When it comes to factors you can control to improve your website traffic, it’s Mr. Big. You do want to improve your website traffic, correct? Let’s have a look at how it’s done.

Take charge, woman. Get large, man.

Why do I feel like I’m hawking Viagra?

But seriously ladies and gentlemen, we have one humdinger of a topic, which in my biased opinion, has yet to inspire a truly helpful online article. So, here and now, I set out to offer you the ultimate list of easy and effective ways to enlarge your digital footprint, increase your findability factor (otherwise known as search results), and drive traffic to your website.

We begin with the easy ones.

The following four ideas—and the ideas within the ideas—are absolute musts.

1. Comment on relevant blogs—It doesn’t get any easier. You’re reading them, right? Now write something. In the process, you’ll be asked to input your URL. Repeat after me now: world’s easiest backlink. Make a habit out of this practice. And, of course, offer a useful idea or web page. Can you say “double backlink?”

2. Get an about.me account—At about.me, you’ll find the world’s easiest web page generator. And with a large collection of graphically pleasing templates, they’ve made it so the page you produce has to be elegant. It’s a fill-in-the blank exercise. You create a pile of links that point to your site, blog and social networks. If you don’t have an about.me account by this time tomorrow, you’ll have a hard time convincing me you sincerely want to grow your digital footprint. Here’s my about.me page.

3. Microblog like a maniac—There are probably 1,000 and 1 reasons to be active on social media, but even if deep down inside you’re anti-social, get your hands on additional social media accounts and your footprint grows. No social media list can be all-inclusive, but you most definitely need the fab four:

• Twitter—No brainer. It’s as now as now gets.
• LinkedIn—The world’s greatest business center. (Have you and I connected on LinkedIn?)
• Google+—The online space for everything.
• Facebook—I predict this thing catches on.

4. Be a picture publisher—You have a smartphone and you use it to take pictures. Now publish them. Of course, you’ll want to use discretion. Only the photos you shoot that are relevant to your business or personal brand are the ones you’ll use as footprint fodder. Consider any or all of the below:

• Pinterest—A true game changer. You’ll find some useful stuff at my Pinterest page.
• Instagram—Soon to outrank television.
• Google+/ Picassa—The authority for authority.
• Tumblr—Any dummy can produce a smart site here.
• Flickr—Where Yahoo! Still matters.

Intermediate domain(s).

These strategies assume you’re a content marketer, or soon will be, and are meant to point out places where your content can reside to help expand your digital footprint.

5. Make video—Don’t like having your mug online? Get over it. Don’t feel comfortable competing with the world’s best documentary makers or TV producers? Get over it. Get some video together and get it on:

• YouTube—The #3 website in the world. Here’s Feldman Creative TV, a work in progress.
• Vimeo—Another powerhouse. (“Absence of Light,” a short film I wrote and acted in.)
• Social media sites that host video—Which is pretty much all of them now.

6. Do picture shows—It’s stunning how many people I talk to that aren’t using SlideShare (or have never heard of it). It’s the quiet giant of content marketing generating 60-million visits per month. With an immense digital library (over 100 million files), sharing features, lead capture options for professional use, and serious search prowess, SlideShare should be home to your slide decks, infographics, videos, and documents. Take it seriously and you’ll see some serious growth in exposure and inbound traffic.

I’d like to think my SlideShare efforts will help you understand the power of the medium (almost 200K views to date).

7. Squidoo—Master marketer Seth Godin created a place in cyberspace where your content takes a website-like form in what Squidoo dubs a lens. They are easy to create, look great, and serve you well. I created a lens with my free ebook, “21 Pointers to Sharpen Your Website.” Looks sharp.

8. List.ly—As the name suggests, List.ly is a home for lists,  a wild card in nearly every content marketer’s deck. Your List.ly posts are interactive, optimized, and easy to embed wherever you choose. Here’s a perfectly good example.

9. Curate like a real publisher—You are a real publisher now. It’s time to toss other experts works into the mix. Try these fun and powerful publishing tools:

• RebelMouse—This newcomer will blow your mind with its social/sharing approach to curation and give you tools to take your publication where you please. My website features a RebelMouse page.
• Scoop.It—Magazine making made easy.
• Twylah—As the name suggests, Twylah is a Twitter tool, a twitty damn good one.
• Paper.li—Niche publishing, content marketing and web monitoring collides in a platform purpose built to make your online marketing easy. 

10. Get graphic—You might hire a pro to put your content in the raging hot infographic format, but you might opt for the DIY approach. Try these:

• Piktochart—I experimented with several infographics generators and favor this one. (I Pikto’d for Valentine’s Day.)
• Easel.ly.
• Infogra.m
• Visual.ly

11. Do eNews—For years, email marketing (managed professionally) has been the best way to build a community and your business. It’s permission-based. Interested prospects are telling you, “Yes, send me your stuff.” Do it. Here’s an archive of my eNewsletters, “Get Magnetic.”

Get Magnetic—Feldman Creative’s very popular eNewsletter

For high achievers.

In this second-to-last section I’ll cover some strategies expert online marketers use to expand their digital footprint in a big way. Don’t dismiss these tactics simply because your time or skills are limited. Consider hiring a pro (me) to help propel you to higher heights.

These techniques call for having some talent on your team. So they are not free. However, they are immensely meaningful.

12. Guest blog—Like baseball, in the guest blog profession, you have major and minor leagues and levels within. It’s unrealistic to think you can’t publish a thing or two online and then get published by the New York Times.

However, if you’re paying close attention to your industry (please tell me  you are) and know which publishers have the most powerful voices, you should think big. I recommend you think of the path to the top as a ladder and climb it like so:

• Blog brilliantly—First rung: your blog. Establish super high standards and meet them. Publish a minimum of 10 articles before you begin submitting work to high traffic sites.
• Go where there are no gates—Today, every smart website host recognizes the need to publish regularly, so many accept contributions from outsiders with no or low standards. Of course, you shouldn’t have no or low standards, but you should take advantage of the opportunity to publish your pieces at ungated blogs/online magazines. (Scribd.com is always happy to have you.)
• Apply yourself—The next rung on your ascent will be to apply to the sites you really want to be on. Often, an application system is in place for you to submit samples of your work and answer basic questions about your qualifications. Pursue these opportunities and you’ll surprise yourself.
• Beat down doors—This step’s not as violent as it may sound, but you may need to prepare yourself for the rejection writers learn to live with. ID sites at the top of the ladder, send email or tweets to the curators/editors/owners and offer them your best, original work, which of course must be perfectly aligned with their editorial charter. If you’re ready for the gig, you’ll get it. I can’t say I’m batting 1.000, but this strategy has served me well. I contribute regularly to several of the best publishers in online marketing. You’ll find a list in the sidebar on my home page.
• Publish and pray—Really now, divine intervention is not an online marketing strategy. However, setting yourself up for success is. I wouldn’t include this rung if I hadn’t climbed it. So, I’ll share this from personal experience. If you create great content and manage to get it published on classy Triple-A websites, major leaguers will find it, read it, and give you the call when a spot opens up.

