The key thing about community relationships is that the more you communicate with them in a useful, honest, and direct manner, the more trust you will build. And the more trust that you build, the larger the community will become.

The people in your community are prospects who, given time, can become customers. The way to communicate with your community is to keep content coming regularly without driving them away.

Communication Isn’t a One-Way Street

Communication takes at least two people; the person delivering the message and the person receiving the message. When it comes to online relationship building, both parties can trade in their roles, but it always takes two-way interactions – not just broadcast delivery. The way to ensure that you remember that is to always respond to comments, and seek ways to interact with your audience.

Have Real Conversations with Your Community

Letting go of your agenda (to make sales) and entering into free conversations with your readers on your blog or social media is important. Strategically you’ll want to try to keep these conversations public so that others can benefit. Remember, this conversation is not only useful to the person you’re talking to, but also to the people reading. It’s also good for SEO to have more user generated content.

Personalize Communication to Help Them Feel Special

Personalization via email marketing is simple because you can set up automation to help with that. And you should, because it works. Personalization in communication on social media is a little harder because you’re going to have to ensure that you get their name, and respond to them in a personal way. Using their name and when possible tagging them so they will see your response will help.

Show Your Fans Behind-the-Scenes Information

Outside of calling out people by name, another way you can endear your community to you is to give them some personal insight into your business behind the scenes. If you’ve failed at something, or didn’t do something as well as you wanted, say so. If you have already written a blog post about something they are asking about, answer them, but link to that old post too. When they see the effort you’re taking for them, it will build a lot of trust.

Ask for Audience Participation

You can ask your audience to upload images, memes and even videos around the topic in question. For example, if you’re trying to promote exercise habits to desk workers, you can ask that they share pictures of their stand-up desk or exercise area or even start a “Fitbit” community to help encourage moving during the work day. The audience participation is key and will build trust, which is crucial to making sales.

Link to Fitbit – http://www.amazon.com/Fitbit-Wireless-Activity-Sleep-Wristband/dp/B00BGO0Q9O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424560859&sr=8-1&keywords=fitbit

Plan a Competition in Your Community

Depending on what you’re promoting, you can plan different types of competitions. For example, if you’re building a Facebook Group, you can offer random prizes to members who bring in more appropriate members to the group by using a tagging system so that you know when your group is shared. In addition, you can give out random gifts for shares.

Host a Q&A session on Facebook, Hangout, or Some other Method

Q&A’s are very popular and ways to build camaraderie with your community. They are fun too. You can use many free software programs to do it such as Google Hangout On Air, or you can use paid webinar software like GoToWebinar.com and even charge a small fee to cover costs and control how many people show up. This is a great way to prime your community and weed out customers from prospects – not to mention add them to a mailing list.
Link to GoToWebinar – http://www.gotomeeting.com/online/webinar

Automate Carefully by Planning Both Scheduled Content and Live Content

Pushing blog posts to your social networks is great, but that will only go so far if you’re not doing it in a personalized way. Automation is useful but if it looks automated (because you don’t include an interesting blurb or quote from the content you’re sharing, or answer and respond to comments on the social media), your chances to build community will be scarce.

Remember that building community means having more prospects and more customers. But, you’ll need a wide range of content types in order to do it. Every time you post something on social media, it’s content. Every time you post an article on your blog, it’s content. Content is everywhere, and it should be. Use it to its best by making it interactive.

The fact is, blogging is a very important tool for marketing any business today. Not only can blogging build a business, it can also become a business. Blogging is essentially writing articles about a particular topic of interest based on the subject or niche of the website where the blog resides. But it does so much more and there are so many reasons to keep blogging.

1. To Tell Your Brand’s Story – Blogging is a simple way to tell the story of your brand through case studies, historical information, and by sharing data. People love reading about how you got started and why.

2. To Establish Expertise – If you want people to realize that you’re an expert in your niche, blogging regularly about the topic is an excellent way to do so. If you can blog three to five times a week about a niche, you’re obviously an expert.

3. To Attract New Clients – Blogging about what you do, why you do it, and how you do it will go far in creating new opportunities for getting more clients. Even if you feel as if you’re giving away all the information free on your blog, people who need the work done will still hire you.

4. To Improve Your SEO – Search engine optimization involves many factors, but one is on-page keywords that help search engines find your blog in order to send people to it who use those words to find information.

5. To Find Your Business’s Voice – As you talk about new products, services, or other issues within your niche, you are also creating a voice for your company that will carry it forth to new customers. If you’re excited about a product, your audience will be too. If you’re serious about it, your audience will be too. It’s all in word choice.

