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Perception

Are You Creating Meaningful Content?

by Brian Clark on January 12, 2011

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Everyone’s creating all this online content, but does it matter?

More importantly, are you accomplishing your goals with the content you deliver, or are you simply spinning your wheels?

Well, if you’re doing it right, your content is highly effective and tightly tied to your ultimate objectives. Otherwise, you’re just filling up space on an ignored web page.

Content marketing is the most effective and lucrative form of online marketing, because it not only works, it also builds a media asset at the same time. So it makes sense to understand exactly what makes content effective, right?

The key is meaning.

Effective Content is Meaningful

The simple definition of content marketing is to give away valuable information in order to sell something related. The word in that definition we’re focusing on today is value.

Value is a function of perception. So, you want the people you’re trying to reach to perceive your content as valuable, even if people you’re not trying to reach perceive it as worthless.

This is an important point, even though it seems simplistic.

The snarling enemy of meaningful content is the urge to water it down for the lowest-common denominator in the hopes of either (a) reaching an unreasonably mass audience, or (b) not offending anyone.

The result of that approach is content that means very little to anyone.

Meaningful Content is an Experience

Yesterday, Sonia showed you that content (what you say) without copywriting (how you say it) can be a complete waste of otherwise valuable information. But no matter how you say it, what you say has to have meaning to the right people.

Meaning is a function of what people believe before you find them. As we’ve discussed before, what people believe is how they view the world, and your content has to frame that view appropriately to be effective.

As a function of belief, meaning is derived from the context in which your desired audience views your content. From there, your content has to provoke a desirable reaction.

For example:

  1. Content – 10 Tips for More Productive Writing
  2. Context – Your ideal prospect believes productive writing is important
  3. Reaction – Your ideal prospect believes he can now write more efficiently

While everything we perceive is technically an experience, experiences begin to become meaningful at the reaction stage. It’s at that point that your content is good.

But is it great (meaning highly effective)?

No.

Meaningful Experiences Involve Action

A higher grade of experience involves active participation from that ideal prospect. So, beyond the belief that your advice is beneficial, your ideal prospect actually acts on your advice.

  1. Content – 10 Tips for More Productive Writing
  2. Context – Your ideal prospect believes productive writing is important
  3. Reaction – Your ideal prospect believes he can now write more efficiently
  4. Action – Your ideal prospect implements your productivity tips

The action taken can vary. It can be acting directly on your advice, spreading your content, buying your software that helps implement the advice, buying your book for more detail, or hiring you as a personal productivity coach.

At this point your content is truly meaningful, and truly aligned with your objectives. There’s only one level that’s better.

The Content Holy Grail: Results

What’s better than action? It’s action that leads to beneficial results.

Now, this won’t happen with every piece of content. In fact, it’s safer to say that reader (or viewer or listener) results happen thanks to the totality of the story you tell over time.

But let’s look at it in its simplest form:

  1. Content – 10 Tips for More Productive Writing
  2. Context – Your ideal prospect believes productive writing is important
  3. Reaction – Your ideal prospect believes he can now write more efficiently
  4. Action – Your ideal prospect implements your productivity tips
  5. Result – Your ideal prospect is a more productive writer

Whether you know about these results or not, it doesn’t matter – you’ve now earned a true fan. But odds are, a true fan is going to tell someone.

And that’s the fantastic last part of a cycle that repeats itself over and over in social media, all thanks to content marketing. And all the while, you’re building a media asset on your own domain that has independent value beyond the cash flow you pull every month.

You are building that asset, right?

We’ll discuss this more on tomorrow’s Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio show.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Copyblogger Media. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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Why Being Too Diligent About Your Facts Can Hurt Your Content

by Sean D'Souza on September 20, 2010

image of scientist examining liquid

Once upon a time, the world was flat.

Now it’s round.

Who knows? Maybe some day we’ll find out it’s square.

It’s hard to come across a cold hard fact anymore.

Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Drink 16 glasses of water a day. Don’t drink any water; get all your water from fruits and vegetables.

The contradictory advice goes on forever. There’s almost nothing you can nail down with absolute certainty.

Even your own content.

When you’re writing a game-changing piece of content, it’s natural to want to nail that article down with irrefutable data. So you spend seventeen hours to come up with data from books, white papers, and online sources.

But your research is tainted

No matter how hard you work to nail down the facts, you’re going to run into accuracy problems.

That’s because your information sources aren’t entirely reliable. Even if the source is reliable, the information may not be.

For example, a magazine may accurately report the findings of a study, but who says the study results are actually correct?

Here are just a few ways your research can become tainted:

  • Research is often funded by lobby groups pushing their own agendas.
  • Passed-down information can lose relevant bits.
  • What was once fact has since been overturned by new evidence.

Let’s look at them one by one.