13. Webcast—I’m using the word as a verb and I’m telling you to get into the infotainment business. You need not be Oprah. But you need to use the Internet as your platform for:

• Webinars—Any size business can do this and there are all kinds of tools to get it done. Decide you’re going to teach a valuable lesson, line up the talent and assets you’ll need, and do it. Here’s one of my webinars: “Magnetic Content—Transform Your Website Into a Customer Attraction Force Field.”
• Podcasts—Welcome to radio, online radio. It’s easy. The demand is enormous. Try creating an interview show or giving audio-based lessons. There are a ton of tools for producing podcasts and publishing them too. I use Spreaker. And of course, in addition to making my website a broadcast channel, I use iTunes, as should you. (My podcast program: Content Marketing Minds.)
• Video programs—We hit on YouTube and Vimeo earlier. There’s no reason to not charge forth with video and there’s no realistic barrier. Roll ‘em.

14. Get interviewed—Has this lesson got increasingly scary? You’re good? Cool. I get interviewed fairly often now and obviously this helps shine the spotlight on my website, my services and myself. But I want you to know this… Sometimes requests for interviews just happen, but sometimes I make them happen.

You’re an expert in your field. People will want to hear what you have to say. So, get interviewed.

• Speak—Call yourself a speaker and publish information about subjects you speak on.
• Ask—Seek out opportunities to speak and tell website owners why their audience will benefit from an interview featuring you.
• Promote—Tell everybody via every media outlet you have access to you’ve been interviewed. Good things happen. Trust me. Digital channels multiply. You get on coveted lists. People start believing you know your stuff.

Example of a podcast interview from our friends at Social Media Explorer: “Is Content Truly King?”
Example of video interview from our friends at Vertical Measures: “How to Get Started with Content Marketing.”

15. Make books—Your prospects love books. Make them, give them away, and/or sell them.

• Free eBooks—These are easy to make and you can pretty much create your own definition of what an eBook actually is. Create a serious collection of helpful information and package it as PDF. Offer it as free download and you’re bound to see it shared all over the place.

eBook: Here’s my latest—and hottest—one. 100% OFF if you ACT NOW!

• Purchasable eBooks—The next step is stepping up and onto Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the gamut of online eBook distributors. You have to play by the seller’s rules, but it’s easier than you might expect. You can experiment with prices, selling strategies and outlets and in the end, you may achieve new levels of authority and prestige, new markets and audiences, and possibly, new revenue streams.

Advertising may pay too.

Effective online advertisers are generally dialing down media spending, but they’re also strategically investing in online media placements.

16. AdWords—Google’s AdWords program changed advertising forever. As basic and unsexy as it may be, it’s hard to deny it’s the most cost-effective advertising media ever created.

• Double your search success—Publish content and buy pay-per-click smartly and your company may appear on a page one search result twice, side-by-side with a paid and organic listing. That’s a powerful combo.

• Drift into everywhere—PPC offers the option to present your ads beyond Google. Your ads can go the many places their AdWords program is embedded, which can be an amazingly extensive networks of sites where your prospects are.

• Learn and improve—A seldom spoke of, but immensely large benefit of PPC advertising, is the deep and rich insights you get from the reports you’re provided.

17. Retarget—I won’t pretend to be an expert here, but I will tell you this new thing called retargeting makes a lot of sense. You visit a site, but don’t buy and then in your online travels, ads from the host of these sites appear. Makes good sense.

And finally, you’ll get a little lucky.

You know how they say you make your own luck? You put yourself in a position to be lucky? This applies to this lesson. If you’re actively creating content and experimenting with strategies, sometimes your digital footprint just expands. Lucky you. I thought before I signed off of what has become the longest post I’ve ever written (but hopefully the most helpful), I’d scan my analytics to stumble upon some loose ends that help the cause. I did. Here are three of them that were actually in my top 25 traffic generators:

18. Bookmark sites—Yup. I don’t know a lot about them or use them much, but they’re far from dead. So StumbleUpon (which I do use), Reddit, Digg, Delicous and so forth expand your digital presence too. I don’t believe you have much control over how or when, but I suspect these are reciprocal communities, as are all online communities, so put something into them and you’ll get something out of them.

19. Feeds—RSS feeds represent this crazy corner of the web where geeks tune in and casual users tune out. But still, you can help your cause with a little bit of understanding of feeder tools that push your content to readers that want it or sprinkle it automatically across social networks. I’ve signed on with feedburner, dlvr.it and networkedblogs and found that these mostly free services help feed my content to hungry readers.

20. Groups—Where good old-fashioned networking meets good new-fashioned networking, your digital footprint can actually expand. I’m tight with my time and don’t attend a ton of events, but I do attend some conferences and speak a bit. My involvement in the following ones generate traffic to my website.

• MeetUps—My tennis and guitar MeetUps don’t help the cause, but my blogging and marketing MeetUps do. Surely, you can benefit offline and on from being involved.
• SVForum—I’ve made friends and landed business through my involvement in the Silicon Valley Forum and its cousin, Marketing Camp, which I discovered in the first place via a social media-based friendship. I recommend you connect the old-fashioned way, shake some hands, share some wisdom, and see how it might affect your digital footprint.
• Foreigners—Sorry. I’m no help here, but a site called “seojapan.com” brings a steady stream of traffic to my site. Their site’s in Japanese and Google’s handy translation feature didn’t help, so all I know is by putting myself and my company out there with sensible strategies to enlarge my digital footprint, I’ve become a more effective online marketer.

You can too.

I’ve laid a lot on you. If you have questions, I intend to answer them. And, if you have additions you’d like to make here, I definitely appreciate them.

Contact me — or sign up for a free WebVision consultation. 

Early Thursday morning, an up-and-coming slogan was shot down in the Silicon Valley office building of a software startup.

An intern, recently hired to handle social media marketing by the software company (whose brand must be kept secret), claims to have witnessed the entire sequence of events that transpired in the conference room, where the tragedy occurred. (The young woman requests anonymity while the investigation takes place but claims to have witnessed what happened.)

She remained at the scene of the crime when authorities arrived and recounted the details. The intern said a meeting involving the company’s marketing team and a freelance copywriter had taken place, with the copywriter participating in the meeting remotely via the popular Skype application.

The Meeting Was About Selecting a Slogan

“Everything was going well and the mood was upbeat,” the intern said. The copywriter was presenting ideas for a new slogan for the emerging brand. “The CEO and the guys on the marketing team were thrilled. There were a lot of fun and interesting ideas, and almost everyone loved them.”

According to the young woman, not everyone in the meeting had the exact same shortlist of winners, however. The CEO expressed his opinion, and everyone began to rally around the clever four-word phrase he favored.

“There was a some friction reaching consensus and a final decision,” she said. “And at that time things began to get contentious.” Despite the differences ofopinions, the intern said things were progressing nicely, and there was no reason to believe a felony would soon be committed. She did admit to sensing signs of a power struggle as the executives jockeyed for position.

An Apostrophe Was at the Center of the Dispute

But the meeting took a turn for the worse when the discussion began focusing on the use of an apostrophe. According to the police report, a contract marketing director adamantly objected to the proposed apostrophe and pressed the copywriter to revise the phrase.

The copywriter was cordial and professional, said the intern, but demonstrated how a compromised version of the slogan created awkward and less meaningful language.

“He seemed very sure of himself,” said the intern. “He listened to the team’s ideas and even threw in some of his own but stood fast by his recommendation to leave the slogan alone.”

