three tactical implementations of his ‘profiting from content’ suggestion. They are…

“Make yourself a better resource

Creating a habit of filtering content related to your industry, products, competitors and customers will make you better at what you do, allow you to keep up with trends and give you data to help you build deeper relationships with customers.

Share content to draw attention

Pointing out useful resources and good finds is a great way to build your social media and blog followings. Consistently sharing relevant links and sharing them on Twitter is a strategy that many find helps them be seen as follow worthy. Creating a once a week blog post roundup of good stuff is a great way to add content and keep readers engaged.

Filter personalized content

A more advanced strategy is to use your filter skills to create your own industry research briefs. If you specialize in several market niches you can create laser specific new pages and email newsletter roundups that feature the best of what you find each week. You can even use RSS technology to deliver dynamically changing web content password protected for your best clients.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Clearly, John and I share a lot of the same ‘common sense’. He goes on to list 10 different resources [you can follow the link] you can use as tools to find other people’s content. One of them — Kurrently — is one I’ll have to add to my toolkit. For me, however, this is where we part ways. My paradigm is “Google Reader is the answer. Now what is the question?“.

I use Google Reader like a tactical nuke. It’s the one tool I use to manage the ‘rest of the internet’ and I use it like a virtual newspaper or better yet, news bureau, where I manage hundreds of little newsbots that do my news aggregation for me. I have 5 great ways to get relevant content into Google Reader and they include most of John’s 10 tools — it’s just that in my book, Google Reader is the one tool that rules them all. It really is the driver in my ‘e1evation workflow’ outlined below. Either you get it and you can use it or I can help you implement it but the point is that if you have a brand and you want to build it online, we can help…

Related articles

Will blogging become essential for lawyers to establish trust?

John Jantsch
Image via Wikipedia

In order to establish trust these days, producing helpful content for your target audience is essential. This per John Jantsch, publisher of Duct Tape Marketing, a leading resource on small business marketing.

…[P]eople today have come to expect to find information about any product, service, company, individual, cause or challenge they face by simply turning to the search engine of their choice. So, if they’re not finding content that you’ve produced that provides them that information, even if someone referred them directly to you, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be worthy of their trust.

I guess I am going to tell you that you’ve got to commit to content production, but you’ve got to make it a part of your overall strategy and you’ve got to produce content with an eye on doing two things – educating and building trust.

What’s the leading way to produce content to build trust? Blogging says Jantsch.

I think a blog is the absolute starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication and sharing so easy. The search engines love blog content as well and this is the place where you can organize a great deal of your editorial thinking. Content produced on a blog can easily be expanded and adapted to become content for articles, workshops and ebooks.

Other content that can establish trust, per Jantsch, includes social media, reviews, testimonials, white papers, and FAQ’s. But with so many people reading blogs these days, including in-house counsel, and with blog content being regularly shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, it’s difficult to see other content having the impact of a blog.

People looking for a lawyer are as apt to be doing research on the underlying legal issue they face as they are to be looking for a lawyer. For example, someone looking for an estate planning lawyer is also going to be looking for information on the estate planning issue they face, whether it a type of trust, a tax issue or something else. They’ll still hire a lawyer. They’re just doing research so they are informed.

via kevin.lexblog.com

Easy Posting for Blogging Experts and First Timers Alike

I´m pleased to share with ThePRLawyer audience another amazing tool for public relations and marketing professionals called posterous.com. This website is designed for just about anyone to post music, videos, pictures and content on the Internet just by sending an email. There are options for first-time bloggers with simple instructions to get started and more advanced options for seasoned blogging experts.

Getting started is easy, sign up by sending an introductory email to posterous@posterous.com with the option to attach files like photos or videos and voilá! The reply is almost instant and you are set up with your very own part of the information superhighway. A variety of platforms (up to 30!) such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and/or Picasa can be integrated with your posterous. Once set up, you control where your information is going to be posted. It´s just that quick and easy.

Duct Tape Marketing´s John Jantsch explains the benefits for users by pointing out that “for many people, particularly those that rely on email as their primary communication and storage tool, this is a great way to create and curate content.” Jantsch also points out that posterous can be used as a hub for distribution with easy options to pick and choose what information to post and which platform it will be sent to.
via theprlawyer.com

Posted via web from Inside Posterous

I’ll be doing a webinar on using Posterous to establish thought leadership tomorrow at noon. It’s not too late to sign up…

Google Reader and Feedly

John Jantsch is validating what I’ve been telling you for months…

“If you use an RSS reader to subscribe to and read blogs (and you should) then you know what a great tool it can be to keep you up to date, well-read and inspired.

I’ve used the free Google Reader tool for a long time and love it’s simplicity. However, a reader of this blog (Rob Kirby) pointed out a very cool tool called Feedly that takes my subscriptions and creates a much better looking magazine like interface. To me better looking translates into more useful when it comes to scanning a hundred blogs or so. Feedly immediately brought all of my feeds and organization folders over from Google so set-up was instantaneous.

But that’s just the beginning. Feedly is a Firefox add-on that functions using my Google Reader account so all my Feedly activity is still saved to Google Reader. Adding blog subscriptions as simple as a click, but I can also pages I find, video, images, anything I want to bookmark and organize. I can share and email articles I find and the tool analyzes the content I seem to like and gently suggests where I might find more.” Source: A Beautiful Way to Read More Blogs | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Go to the source for the rest of the article! Perhaps you’ll like his version better… ;-)

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