Problem 1: Research may not be objective

Let’s say a lobby group wants to increase sales of lemonade. They fund research to find more reasons for you to drink lemonade. They pour squillions of dollars into their research, and amazingly enough, all that research comes to the same conclusion: lemonade has amazing health benefits.

Of course, that’s not how the research is presented to you.

The research is presented in an interesting, fact-driven way that makes you believe it. Given a slew of reasonable-sounding facts and a truckload of statistics, and most of us will change our perception.

That’s not to say lobby groups are bad people. They’re just like you and me.

We tell our kids to eat spinach because it will make them big and strong. Doesn’t matter if the spinach doesn’t actually have the nutrients to get kids big and strong. Doesn’t matter if we’ve cooked the goodness out of the spinach. The kids swallow the idea — and hopefully the spinach. We all present information in the best light.

And when we add figures and facts, it becomes something written in stone.

Except it’s not written in stone. It’s not cold, hard fact. It’s just one view, one presentation of the data.

Problem 2: Hand-me down facts

Use tea bags to polish hardwood floors. Mix turmeric and honey in hot water and drink it for a cough. Use the underside of a ceramic mug to put an edge on that dull kitchen knife.

These are hand-me down facts. They work — but do they work just the way they’re written? Did the author leave out a piece of critical information in the re-telling? Perhaps you have to steep the tea bags for a certain amount of time. Maybe you have to be careful to get the exact correct angle between your knife and that ceramic mug.

Facts often develop holes over time.

As stories get handed down, they lose information. The main part of the story may be true, but misleading without key pieces of information that go with it. The only way to be sure it to check for yourself. You take those tea bags and polish a part of your hardwood floor. If the floors shine, you’ve got a personal story of your own to tell.

Hand-me-down data looks valid, but unless you’ve proved it yourself, you’re quoting unproven research.

And that takes us to the final problem: The data keeps changing.

Problem 3: Facts evolve

As recently as 1980, most neuroscientists would tell you with confidence that the brain had no meaningful plasticity.

Plasticity means that the brain is adaptable. That it can heal damage from strokes, accidents, and other horrible things, and that it can change and adapt after the critical period of childhood.

There’s now research (yeah, I’m aware of the irony in referencing research in this article) that all areas of the brain can change and evolve even in adulthood. Destroyed function can be “re-routed” to other areas of the brain. And intense mental activity (like studying for med school exams) can change the brain in measurable ways in a matter of weeks.

I want you to understand one thing: these original nay-sayers were neuroscientists. They live, breathe, and map their entire careers around research about how the brain works. Some of the smartest people on the planet. And they were wrong.

Today, neuroplasticity is an irrefutable fact.

But who’s to know what will come around the corner?

Does this mean you shouldn’t research your articles?

Not at all. Research matters. Facts matter.

All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary to spend all those hours tracking down facts. Often, the facts you find are only half-right, or they’re just a part of greater truths to be revealed.

Go ahead and do your research, but put on an egg timer. If you don’t get what you’re looking for in about 20 minutes, it’s time to get your own facts together.

Don’t make up facts that aren’t true, but tell us your own experience.

It’s better to simply write what you know. Not only does it make for a good story, you can be secure that what you’re saying is really true.

Research makes things interesting, but your own case studies are just as interesting. So don’t be bashful. Use your personal stories and experiences more often — you don’t need fifteen sources and two experts to back you up.

You might be wrong

Sure, you may be wrong about the way you interpret what you experience.

The neuroscientists were wrong too. So were all the smart, educated people who insisted the world was flat. There have been countless geniuses who insisted on theories that would ultimately prove to be wrong.

Research won’t save you from being wrong. It’ll just get in the way of telling your story — and that’s more important than having irrefutable facts.

Especially because the facts are never irrefutable. No matter how much research you do.

About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter. Be sure to check out his blog, too.

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Six Questions to Ask for Powerful Testimonials

by Sean D'Souza on April 8, 2010

image of two women in masks

This is the second and final installment of The Secret Life of Testimonials.

Most of us ask for testimonials. And if we follow up and pester our customers enough, we get testimonials.

There’s only one problem. Our testimonials have no power.

Testimonials are stories. And stories have power and grace, flow and rhythm. Look around you and you’ll see none of that in most testimonials.

Limp testimonials are a fact of life, because clients don’t know how to give testimonials. But more importantly, because we don’t have a clue about how to ask for testimonials.

As I mentioned last week, the way to ask for testimonials is to use six key questions.

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How Your DIY Attitude Is Keeping You Poor

by Johnny B. Truant on December 17, 2009

image of hammer and nail

The way people talk, you’d think there are like four customers in the world. Maaaaybe five if you look around really hard — but that’s about it.

So whatever you do, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those customers, you’d better not do anything that minimizes the income you receive from them.