Raja Gupta, the marketing associate responsible for setting up the meeting, corroborated the story. Gupta told reporters from The Point, “The marketing director introduced an objection based on SEO. He said the slogan’s keyword would be lost on search engines because of the apostrophe. Then, as if he was literally foreshadowing what was to come, he expressed very strong belief the slogan’s possessive noun should be eliminated.

Gupta said he himself sided with the copywriter, who insisted SEO considerations and the choice of the best and most memorable slogan were completely separate issues.

SEO Shouldn’t Trump Smart Communications

When contacted after the murder, the copywriter was happy to reveal his name as well as the location of his website—understanding, of course, the backlinking implications.

“The issue really calls for some context,” explained Barry Feldman, of Feldman Creative. “A good copywriter would never deny the importance of SEO for web-based content, but—and this is a huge but—the searchability of a slogan simply doesn’t factor into the slogan selection process.” Feldman continued (much more so than we asked him to) by adding, “It’s really quite lame.

“For starters, slogans are supposed to appeal to customers, not friggin’ robots. And also, it’s extremely unlikely the slogan would be search-friendly, no matter which words it contained, because it was unlikely to appear as HTML.”

Gupta told us given the chance, Feldman can really rant, but copywriters are generally very strong-willed and don’t respond well to having their expertise challenged or creativity stifled. Feldman didn’t disagree, but he did seem fairly pissed.

Sentenced to Death

Ultimately, the marketing director’s objection prompted a stalemate. The team played nice and pretended with a little “stewing on it” time, some additional ideas, and additional creative fees, a solution would be found.

However, the truth is the slogan, a victim of the omnipresent SEO, lies slain.

Experts across the online marketing landscape wrestle with search-based issues and seldom agree on any sacred set of laws. Plus, it’s no secret that Google, the dominant force in search products and services, relentlessly clouds the picture by frequently updating its software while revealing only vague explanations of its doings.

Feldman and other members of the copywriting camp are convinced SEO is the poison behind infinite crimes of creative slaughter and the catalyst of countless bad business decisions.

The father of the precious slogan, Feldman was distraught as he spoke with us. Though he fought back tears as he spoke of his loss, he mustered the strength to condemn his client, the process, and SEO in general.

“Screw it,” he said. “Screw it, screw them, and screw the algorithms they rode in on.” Harsh words to be sure, but understand, Barry had just suffered the most profound pain a copywriter could ever experience: the death of his idea.

If you’ve been doing marketing for as long as I have you may recall when the Macintosh came out in the 80s. It was a landmark in personal computing. And it opened the floodgates for countless amateurs trying their hands at design.

Suddenly, everyone was a graphic designer. A rushing river of poorly executed logos, newsletters, and marketing communications projects of every kind were created by amateurs. The phenomena has continued ever since with typography, photography, video, and well, everything.

It’s content marketing’s turn.

Today, nearly every business is attempting to become a content marketer. The results ain’t pretty. The noise is deafening and while there’s plenty of great content, every industry is being bombarded with junk—cheap imitations of the idea of content marketing—create original, compelling, helpful content. You can trace the problem to a long list of problems. In an effort to sound the alarm, Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi created a ”13 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing May Fail.”

I took 10 points on Joe’s list that resonated with me and created a List.ly list. Familiar with List.ly? Here’s how it works.

Listly claims to be a “multiplier.” The simple service allows bloggers to embed lists in posts to amplify exposure.

Listly is a 2-way street.

The cool thing about List.ly is it’s interactive and dynamic. That is, you can contribute to the list, comment, and share. Try it. Right here, right now. When you get to the bottom of this list of “Content Marketing Killers,” add to it, share it, comment, join a community of content marketers aiming to inform newcomers of the mistakes they should avoid if they aim to create effective online marketing.

GET A FREE COPY OF:
“The Plan to Grow Your Business with Effective Online Marketing.” 

You devour online marketing lessons. You feast on articles, reports, books, and eBooks. Perhaps it’s so important to you, you spend some of your precious time attending webinars and conferences and you can’t help but join the conversation on blogs and via social media.

Good for you.

There’s a ton of information to take in, the rules change daily, and if you’re going to succeed with online marketing, you must master a good many practices, techniques and tools.

The experts keep serving up specialized dishes: content marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, permission-based marketing, inbound marketing and any (fill-in-the-blank-here) marketing.

The more these ingredients get heaped onto our plates, the more the meal calls for a bowl and spoon. It’s digital soup, my friend.

Clarity is hard to achieve.

Pencils out. It’s pop quiz time.

What should you focus on to make your online marketing more effective?

(A) Content
(B) Social media
(C) Search
(D) Analytics
(E) All of the above
(F)  None of the above

Answer: (F)

I told you this was a tough one.

If you answered (E) it wouldn’t be fair to give you an “F.” You studied the choices and decided it’s not all that effective to focus on just one ingredient in this complex recipe. They’re interdependent.

You’re right about that.

But you’re wrong to focus on tactics.

As marketers, we fall into this trap time and again. Right now, in offices everywhere, marketers’ pulses are racing with questions such as:

How will we produce video content?
What’s our Facebook strategy?
Should we revisit our keywords?
What’s producing the peaks and valleys in our website traffic?

These are good questions. I applaud you for asking them and agree whole-heartedly they demand thoughtful answers.

However, you need to push questions such as these to the backburner until you answer a far more important question…

What does the customer want?

The customer—I chose the singular for a reason. The most effective online marketers have one thing, the word “you,” written boldly on a sticky note and forever attached to their frontal lobes.

“You” is a person your marketing strategy must focus on, a word your copywriter must use, the living, breathing target market your designs need to appeal to and your social media specialist must connect with.

“You” has five senses. Can your marketing team state in no uncertain terms what he or she wants to see, hear, smell, touch and taste?

“You” opts in or out. “You” follows your company or a competitor. “You” either does or doesn’t find your pages and posts via search. “You” affects your numbers, but is far more complex than a zero or a one.

What’s wrong with “we?”

A month or so ago, I’m on the phone with a new client and his marketing team. They want my honest opinion about their home page, so I give it a quick once over and say, “It’s all so self-serving. The word ‘we’ is the subject of practically every sentence.

Someone on the other end of the line doesn’t like what I’ve said. “What’s wrong with we?,” he protests.

If I was in the same room, I might have kissed him for writing such a great line for me. Though it’s the bane of copywriters the world over, in one form or another, clients have been asking this question since the beginning of time.

I go on to explain the website visitor isn’t there for “we.” He’s not interested in your company. He’s dealing with a challenge. That issue got him a’ Googleing and lucky for you, it drove him here.

If you feed him a steady stream of “we, we, we,” and start singing your own praises, he’ll head right back to the search engine and find someone who’s sincerely interested in helping him solve his problem.

That’s what’s wrong with “we.”

Now for a clinic in “you.”

The most effective marketers focus on the customer. While it may be the oldest lesson in marketing communications, all you have to do is read corporate websites to be reminded how often it’s shunned.

Here’s how to forge your way down the more effective “you” path:

Develop detailed customer personas—You can’t push your customer’s hot buttons until you know what they are. Conduct research by interviewing and surveying customers, observing social media behaviors, mining data and asking the sales and support team for insights gained from their interactions. Tooled with the answers to what makes your customers tick, document fictional bios or personas to represent different types of customers.

Find the pleasure and the pain—The act of buying boils down to a person striving to avoid pain or increase pleasure. Yes, even in business. Understand what hurts and what makes the prospect’s heart race.