6. To Interact with Your Audience – Many people do not think of a blog as social media, but it really is. When you open up comments to your blog, it gives you a chance to interact with your audience based on the topic you want to discuss. Use that opportunity to get feedback and even for new product ideas.

7. To Use Resources Wisely – Most businesses have limited marketing budgets, and blogging uses that budget very wisely due to the amount of return you can expect on your investment. Blogging is the long game, and the blogs you post today will still be working for you a year from now if you plan appropriately. It’s all about momentum.

8. To Educate Your Audience – Blogs are an excellent way to educate your audience about problems and issues that affect them. Plus, it’s a simple way to get out news regarding solutions that you want to offer them.

Blogging will build your business faster than almost any other activity, especially if your business is an online business. If you’ve studied your audience enough to understand what they want to read, and blog as often as possible, you’ll create a lot of momentum in your business and your blog.

Every business today needs online content to help market and promote the business. The best way to do this is to ensure that you have a plan for your content based on the products and services that you offer. Once you set up an editorial calendar it will help you come up with content on a regular basis. There are several ways that you can save money on content.

* Hire a Writer – That might sound like you’re spending and not saving, but a good content writer can be a life saver. If it takes you an hour to write one blog post, and you could earn more doing other work during that hour, it only makes sense to let a writer do it for you.

* Buy and Use PLR – Private label rights articles are very useful to use and very inexpensive. If you choose well, you can use PLR for a lot of your content. When you use PLR it’s important to update it and change it around to make it your own first, but that will take minutes to do.

* Write It Yourself – If you think you can’t write, you’re wrong. If you know a topic well, you can write about it. Just write how you talk, and act like you’re just telling someone who would be interested the information. In fact, using voice to text on your computer might help you.

* Repurpose What You Have – Every piece of content you create can be used again; you will just need to change it up a little bit to use it in other places. You can use a blog post in a newsletter, compile them together into a book and more.

* Refresh and Update What You Have – This is a little different than repurposing in that you will take older content that has what is now wrong advice, due to changing technology and so forth. Updating it will make it new again.

* Curate Content – In addition to your own content it’s important to tell your audience about other people’s content by curating content. The way that works is that you find excellent content that would be of interest to your audience, write a short blurb about it, add in your thoughts and link to the content.

* Make the Most of the Content You Have – When you already have content, you can make the most of it. Turn a blog post into a video. Turn a data-centric blog post into an infographic, turn several newsletters into an eBook – if you keep a plan in place it will see as if the content you have multiplies.

* Mix It Up – As mentioned, creating different types and forms of content is really a great way to expand how much content you have. A newsletter becomes an eBook; a blog post becomes a video and so forth. Use many types of content to keep your audience’s interest.

* Promote Your Content – Promote each and every piece of content that you spend time creating. If you aren’t willing to promote it, then it’s probably not that good.

Creating content is one of the best ways to market your business inexpensively. Saving money on the content that you create is essential because you need so much to stay in the game today. But, it doesn’t have to break the bank to be effective.

Good storytelling includes bringing facts to the table along with the extra information that brings the reader closer to the storyteller. The aim is to weave a compelling story that pulls the reader in so that they really care about the outcome of the story. The more a customer cares about your story, the longer they will remain customers and demonstrate brand and product loyalty.

* Create an Email Series – A good way to get your audience primed for an emotional story is to start small and deliver the story in pieces via an email series. Keep each email short, about 350 to 450 words, and to one small point.

* Incorporate Video – Using video for part of or even your entire story can help bring more emotion to the story because people generally feel more emotional when looking at people and images than just by reading text. Using both text and video can be the best of both worlds.

* Include Testimonials – Text and video testimonials from your satisfied customers can evoke emotion from those who haven’t purchased from you yet, because they will want what your satisfied customers want. They will also trust you more when the videos are very authentic and real.

* Put Customers First – In every story it’s important to put your customer first. Get to know everything you can about your customers and incorporate the things they care about within your stories. This shows that you know them well and can speak about the things that concern them the most.

* Get Attention with Negative Stories – Pull the emotional strings to get their attention with negative aspects of a story that will be resolved by using your products or services. You don’t want to traumatize your customers, only evoke emotions.

* Calm Fears with Positive Stories – Tone down the negative with some positive stories of people who have used your products and services with good results. Bring them back up after you brought them down.

* Reinforce with Neutral Stories – Tell them the “who, what, when, how and why” of your products and services using stories to guide the discussion that are less emotional and volatile.

* Recognize the Relationship – When you are telling any story, it’s important to recognize the relationship between you and the receiver.

