“Pushy” isn’t the first word you want prospects to associate with your profession, but it’s a term that’s plagued the sales industry for years — and for good reason.
With the old-school sales approach, you searched for prospects with the biggest budgets and incessantly pitched your products or services until they surrendered.
Content creation is one of the key pillars of inbound marketing — but that doesn’t always mean it’s the easiest pillar to master. As with any new project, you’re bound to run into an obstacle or two.
To help you overcome those obstacles, here’s a quick round-up of recent blog posts
Creating content is hard work. So if you’re going to go to the trouble of creating it, you want to make sure it’ll bring you a great return on your investment for a long time.
What if each of your blog posts and articles were conduits of cash that never, ever turn off? What if they kept on delivering traffic, conversions, and revenue?
Is that a lame title — “Common Headline Writing Myths We Should All Stop Believing”?
I could have tried something with a lot more sizzle and punch, right? Like these …
OMG! I Just Discovered Why I’m Losing Traffic! Wait Until You See Them!
I Won’t Be Able To Sleep For Weeks! The Freaky Reasons Why I’m Losing Traffic!
The year was 1997, and all the cool kids were watching MTV.
Meanwhile, over on VH1, a new series was just rolling out; a series that was actually about music … and the musicians who made it.
That groundbreaking documentary series? Behind the Music.
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar …
As an inbound marketer, you work hard to keep your content engine going. You publish new blog posts, launch new ebooks, and produce new webinars regularly. You rinse and repeat, pumping valuable time and resources into new content creation to keep your blog fed and your offers fresh.
I’ve been not writing this post for a long time.
What I mean by that is — I’ve had this post in my head for a long time, but I couldn’t think of a way to write it without alienating a lot of people. I might still alienate a few here, but I think I found a productive way to say what I’ve been thinking about for a while now
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Not all of the content you create has to be 100% original.
I know. Mind-blowing, right? And for those of you inbound marketers plagued by the incessant demands of content creation, maybe also a little comforting?
When most of us think about creating content for a businesses, we tend to think about the content that helps generate awareness or new leads. This type of content isn’t self-promotional — you typically use it to answer industry-related questions and address topics that’ll attract people to your website, entice people to follow you on social media, and spur visitors to give over their information to receive a free offer.
If you know me at all, you know that I do a lot of writing. A lot.
I write content that is published widely on industry publications, because I consider it to be extremely important both personally and professionally. Content writing isn’t just something that I do on the side.
Someone once asked me how much time I spend editing. My response?
“How much time do I spend editing or copyediting?”
The two are different, you see. But they’re commonly used interchangeably, which can cause some confusion. So here’s the basic difference:
Whether you’re writing a how-to post for your blog, documentation for your software, or instructions on how to use your product, it’s important to make your content easy to read. Otherwise, you’ll lose your readers’ attention and they’ll never even get to the end of your post.
These tactics will help you create more helpful how-to posts that your readers will love (and hopefully even finish reading):
We use presentations every single day to tell stories, pitch ideas, share data, and even connect with our audience. But, there’s a small problem: 32% of people have fallen asleep during a PowerPoint presentation.
And that’s not really that surprising.
This post originally appeared on the Insiders section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Insiders.
Today’s winning brands aren’t playing it safe. They never say “that’s how we’ve always done it,” and they know their brands are more than just a sleek logo or a cool website.