Recognize the hurdles—What might derail the sale? Potential hindrances often include price, terms, competitive offerings, approval protocols, risk, time frames, and lack of urgency. Take a proactive approach to addressing common deal breakers.

Re-orient your language—As soon as you find your communications creeping back in the direction of what you do, what you make and how you do business, stop. Retreat. Turn features into benefits. Turn around first and/or third person voiced propositions into a “you” statement or question.

Remember, how to win friends and influence people.

Make your prospect feel important—Demonstrate appreciation and give encouragement.

Arouse an eager want—These are Dale Carnegie’s words. As are these: “The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”

Smile—In copy? Why not? Use welcoming, upbeat and friendly words and spread the love.

Personalize—Apply what you know to make your message as customized and personal as possible.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests—There’s Carnegie again, delivering a copywriting 101 course.

And in Dale’s legendary guidebook, he writes, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in you.”

Track the changes that really matter.

The “you” path tends to take unexpected turns. That is to say, if you create a map and follow it forever more, you’re bound to get lost.

The goal is to connect with and meet the needs of your audience—people—and people change. Copyblogger reminds you of this in The Business Case for Agile Content Marketing.

So when you understand the need to be agile with your online marketing endeavors, it follows you’ll then stay perpetually tuned-in to the mindset of your target audience.

Remember the one thing that doesn’t change.

You’re not going to dig into any deeply useful source about content that doesn’t get into search, about social that doesn’t get into content, and every other conceivable combination.

These tactics are awesome. In this age dominated by all things digital, marketing is more fascinating than ever.

However, the landscape evolves faster than ever. In the field of marketing, the lines will continue to blur. The tools and tactics we rely on will continue to change.

The need to focus on the customer will not.

Now hear this.

This article was originally published on Copyblogger. Soon after, podcaster Chuck Bartock created an audiobook version of it, you can hear here.

Barry Feldmann Talking about the YOU in Marketing by Chuck Bartok on Mixcloud

> GET A COPY OF:
“The Plan to Grow Your Business with Effective Online Marketing.”

(Yesterday, a new client told me it’s the most informative and fun eBook she’s ever read. Seriously.)

Be helpful, be kind or be quiet

Courtesy of the killer content creators @ Vertical Measures

One fantabulous thing about the Google/YouTube/Google+ connection (the links here are to my YouTube and Google+ pages) is how easy it is to create, publish and share video content. This interview recorded just a few weeks ago is a great example. Arnie Kuenn, founder of Vertical Measures, gave me my first guest blogging opportunity just a couple of years ago.

Read: “Is the Main Ingredient Missing from Your Content Marketing?”

Since then, I’ve read his great book, Accelerate, and come to know him well. We tend to cross paths at the same industry conferences and contribute to each other’s websites with written and recorded content.

Recently, I was asked to appear on a Google Hangout along with the CMO of HubSpot, Mike Volpe. I was thrilled to get the invitation and really enjoyed the opportunity. Vertical Measures then published the interview on their website and blog, Google+, and YouTube.

Pretty simple content creation task and massive bang for the buck (it’s free).

Arnie made the format incredibly simple too. He really had one question…

“How do you get started with content marketing?”

Invest 15 minutes and see what answers Mike and I offered.

Arnie: Hi I’m Arnie Kuenn with Vertical Measures and welcome to today’s Google Hangout. I’ve got with me today Barry Feldman and Mike Volpe. I’m going to let them introduce themselves before we jump into our topic which is going to be about how to get started in content marketing. So Barry, why don’t you go first?

Barry: Thanks for having me Arnie. I’m the principal, founder of Feldman Creative. Feldman Creative is copywriting, creative direction, and content marketing consultancy. I’ve been a copywriter growing up in the ad biz for years and years, and when the world turned digital, I did too. So now I like to call myself an online marketer.

Arnie: Great. And Mike- how bout you?

Mike: I’m Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot. I’ve been with the company for 6 years now- I was the 5th employee and first marketing hire and have since built out the team, the blog, social, and all that stuff. I’m happy to talk about that or whatever you want.

Arnie: Well, super. And congratulations to both of you from different perspectives. Barry –you making it out of traditional to digital and Mike for building a great company. You’ve done a great job there. So the topic is…we get asked, do a lot of content marketing workshops, we do webinars, hangouts like this, and meet with customers face-to-face and we still get asked how to get started with content marketing. So I was hoping that maybe each of you could take a couple of minutes to tell a business (maybe small, medium, and large) on how they can get started and tackle content marketing today. Barry, do you want to start?

Barry: I’d be happy to. I get the question to and what’s usually the response to me sort of preaching the gospel about why and when somebody understands why, then they say how. I think the answer to how or where to get started resembles any marketing at large is how to get started with marketing. What’s it for? It’s to accomplish something. Therefore you get started with objectives. You establish what your objectives are. They don’t need to be fancy. I think people get a little paralyzed by that one. Your objective can be to generate traffic, generate leads or build authority. There all sort of inter-related. If you commit to those, you put them down on paper, so people get that. Then you forge a plan. I guess that’s really the question. What does that plan entail? Given that we are all sort of digitally oriented here, I’m going to couch my answer in the realm of digital. Because I think you can do content marketing online or offline, and I think we are mostly talking about online? I hope I’m not stealing Mike’s thunder but I’m going to quote hub spot here because that’s how I got started. Hub spot has said for ages and is one of my favorite things and is “Keywords are the new neon signs” If you sell coffee and your trying to appeal to someone driving down the road, and there is a neon sign that says “Hot Coffee”. If you want people to discover the fact that you sell hot coffee that would be your keyword. How do you go about discovering the keywords that are going to drive your business? That to me is the question on how to get started on content marketing. Where do you go to be successful and learn how to be a keyword discoverer, figure out what people are looking for? That is what inbound marketing is, and content marketing is the big car that drives inbound marketing. I think the answer to that is you listen. You listen online, that’s a different topic but I think we can teach people how to do that with the modern tools of today. And you can read, read, read, I know I am a ferocious reader, you identify who the influences are. Arnie you may remember I identified you as an influence after reading your book, and I said “can I write for you?” That was actually my first blog. And I said “wow that was great, people are tweeting me” and you said “that’s how it works dude.” Then you asked for customers. I don’t know why people resist that. You want to know what they want to know. Which is the keyword discovery process. Ask them. I’ll quote Jack, our copy blogger now. What people forget, content marketing, keywords, the conversation you’re having changes, it changes every day. They have a theme going on, on their site about agility, about being agile. You have to recognize the conversation is going to evolve, and therefore you have to plug into it. Ultimately when it comes down to the question “how do I get started, what is it, what do I do?” You plug into the keywords, and you join the conversation. That is what content marketing is. The keywords and the conversation. You have to get a grasp on that. You have to get a grasp on the four pillars that you hear about from HubSpot. The social, the search, the content and the analytics. You’re well on your way to influencing the most important influencers of them all, your customers.