* Remember the Imagery – It’s important to ensure that the images you use match the emotions you’re trying to evoke, otherwise your story will be confusing to the reader/viewer.

The fact is that emotions drive us to do more than we would like to think. From buying a house, to choosing a book to read on the weekend, we are driven by our emotions more than we are by logic.

However, as you try to evoke emotions in your viewers, it’s important to also bring in elements of logic so that your viewer or reader trusts you to buy what you’re offering. Otherwise, they might feel as if you’re manipulating their emotions too much.

Scaling content creation enables you to get the most out of the content that you spend money, time and resources on. Plus, it allows you to pad that with other people’s content to bring to your audience a plethora of content that adds value to them and helps them to make purchase decisions.

Use Curated Content

Collect content that you believe your audience will be interested in as well as content directly about your brand that you did not author. Include content that is about your niche, and not your brand directly, and other topics you feel that your target audience will find educational, useful, and valuable.

* Share curated content – Be sure to share this content as heavily as you do your original content in order to keep your audience engaged and informed. The great thing about curated content is that it enables you to participate in discussions across the web. It adds interest of your brand by those authors and allows you to impress your audience.

* Know your niche – To properly curate content it’s important that you understand your own brand and niche enough to choose the right content to curate. Plus, it’s important to always give the right attributions and credit to the original author. Never post the content to your website. Post a small blurb, your thoughts and point of view about the content and a link to the original source.

Repost Original Content

It costs a lot of money, time and effort to create content for your niche. You need content for everything, and every platform and every form, and you need it on a regular basis. If you’re not repurposing and reusing some of your content, you’re not getting the most out of your investment.

* Share more than once – Sharing new content on social media needs to be done more than once to ensure it gets maximum views. With the way social media works, on a feed system it is likely only a very small percentage of followers, or likes, will see the share more than once, or even once. Share each new addition to your content at least three times a day.

* Use older content – Alternatively, if an issue comes up that the old content piece answers then go ahead and share it again, even if it’s months old. It’s also okay to update the content first to be more relevant if any part of the original piece is out of date. As long as the content is relevant, original, and makes sense at that time, share away.

Use Multiple Platforms

You probably are part of many different online communities and networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook groups, forums, groups and so forth. Make sure to take advantage of this fact. While it’s true that some of the audience will be the same on each network, if you find a fresh way to share the same content throughout all these platforms then you can share the same content.

* Edit for network personality – The important thing to do here is to be sure to craft each message a little differently for each network. For example, you might want to share the content in a more visual way on Pinterest than you do on Twitter. Plus, each network has a different personality. Make the content fit the personality of that network for best results.

* Use different formats – This is just repurposing content, which you hopefully already do. A blog post becomes a slide share, becomes a video for YouTube, and becomes a podcast for iTunes. It really is that simple to reuse your content. After all, the format doesn’t change the research you’ve already done. You’re just changing the format and sometimes the mood of the research to participate on multiple platforms.

A lot of work goes into creating the content that you use to market your business. You may as well get the most out of it by repurposing it for multiple channels.

Coming up with content every day can be difficult if you don’t know creative ways to bypass “writer block” or “idea block”. One such idea is to interview experts. Not only will the interview become a blog post, or even part of an eBook or report, it can also help you generate more content ideas for future content needs.

Collect Data to Use for Memes and Infographics

When you interview a number of people, asking them the same questions such as in a survey, you can extract the data to use on memes and in infographics. A meme is a picture, usually with one quote on it, which is shared on social media. An infographic is a much larger depiction of multiple figures of data. You can use software like Piktochart.com or Canva.com to help you make these types of content from free to very inexpensively.

Link to Piktochart – http://www.piktochart.com/
Link to Canva – http://www.canva.com/

Elaborate on Something the Interviewee Said

Once in a while someone you interview will add additional information, provide insight into something in a new way, or even turn you on to an entirely new thing that you haven’t heard of before. In this case, take the information you learned and form a new piece of content with it, by starting with what the interviewee contributed and expanding on it. For example, if your interviewee told you about a product they use that you’ve never heard of before and you checked it out and loved it, do a product review on it. Maybe they’ll even have an affiliate program.

Combine Interviews to Make New Content

You can combine interviews in different ways to create entirely new pieces of content. You can pick one answer and combine all the interviewees and the one answer together into one long blog post, adding your thoughts to what each person answered. Depending on how many people participated it may be a very long post, which is great for SEO. You can do this for each question.

If you asked ten questions, you could create ten long blog posts by simply sending out a survey (interview) to other experts or even to your audience if you change the questions.