You’d certainly better not share them. You’d better cut your expenses to the bone on the back end, and hey . . . if you know that a competitor is courting one of the other three or four customers? Well, then you’d better get over there and work on stealing them away.

Right now, you’re rolling your eyes at this dumb picture I’m painting. But just for fun — just to see if I’m totally off base — ask yourself the following:

  • Are you willing to partner with someone if it means that you’ll make less profit per customer, but have access to more customers?
  • Are you willing to pay handsomely for referrals — 50% or more in some cases?
  • Would you be willing to share your business with a competitor who does the same basic thing as you do?

If the answer to any of the above is no, then you’re suffering from a scarcity mindset.

You don’t really believe there are a lot of fish in the sea. You believe there are only a few fish. Or, maybe there are more fish way out deep, but in order to get to them, you’ll need to charter a boat, which means trusting some skeevy boat captain. And what happens when you get into a boat with someone who you can’t trust? You get whacked while baiting your hook, like Fredo in The Godfather.

I’m going to suggest getting over that perception.

There are a LOT of fish in the sea. And the sooner you learn to work with other people to help you get them, the faster you’re going to get ahead.

Anatomy of a successful partnership

One of the things I do in my business is set up WordPress blogs for clients. Just a few months ago, I met Genuine Chris Johnson of Flat Rate Web Jobs. Now, Chris does something interesting in his business. He sets up WordPress blogs for clients.

So what did Chris and I do with this apparent conflict of interests? We teamed up, of course.

See, if you do business in the way I tell readers and consulting clients alike, you’ll soon realize that there are “your people” and there are “not your people.” And once you figure that out, you’ll see that most of your seeming competitors really aren’t competitors after all. Even if your services are the same, your people probably are not.

Yes, Chris and I both set up blogs, but our audiences are very different. Chris’s customers come mainly from the offline world and are learning the power of blogging for the first time. My customers usually already understand the internet and the blogosphere.

The way he finds and contacts clients (often including a phone call) is very different than the way I do (social networking and blogging, never using the phone). The questions and pain points that he addresses for clients (”What’s a blog, and how will it help my business?”) are different than the ones I address (”How quickly can I get my blog off of Blogger?”). His packages include a ton of training material. My customers don’t usually need much training, at least in the basics. Accordingly, our prices are fairly disparate.

Lastly, our personal strengths are different, and complementary. Chris is very good at sales and would rather that someone else handle customer service and implementation. Conversely, I don’t want to sell. I’d rather implement and do customer service.

We could pretty easily have decided that we were competitors. Chris could have kept selling his packages, and been bogged down each time with building sites, answering emails, and so on. I could have stuck solely with “my people,” and worked to sell each job I did.

But instead, the partnership has allowed each of us to make thousands of extra dollars a month.

Now, that’s a dramatic example (side note: it gets more dramatic when you realize that Chris dated my wife before I met her, a fact that caught both of us by surprise), but there are a few ways that you can increase your business through strategic partnerships that don’t necessitate seeking out apparent competitors.

Here are a few ways to start small:

1. Get a team

Or at least get an assistant. You can only do so much as one person, and insisting on holding all of the reins yourself ensures that not only will your business not grow past a certain point, but also that you’ll be stressed out and unable to take time off.

2. Start paying for referrals

A lot of people are reluctant to pay for referrals (or to start an affiliate program) because it means shrinking your profit margin.

That’s short-sighted thinking. If you offer commissions to people who send you business, those people send you more down the road.

Remember, a referral is business you would otherwise not have gotten. So be cool and kick a thank-you to the person who sent it your way. For services and tangible products, 10-20% is a good commission rate. For digital products, it should be 50% — or even more.

3. Bundle your products with other people’s products

If you sell your Widget Buster Extraordinaire for $50 and another person sells Widget Smashing Secrets for $50, consider making a deal to sell both products together for $80 and split the profits.

Yes, you’ll make $10 less each time you sell a Widget Buster. But the new Buster + Secrets offer is so much more attractive to customers that you’re almost certain to sell enough more to make up for it.

Don’t be short-sighted. Assuming your margins still support it, 50 sales at $40 is better than 25 sales at $50.

Getting beyond doing it yourself

There’s a certain romance in “going it alone,” especially for bloggers. But taking the DIY (do-it-yourself) mindset too literally just ensures that your business will never be able to grow beyond the capabilities of one person.

Trust me, other people are cool. Partnering with them is fun. And doing so is absolutely the way to accelerate your progress. So have a little faith and try it already.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is a website builder and consultant extraordinaire who wants everyone to know that he’s raising his rates on January 1st — so if you’d like to work with him, now’s the time. (Contact him now and he’ll even build you a free blog.) You can also follow him on Twitter, where he’s moderately amusing.

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