Mike: I think a lot of what Barry said is spot on. To me it really boils down to the customers, and understanding the customers. What do I mean by that? I mean the biggest change that we’ve seen, all of us in buyers, is that buyers no longer want to be advertised to, and marketed to and bothered all day long. They don’t want to get cold calls, the don’t want to be watching a video show and go “oh wait we have to stop and pause for an advertisement, that you don’t want to see.” But people are still buying things. What we need to do is figure out how do we attract them toward you. How do you make any sort of marketing to be the other way around and have it be much more inbound? Content is a really, really important part of that. How I like to think about it and talk to folks is, get a deep, deep understanding of who your customers are. Both your current customers and your potential customers. Then figure out what is the thing you can publish, that would be the best publication for your industry niche? What would be the thing what would be the thing when they wake up in the morning and say I need to read this, or watch this, or I need to listen to this, so that you are really capturing their attention. You need to think a lot more like a media company, or sort of a publisher. That’s an uncomfortable change for most marketers. Most marketers wake up every day and say I want to create an advertisement. But the problem is none of your customers wake up and say I want to go watch an advertising or read an advertisement. You need to think about what are the things that are going to attract them to you. Whether your customers wake up and say I want to learn about something, I want to learn more about this, I want to learn about something else, or I want to get some industry benchmarks. Whatever that thing is, whatever that content is that is going to attract them to you. That is what you need to figure out how to produce. How do you basically become the New York Times for your industry?

Arnie: One of the things that I like to tell people when I’m giving my presentations or whatever’s I think one of the fastest ways to get started is to get your team together, your staff together whoever it is that’s interfacing and talking to clients and prospects and just ask them what do they get asked all the time. What is that are your customers or prospects concerns, education points. One of the fastest in points I think. I don’t know if you agree with that, or how you feel about that.

Mike: I personally agree with that. I think tactically the questions that people are asking you all the time, or your salespeople, whoever it is in your organization, those are a great place to start. Before they asked you that question, they typed that question into Google.

Barry: I got to say the customers empower, the customers going to ask the question and the customer is going to find the answer. The answer is going to come from content. Will it be your answer?

Arnie: They are going to find either you or your competitor.

Barry: Can we give Marcus Sheridan on the line? Were pretty well acquainted with him. The customers are asking questions, answer them. I think the thing he demonstrates the best is when he says raise your hands everybody in attendance if you website has information on what your product costs. One person raises their hand. Why? Doesn’t everybody ask that?

Arnie: I’ll point this at Mike and then maybe we’ll let Barry wrap it up. Mike I recently seen some research which you guys are awesome at producing really good content, and really good fact based stuff. About the time it takes before the curve really starts to grow for you, I thought that was awesome. I can still remember years ago starting Vertical Measures, blogging at night, knowing that no one was reading this stuff. But I had to. You don’t get a hundred hits in one day, it’s a slow, slow process. I remember the graph and you can speak to it. It seemed like it took 6-9 months of really good consistently producing content before that curve really started to go. Once it goes it really does go. Were proof of that here at vertical measures? If you could speak to that.

Mike: You’re totally right. I think 6-9 months is about the right time frame to think about. I think what you’re really referring to is that there is a huge difference between inbound marketing versus advertising. The cool part is that if you write about the blog articles over time, even your old blog articles continue to work for you. We’ve been blogging for six years now, we’ve written about 4,000 articles. The interesting thing is when I look at the leads were getting from our blogs, the new business were getting from our blog, 70% of that is from articles we didn’t write this past month. It is stuff that we have written previously that ranked really high in Google, that’s answering peoples questions, that people are still sharing on social, people have bookmarked, people are emailing, their finding it in all these different ways. That’s really the benefit. That there’s this accumulating benefits. Even if we stopped blogging for a month we would still get a lot of benefit because we built up all this content. It’s basically an asset for our business. With advertising the second you stop paying Google that bill for pay-per-click traffic, the traffic goes away 100%. It is totally gone. While advertising can start faster, it can start instantly, it also ends instantly. So your right, it can take a while for this inbound stuff to build up, but it pays big, big dividends over time, even if you sort of coast for a while. It works differently. You need to think about it as building up an asset. Not just this month to month, or day to day expense.

Arnie: Not that we endorse the concept of coasting.

Mike: Of course not. Once you realize the asset works you want to do more of it. But you could if you wanted to.

Arnie: Barry I think this will be the last question, then we’ll wrap it up but… I know you made the transition, maybe you can talk about that from a patience level or just whatever you have experienced before things started taking off for you. I think you have done a great job and I have followed your writings, various blogs on your own platform and you’ve made that transition. Maybe you can talk about that real quick.

Barry: Am I blushing? It definitely is snowballs. Arnie, you’re in Arizona. Snowballs are like when you take snow and make balls out of them. It’s a cumulative effect. I think you both mentioned 6-9 months, I think you going to see when I have clients that want to dive in, I think you’re going to see progress immediately. You’re going to see the arrows going in the right direction. We have data and were going to show it to you. If we are going in the wrong direction you’re going to replace those with somebody who is better at it. In terms of critical mass where it’s meaningful, I think 6-9 months makes sense. There’s a whole hell of a lot of variables in there. I think really a underevaluated or underappreciated factor is guest blogging. I have been blogging for a couple of years now and there is still a modest amount of people who come to feldmancreative.com and read my stuff. It’s also on your site and it’s also on copy blogger and it’s also on social media blank dot com. There’s tactics and I got clients who are enormously impatient and I talk to them about pay per click and so forth. But your question to like then and now, I think Mike answered that one. You know there’s no such thing as the post card hall of fame, or the letter hall of fame. You don’t get postcards and frame them and put them on your wall and refer to them later. You either responded to them or you threw them out. That is not the case with digital assets. Digital assets like Mike talked about, and to the stories I have contributed to your blog or this hangout hopefully will make rain for ever more because they are archived. They are based on keywords and conversations people want to have. That really is the difference. There’s no wasting your time in digital marketing. If you are plugged into the conversation you’re going to succeed, when I don’t know. Something I wanted to add that I didn’t before is with this agility idea that copyblogger has been mentioning a lot is in addition to understanding what to write about. The question is I want to go into content marketing, what do I create? I think the new question is, where do I put it? A year ago, or two years ago I said you put it on Pinterest that would be a pretty dumb thing to say because there was no such thing as Pinterest. Things are changing in fast motion. That’s entirely unique to digital. You have to have your finger on the pulse to where the audience is.

Arnie: I’ll wrap it up by saying that whoever is watching this, reading this because it will be transcribed put on our blog, and who knows where else it will wind up, you do have to just dive in and don’t give up. Keep at it. There will be in the beginning the feeling that no one is paying attention, no one’s reading and no one’s engaging. That is exactly the case. Unless you are amazingly lucky, it does not happen overnight. It will happen if you keep writing good quality stuff. I want to thank you Barry, thank you Mike. I really appreciate your time. We will see you all next month.

Barry: Thanks Arrnie, thanks Mike.

Mike: Thanks, bye guys.

Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd.

Today we present “Is Social Media as Worthless as the Telephone?” Playwright Barry Feldman explained the inspiration for his one-act play came from having read 7,777 articles about how C-level executives don’t recognize the value of social media and seldom endorse its use.

The scene takes place in the chief executive’s office at a business enterprise.

Please silence your mobile phones.

John
Have a seat Marty. It’s good to see you. Would you like a scotch?

Marty
Scotch sir? It’s 9 o’clock in the morning.

John
Right, right. It is early. Just want you to be comfortable. Would you prefer a beer?

Marty
If it’s okay with you sir, coffee would be just great.