Develop an eBook or eReport

Using the interviews as a starting point, you can create an eBook or eReport. Organize the interviews in order of how you want to present the information into the report or book. Many books are like this. The author talks about a point, then uses the interview answers to stress the point, and then provides more information for the reader based off what the interviewee said, plus research conducted to fill out the book with a lot of facts and figures.

You are just as capable of doing this as any other author. The difference between you and an author is just the fact of publishing. They’re not better or smarter than you.

Publish Your Findings via the Amazon Direct Publishing Program

You can also combine your interviews into a book much like above, but instead of selling it off your website you can format it for selling on the Amazon Kindle through the Direct Publishing Program. It’s free to participate, and then you simply collect the money. They handle all payments, returns, delivery and everything.

You may earn less per book using this method, but it’s likely you will sell more books due to how many people love downloading and reading books on their Kindle. What’s more, people don’t actually need a Kindle to read your work, so no one is left out.

Link to Amazon Direct Publishing Program – https://kdp.amazon.com/

Turn Each Interview into One Blog Post

You can spotlight each person you’ve interviewed by publishing their interview as is. Ask for their headshot, contact information, and a more complete bio, and then publish the interview as a blog post. You can also take this future by promoting something they sell, or adding affiliate or links to any products or services that they use to make more bang for each post.

Tell a Story with the Interview Results

Often when you send out an interview with all the same questions, you can see the start of a theme or story forming for at least one of the questions. This can be inspiration for telling a story based on the interview question and each interviewee, as well as yourself. Weaving a story and connecting important points will make a huge difference in the quality of content you put out to the world.

Plan a Webinar or Round Table Based on the Interviews

If the interview turns out something you want to explore more deeply, invite those particular respondents to be part of a webinar or round table. You can do this on  via GoToWebinar. It’s another way to take one bit of work and turn it into something that pays off over and over again.
Link to GoToWebinar – http://www.gotomeeting.com/online/webinar

Content doesn’t have to be in written forms. It’s important to realize that it can come in many different formats, and then be repurposed into other formats to make it like new content. It may seem strange to produce content about the same topic over and over again, but each new way the idea is presented will give your audience more information. Plus, each individual learns and understands information differently. By providing many forms of content on the same subject and topic, you’re helping more people.

The wonderful thing about blogs today is they don’t have to be boring and only include text content. You can get creative and include all kinds of content on your blog. The more types of content that you include, the more interesting it will be for your audience. They’ll want to read more, engage more, and even buy more when you have more creative content.

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* Video – You can easily create videos using your webcam to educate your audience, or software like Camtasia to record your screen to visually teach your audience how to do something or to go through a slide show. Video brings a brand-new element to your blog that is truly unsurpassed in opportunity.

Link to Camtasia – https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html

* Audio – Podcasts are super popular; people love downloading them and listening to them later in the day or when on the road. You can turn any blog post into a podcast by recording it using software already on your computer.

* Infographics – An infographic is a pictorial depiction of data put together in an interesting way. Most infographics are fairly long and can include a lot of data. If you have any data-centric blog posts or informational articles, consider making them into an infographic.

* Memes – Use beautiful imagery, quotes, facts and data to create pictorial images that are about 350×350 pixels depending on where you use them. You can put them on your blog; share them on social media, and more.

* Guides – Longer blog posts that are very complete guides to something are very popular, and will increase the authority level of your website. These are very long blog posts with a lot of information links to other information on and off your website.

* Reviews – Anytime you’re not sure what type of content to put up, try doing a review. There are likely books within your niche, movies, educational programs, info products and more that you can easily do reviews about. Be honest, include images, and disclose how you came by the product you’re reviewing.

* Interviews and Webinars – Believe it or not, interviews, webinars and other recorded events can become content for you on your blog. Record, cut it into shorter versions, transcribe it, make infographics to support it and you can create a lot of content out of one interview, webinar or hangout.

* New Formats – When new formats come out for content, include them in your content mix. Mixing things up and making things look a little different will go far in keeping the interest of your audience.

Blogging is lucrative, fun and interesting. You can make it even more wonderful by being creative in the types of content you include on your blog. As long as the content fits your audience, go ahead and include the type, and be creative with how you present the information.

In order to bring your blog posts to life, it’s important to add images. Images add interest, color, and even more understanding to the reader of the information you’re trying to convey. But there is a lot to know about using images to ensure that you get the most from them on your blog.

Understand Copyright Laws

You can’t just find any image you want by searching on Google and using it. It’s important to understand about how copyrights work. Read the fine print no matter where you find the image, so that you get permission and give credit appropriately.