John
Suit yourself buckwheat. And please, call me John.

Marty
Yes sir. Er, Mr. President.

John
John. Call me John.

Marty
Yes, yes, John.

John
So what have you got for me Marty? Connie mentioned you sent me a memo. I never get to the damn things, but she said you wanted to show me something you thought would be useful for the business. Is that right?

Marty
Yes sssssrrrr—yes, John. Let me get right to it. I know you’re busy.
(Reaches into his case and sets his device on the president’s desk.)
This is it. It’s called a telephone.

John
I’m listening.

Marty
Great. Well John, the telephone is really ingenious. With it, you can communicate with people, anybody, any where. They don’t need to be in the same room. Each user has a number, so you simply press the buttons and if they’re there, they pick up this part, the handset, and you can hear each other talk.

John
Well I’ll be damned. That’s very clever. What will they think of next?

Marty
Only time will tell. I suspect there could come a time when you might be able to record the conversations, speak with more than one person at a time. You never know. Maybe someday a pocket-sized version will allow you to take it with you.

John
Pocket-sized!? Why that’s very funny Marty. Maybe someday it’ll give you directions to a nearby bar. No, I got it: you’ll be able to watch football games with the damn thing.
(John laughs his ass off. Marty shrinks.)
So tell me son, how would this help us grow the business? It seems like a distraction to me. I would think you’d use the thing, uh, what did you say it was called?

Marty
It’s called a telephone.

John
Right, right, right. Catchy name. So what I was saying is if you had one of these telephone machines, you might talk to your friends, your family… You know what I mean son? How would you get any work done?

Marty
Great question Marty. My theory is while it’s true you could talk on the telephone with your friends, here at Innovation Global Enterprises, we could use it to talk to our customers and our partners. We could build relationships.

John
I think your heart’s in the right place John, but I guess I’m the president of this taco stand for a reason. We don’t want to build relationships. We have a business to run. Priorities. You understand.

Marty
Excellent point sir, but if you don’t mind me saying so, I think if we built relationships by having conversations with people and sharing ideas, we would in turn, build our business. The people we spoke to might even call their friends and tell them about what we make.

John
I like you John. You might be a little green and naïve in the ways of business, but you dream big. Those are some interesting ideas you have about communications, even if they are a little, er, how should I say…? Whacked.

Marty
Sir, I think I might have that beer now.

John
That’s my boy. Here you go. Try this one. They call it “Lite.” Seems to weigh just as much as any other 12-ounce can, but they say it tastes great and it’s less filling.

Marty
Thank you sir, John. So could I ask you to consider what I’ve said here today?

John
I must have missed something. Tell me again why we’d want our people using this fancy machine to talk to customers?

Marty
Lots of reasons. They might have questions we can answer for them. If they were having problems with the products, we could tell them how to solve them.

John
You want the company to answer questions and solve our customers’ problems? We have products to make and we must sell them. I’m not running a charity here son.

Marty
Yes, sir, but I was thinking if we could be the company people trusted as a resource for information and advice, they might buy even more of our products.

John
It’s a very nice thought Marty. It’s admirable how you young ‘uns like to embrace all the abstract ideas about community and love and all that touchy, feely shit. It really is. Will there be anything else John? I have the advertising agency coming in very soon. They said they wanted to talk about some box that has channels people can turn on to watch people talk and tell jokes.

Marty
Right, right. They’re probably talking about the television.

John
Television! Right! I think that was it. Telephone. Television. I don’t know how anybody can keep up with all these tele-things.

Marty
Well, things do tend to change very fast in media. People want to share their experiences.
(Marty gets up to leave.)
I’ll get out of your hair now sir.

John
Marty, I’m a fair guy. And you know, I wouldn’t have got to where I am today if I wasn’t open to new things and new ideas. You kids coming out of college sure have a lot of them. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to think about this telephone device. I might even buy one for the office.

Marty
You may like it.

John
No, no. I’m too old to be screwing around with fancy technology. But maybe someone here could use it to talk on. They could call up people that don’t buy our products, maybe at dinner time when everyone’s home and tell them when we’re having a sale and that sort of thing. I want you to do something for me Marty. Play around with that one you have and bring me a report. I’d like to see some documented evidence that this sort of thing has a return on investment. I call it ROI. Get it? ROI. It’s an abbreviation for return on investment.

Marty
Good one sir. And thank you for the beer. It really was very light.

John
Damn straight my boy. Some brewery came up with some fancy way to take out a lot of the calories. Just goes to show you son, you can’t put the brakes on innovation.

THE END

FREE-B!

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Special thanks to Convince and Convert
for this image and publishing
the original version of this article.

Let’s talk about website conversion…

Four years ago, my friend Marcus Sheridan discovered the power of content marketing and rescued his nearly bankrupt pool and spa business. He dove deep into blogging and propelled River Pools and Spas to a dominant leadership position in his home state of Virginia.

Today, while still maintaining partial ownership of the pool business, Marcus, a.k.a. “The Sales Lion,” is a very in-demand online marketing consultant and speaker. While he credits much of his success to his ascent up the ranks in search, he’ll be the first to tell you getting found is merely the beginning.

If you want to be successful, you need to understand how to get your website visitors to click around and stick around.

I’ve seen what sabotages websites.

I offer a free consulting service called “webVision.” Sounds fancy. It’s not.

Instead of relentlessly exchanging emails or doing a pre-crafted sales pitch, I get on the phone and screen with a new business prospect to examine the company’s website and online marketing properties aiming to explore ways to make them more effective.

Screen-sharing freebies make this easy and, well, free. But it’s valuable. I’m not harping on webVision to get you to signup (though I offer a link if you’re interested).

I want to share my take-aways with you, the common mistakes I see website owners making that discourage new business prospects from getting into the website or getting any closer to becoming a customer.

Ten leading “conversion repellents.”

1. Conversion aversion

This is probably the web’s leading contributor to back-buttonitis. Sufferers of this disorder can’t even justly claim to have crappy conversion rates because they have no definition of conversion.

Owwwwwch. I scour the home page looking for instructions on what to do next and I come up empty. Naturally, I ask my prospect…

“What is it you want the first time visitor to do?”

Bad answer #1: Go to our contact page and fill out the form there. C’mon, really? I’m not saying this will never happen, but it’s naïve to believe it will happen often. Please, think like your gun-shy, skeptical, research-conducting visitor. Offer a reasonable baby step.

Bad answer #2: I’m not sure (what I want visitors to do). One word of advice: decide.

Probably a bad answer: Buy our stuff. I’ll accept this answer if your stuff is inexpensive, easy to understand, easy to buy and risk-free. In fact, if your sale meets these qualifications it’s a good answer. If it doesn’t, it’s borderline nuts.

2. Page pollution

This one’s dangerously rampant. Your home page, or worse yet, your campaign-specific landing page, is crowded, confusing, and poorly designed.

No one wants to wade through a messy page. And they won’t. Make the page welcoming, simple, and clean. Go easy on the options. Keep the noise level down. In fact, silence is golden. Auto-play audio and video is a nasty tactic. This is your lobby. It has to be tidy, welcoming, and comfy.

3. Keyword disconnect

Your website traffic comes from other websites. Search engines and pay-per-click campaigns are likely to be your top draws. So keyword continuity is paramount. Conversely, keyword disconnect is lethal. Meaning…

The term the visitor used to discover your content, or at the very least, the concept behind the term, must jump off the page into the reader’s brain. Don’t choke on this opportunity or forget this tip. Deliver what the visitor came to find.

Your landing page should reassure the reader he’s come to the right place. Relevance is the key to conversion. So, if you’re running specific campaigns, via search, PPC, social media, guest blogging, or what have you, the headline the visitor discovers upon arrival should map to the phrase they just clicked.

4. Incredibility

As a marketer, you’re either going to establish trust or you’re not. The trust you earn traces to the credibility you conjure.

One way or another, your website newbie needs to find signs which indicate you know your stuff. If you haven’t yet written a book, the “social proof” (or evidence) surfers seek can come from articles, videos, reports, case studies, testimonials, badges, certifications, press releases, and so on. Even links to social media will serve this cause.

And besides talking the talk, you have must walk the walk. Be honest, candid, and demonstrate integrity in every word uttered or written. Your website has to prove you’re a credible problem solver. Publishing a brochure won’t do.

5. No help

As the hub and home of your online marketing, your website should wear a friendly face that says, “Come on in and allow us to help you solve your business problems.”

However, far too many companies confuse the idea with the more conventional voice: “You’ve come to the right place for the best [product type here]. Now click here and buy it.” This is pushy, which naturally, pushes people away.

If you want visitors to get into your site and value your company, you’ll offer informative and helpful content. Executing the strategy requires offering a blog, where the prospect easily gathers good advice about the business issues he wrestles with daily. You’ll also want to further empower your prospects by packaging useful content in multiple forms such as eBooks, videos, podcasts and webinars, offered at no cost, with no risk.

6. A one-way web

On a one-way website, information flows from the your company to the visitor, period. There are no fields to fields to fill in, no email or RSS feeds to capture contact information, no place to make comments or requests, to ask questions, contribute ideas, complain or even give compliments.

Don’t make this mistake. Make a website that encourages interaction. Take advantage of every opportunity to engage the audience, let them know you’re listening, interested in their point of view, and eager to have them come back in the future.

7. Anti-social

You can wow customers with content, woo them by demonstrating how much you care, or whisk them away with an anti-social stance.

Prospects expect your company to express interest in them with ongoing interaction via social media. If you deprive them of sharing, you deprive your company of all kinds of opportunities for building relationships, increasing your reach and earning referrals.

Social Media Examiner’s Patricia Redsicker delivers powerful ideas in her article, “3 Easy Steps to Engaging Your Customers.”

8. Hard sell

I came across a funny Valentine’s Day themed article that pointed out how preposterous it would be to propose marriage on a first date. Though it’s more of a smart practice than a rule, for most businesses, it’s a big turnoff to ask first time visitors to break out their wallets. Cool your jets and do some nurturing first.

9. Unsearchable

If your site is rich with resources, it’s risky to ask visitors to scour through the pages to find what they seek. Put a simple search field on your home page and use content filters where they’ll help speed access to the content prospects might want.

Understand the segments and personas you serve and place obvious signposts where they will help direct traffic. What’s more, allow visitors to qualify themselves so specific segments of your potential customer base can be addressed more personally and as pragmatically as possible.

10. No direction

Nine points ago, I pointed out the ironic “conversion aversion” that stands between you and success. An equally potent form of self-sabotage is all too prevalent: web pages, or worse, entire websites that fail to provide clear directions.

Put yourself inside the mind of the busy, multitasking, and unknowing visitor who knows not where to go and what to do. Tell her. Don’t be coy, cute or mysterious. Have a loud, proud call-to-action on every page pointing the way to the next step in the buying cycle. Make it easy to find and painstakingly clear why it’s beneficial to CLICK HERE NOW.

Your quick checklist.

I’ll leave you with a cheat sheet.

• Define conversion
• Make the website clean
• Connect with keywords
• Nix the jargon
• Foster credibility
• Offer helpful content
• Inspire interaction
• Embrace social media
• Nurture
• Make the site easy to search
• Direct the visitor

Do yourself a favor. Review the entire list and make sure your website has zero conversion repellents. And tet to work giving visitors every reason to get into your website.

Free eBook:
> Download
“21 Pointers to
Sharpen Your
Website.”

What’s with this thought leadership pandemic? The term’s getting tossed around today like a dollar store foam football. In my mind, this makes for a great analogy of its value.

I’m a thought reader. I’m a thought needer. Given my love for blogging (and obvious affection for opinionating), I think it’d be fair to say I’m even a thought feeder.

But I’m not a thought leader. Neither are you. Okay cool, we now know at least two of us here in cyberspace are not thought leaders.

Is there a formula for thought leadership?

No. Hell no.

Despite what you may have been told by the wanna-be thought leaders who so generously offer convenient instruction manuals for becoming a thought leader, no formula produces one.

Though there are a variety of ingredients thought leaders share, there’s no recipe. There’s no thought leadership department at Walmart and no webinar, conference, eBook, podcast, infographic, pin board, or blog with the magic power to convert you into a thought leader.

I hope I haven’t ruined your day. I don’t mean to be a downer dude. I think the world of thought leaders. I think you should definitely aspire to become an authority in your field. I also think you most definitely should share your ideas by publishing useful content online. It’s a powerful strategy for building your brand.

However, you need to be credible every step of the way. Wander into the land of self-proclaimed thought leadership and your credibility dies a sudden (and deserved) death. Thought leaders don’t call themselves thought leaders. They don’t think that way.

What else don’t thought leaders think?

Thank you for asking. I’ve created a list.

1. 1.    Twitter is the road to Thought Leadership City.
   
   Twitter is awesome. It’s my favorite platform for exchanging ideas, making new connections, and building relationships. I credit social media at large for profoundly changing our lives in so many ways. It has given experts of every type a means to amplify their messages and accelerate their teaching, so its implications for marketing are enormous.Perhaps it’s fair to say social media does pave the way for many new opportunities, but it doesn’t take you to a place called “Thought Leadership.” It gives you a great microphone, so it definitely can allow you to be heard by a bigger audience and potentially command even greater influence. But it doesn’t give you the revolutionary ideas that will anoint you a thought leader.

1. 2.    Authoring a book makes thought leadership automatic.
   
   It’s never been easy to write a book and it never will be. But it’s true; it has become immensely easier to publish a book—or anything. Hurdles that might have formerly blocked the path to publishing have been removed. So we have more books now. I’m not sure we have more great books though.Essentially, we’re segued over to content marketing with this one. The content doesn’t have to be a book. However, just as social media itself doesn’t make you brilliant, a publication with your name on it doesn’t either.

1. 3.    Calling myself a thought leader makes me a thought leader.
   
   This is so untrue, I was compelled to write an article about it. Read “You Are So Not the Thought Leader You Think” published at ‘The Point.” I’d like to call myself a professional tennis player, but I’m a mediocre club-level player. Want lessons?
3. 4.    All those convenient shortcuts to thought leadership are so useful.
   
   I can’t imagine graduating from a course with a degree in thought leadership. I hope you can’t either. It strikes me as laughable that a seminar, eBook, video, or any teaching tool can transform you or anyone into a thought leader. An article titled, “Write a Thought-Leadership Corporate Blog in Just 5 Minutes a Week” inspired me to add this “shortcut” idea to my list (as well as add a few thoughts to the article’s commentary stream).