Where to Find Images

You can buy royalty free images from stock photo sites like iStockPhoto.com, and stockfresh.com, or you can find free images from morguefile.com. These are only a few examples. Royalty free does not mean an image is free; it just means you can pay one time, and if you use it according to the licensing agreement you don’t have to pay per view.

Links:
iStockPhoto – http://www.istockphoto.com/
Stockfresh – http://stockfresh.com/
Morguefile – http://www.morguefile.com/

Formatting Images Properly

You want to ensure that your images aren’t too big to suck up bandwidth and make your pages load too slowly. If you use WordPress, you can get a plugin for images like Hammy to help ensure that images are sized right for the browser viewing it.

Link to Hammy – https://wordpress.org/plugins/hammy/

Ensure That Your Images Relate

Adding images to your blog posts will, if you choose right, make the blog posts come to life for your audience. If the image advances the story of your blog post, it’s going to mean a lot. They say an image is worth 1000 words, and it’s true if you choose well.

Add “ALT” Tags to Your Images

Many bloggers think that tags are old-fashioned and unnecessary, but if you want Google to index your images right, you’ll need to add the alt tags as well as a good description, using keywords that fit your website and blog post.

Keep Pictures on Your Own Server

It’s tempting to house images on another server because of space, but it’s best if you house the images for your blog on the same server. If you use WordPress, just upload them in the media section to ensure fast loading of images.

Use Screen Shots or Make Your Own Images

Sometimes, the best images are the ones you create yourself using screen shots. This is especially true if you are creating a how-to post that needs images to help lead the blog post reader to follow the directions carefully. You can make your own images easily by taking pictures with your phone and using software like Canva.com to edit the picture for posting on your blog.

Link to Canva – https://www.canva.com/

Be Consistent

It can be hard to be consistent about how your blog posts are laid out if you don’t create a guideline for yourself (and others if you have guest bloggers). But, you don’t want to confuse your readers by making your website look messy without any order. Try to place images logically on each blog post.

Using images on your blog posts is important. In fact, most experts say you should never post any blog post without an image included. WordPress has an area that allows for “featured image” for each post that will let the image share with the blog post. Posts with images are more likely to be read, so it’s important to include them.

You are blogging and creating content but you feel like nothing is working like you want it to. Your sales aren’t increasing, your newsletter isn’t getting new subscribers, and it just feels like you’re wasting your time. If that is the case with your content marketing, take heart that you can access where you are and start over anytime.

1. Determine Your Why – When you are creating any one piece of content, do you know what the purpose of it is? Each content choice must have a reason for being in order to be successful. Is the content there to inform your audience about a problem? Is the point of the content to get more subscribers? Perhaps the point is to sell a new product or service? If you don’t know what the point is, it’ll be hard to get anyone to take action.

2. Understand Your Audience – When you produce any content it’s imperative that you know who you’re creating it for. Try developing buyer personas and write the content to the “customer of one” instead of creating it for a nameless person that you don’t know. This can help you develop very personalized content that gets results.

3. Know Your Niche – You may think that you know your area of expertise but the fact is, a niche might change a bit over time as technology improves. Keep up to date in your industry so that you’re ready for changes and trends that may develop.

4. Follow Your Competition – The best way to differentiate your content marketing from your competition is to watch what they’re doing. Join your competition’s lists, and look at the content they’re sending out. Can you determine if it’s working well for them or not? Can you decide how to do it a little bit better?

5. Know the Buying Process – There is a set buying process that your audience will take part in, even if they don’t realize it, and it’s important to realize where people are in the buying process. Typically it works something like this: Awareness, information search, evaluation, decision and purchase. Plus, after purchase your customer will evaluate again on whether or not to buy from you again.

6. Refine Your Strategy – If you have no strategy, or you feel as if what you’re doing isn’t working, take the time to work on refining your strategy to work better. Base this on the information you’ve gathered about your customers, the niche, your produce and/or services as well as the buying process.

7. Make Content Marketing a Priority – To ensure that content marketing will work, it’s important to do it on a consistent basis as a priority in your marketing efforts. Hire the right people to help you, and place it at the right level of importance in your overall marketing strategy.

8. Promote the Content You Create – Content cannot just be created and that’s the end. Use promotion strategies such as on and off page SEO, social media sharing, and other means to promote the content so that it is seen.

9. Create Compelling Content – No one wants to consume boring cookie cutter content. Ensure that the content matches the needs of your audience, speaks to them on their terms and provides value in and of itself to your audience.

Finally, content marketing is about the long haul. Results aren’t going to happen overnight. Continue to produce high quality, relevant, consistent content that has a purpose and provides value and you will see the results you desire.