1. 5.    Evangelism makes me a thought leader.
   
   Don’t let this observation of mine discourage you. If you have strong convictions about a topic and believe your word will help others, by all means, be an evangelist. I’m doing my part by speaking on and writing about content marketing here, there and everywhere. It doesn’t make me a thought leader though. It makes me an evangelist.

1. 6.    Joining a thought leadership group makes me a thought leader.
   
   Nice try. I’m sure you’ll find thought leader groups on LinkedIn and no doubt there are MeetUps and clubs featuring “Thought Leader” in their names. Chances are pretty good, getting involved in these will have you rubbing elbows with some strong thinkers and inspire some great ideas.I’ve been attending a MeetUp about business speaking (and joined some LinkedIn groups focusing on the topic). I find myself surrounded by experienced speakers, gathering helpful ideas for speaking, and I now take advantage of opportunities to speak. So I’m a speaker now. However, joining these groups didn’t make me a speaker. I made myself one.

1. 7.    Thinking makes me a thought leader.
   
   This one is so obvious we probably shouldn’t give it another thought. Instead, I’ll expand the statement by adding:You also shouldn’t think being a leader makes you a thought leader.Everyone thinks and there’s no shortage of leaders.I do a fair share of leading. I’m the leader on many marketing projects. I’ve been the leader, that is, manager, of an old guys’ softball team for decades. I get to decide who’s on the team, what positions they play, and what order the players bat in. I don’t have thoughts that will change the direction of the sacred sport.

Thank goodness for thought leaders.

See, I value the thought leaders of the world as much as you or anybody. No, you won’t win my respect by telling me you are one. No, you can’t count on tools and techniques to transform you into one. Thinking and talking about it means diddly. And studying thought leadership or hobnobbing with thought leaders may be meaningful, but it’s not magical.

Thought leadership just isn’t a moniker you toss on your resume.

Thought leaders are the men and women with ideas with the power to change the world. Their vision causes us to recalibrate ours. Their conviction stomps on the status quo and grinds it into the ground. Their passion for progress renders fear completely useless. They don’t subscribe to formulas nor do they attempt to create them.

Steve Jobs was a thought leader. You might say he was an arrogant one. He offended people left and right and left a trail of suck-ups and pretenders in his wake. You couldn’t even offend him back. Steve was ruthless. He was relentless. And he revolutionized this world in meaningful ways.

However opinionated this article might be, my observations in the paragraph above are not opinions. They are incontrovertible facts. What you are doing right now is the result of the work of a thought leader in a black mock-tee who made a big badass dent in the world by giving us tools to help us be creative.

He’d infuriate his teammates. If you didn’t see things his way, he’d flip you two middle fingers. If you put Steve Jobs in thought leadership school, he’d fail every course. Thought leaders create their own course.

That’s what I think about thought leadership. What do you think?

Our story begins with a little sketch from the soon-to-be-infamous Theater of the Absurd…

LORI
Welcome to Thought Leader Land. Can I help you find what you need?

PHIL
Yes, thank you. My name is Phil.
I suppose I need a thought leader on weight loss.

LORI
Perfect. Why did I know you were going to say that?

PHIL
Beats me. Maybe because I’m enormously fat.

LORI
Perfect. Well, we can definitely help. We have two thought leaders specializing in obesity arbitration. We have one prominent thought leader in physical exercise theory as well as the world’s leading mind-shaping pioneer in the area of eating less—although I’m told she’s been feeling ill, poor thing. Do you have any preferences?

PHIL
Hmm. Tough one because I’m an avid supporter of Exercise Anonymous, but I also have a tendency to eat quite a bit. Some people even think of me as a leader in the exciting new field of perpetual waistline expansion. I may need some other thought leader options.

LORI
Perfect. Well, we have a new thought leader here. The profile he wrote about himself says he’s the world’s leading thinker on magic. Let me buzz him. Ope! No need. He just appeared out of thin air. Merlin, this is Phil and he’s interested to hear your thinking, preferably leading thoughts, on magical slenderfication strategies.

Happens all the time, right?

Show me someone who calls himself a thought leader and I’ll show you a wanker.

You don’t need to show me. I can find my own thought leaders. And I have. In my travels on Twitter, I’ve seen a handful of twits, er, I mean, tweeps, burn 14 characters of their precious profile space to describe themselves as “thought leader.”

I had to know how many Twitter users actually do this. Using Tweepz, a handy and free search app for Twitter, I discovered 815 people bold enough to claim the title. Not bad, I guess. It’s a very slight slice of the very large Twitterverse.

When I stumble into a self-proclaimed thought leader, I unfollow them. Thumb down. Immediate grounds for unlike, uncircle, unsubscribe. I might even unpin ‘em if their pins weren’t so damn thoughtful.

It’s awfully pretentious to call yourself a thought leader, isn’t it? If you’re worth oodles of money, would you introduce yourself as a billionaire? Charming. Let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re unquestionably a looker. I hope you wouldn’t say, “Hello, I’m a sex symbol.” Sounds kind of unattractive, no?

So c’mon, even if you ARE a legitimate thought leader, who cares? Who’s looking for one? I can see people looking for leading thoughts, but thought leaders? It’s a turnoff. Maybe that’s just me. Feel free to disagree.

In my opinion, calling yourself a thought leader negates your credibility. It’s like a creative person telling you he “thinks outside the box.” It screams “uncreative” to me. Pitch yourself as honest and I suspect you’re a liar. Tell me your product is reliable and I can’t help wonder if you’re wrestling with a reliability issue.

What’s so special about having thoughts anyway?

Would this be some sort of unique trait? Everyone thinks, I think. Try to not have thoughts. Now that would unique.

The pursuit of thought leadership—I’m good with that.

I don’t want you to take this tirade wrong. In my opinion, aiming to be a thought leader is noble. It’s smart. In fact, in this media noisefest we’ve come to call social media, it’s downright important to pursue a goal such as this. You’re in the content marketing game to establish authority, build a tribe, and lead it. This type of marketing strategy is undeniably effective.

So go for it. Think. Lead. Publish. Share. Advise. Influence. Hell, throw thought leader parties if you want. But don’t tell me you’re a thought leader. Just be one.

Thought leadership for dummies.

How’s that for an oxymoron?

In all sincerity though, I’d like to be helpful here. I’ll be honest too. No really. Trust me.

You can take from this article, some great ideas for pursuing thought leadership as a marketing strategy. All credit here goes to Kuno Creative, an established new media agency I admire very much. They published a really useful guide, “How to Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry,” which I endorse whole-heartedly and recommend you download. If you seek a thought leader for enterprise inbound marketing, look no further. The Kuno Klan knows the territory.

Kuno’s publication defines thought leadership, explains its value, prepares you for the journey, and offers a 7-step plan, summarized like so:

1. • Develop your personal brand and voice
2. • Create and maintain a blog
3. • Produce a variety of interesting and engaging advanced content
4. • Establish yourself on social media
5. • Answer reporter queries and other questions
6. • Write guest articles and blogs
7. • Speak at conferences and events 

Awesome advice. I’m trying as hard as I possibly can to follow the formula. Yes sir, I want to be a thought leader. I encourage you to do the same.

Tell me if I can help you. Tell me how it’s going. Tell me what you know. But please, don’t tell me you’re a thought leader. Real leaders are humble.