soulati.com

Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

Soulati-'TUDE!

Your Blog Headline Sucks

By

Power tribes are all the rage on Triberr. This blogger is in three, and the jury is still out whether that will be the norm in a few weeks or not.

What’s happened as a result, however, are the headline and first two sentences (like the lead of a news story) become the most critical aspect of a blog post.

When your headline sucks, and I don’t know you or your writing ability, then your blog is bypassed, deleted, muted, or blacklisted. Your headline needs to be a summary of what you write about inside. It has to provide a creative depiction and enticement for me, the reader, to click, read, share, and comment.

Here’s what I’m seeing that isn’t good in headline writing:

  • One-word headlines that mean nothing and say nothing.
  • Headlines chock full of @ signs and hashtags (I believe that’s because people are writing headlines for Twitter?)
  • A series of peoples’ names that take away from the content
  • Use of first-person pronouns, kinda like, “What I Ate For Lunch”
  • Headlines that go on and on like a paragraph
  • No imagery, innovation or creativity to conjure a visual

Get my drift?

Because I’m in the public relations profession with a media relations expertise, I learned to write a headline that summarized and introduced the entire news release. In fact, I always spend the most time on the headline and then the lead (first paragraph). Now that I’m in these power tribes, I’ve changed up my first paragraph to be less about my thoughts and more about the content in the post.

Two headlines I’ve written (one just this week) prompted more comments and traffic:

Does  Your Blog Have Spinach In Its Teeth?

Should Video Be Like a Nude Beach?

You can see why these are successful; each creates a great visual, and the image you select helps further pull the reader. The first headline  came from a comment I wrote on Clarity For The Boss; I actually was speaking with Sharon Gilmour about vulnerability and asked her whether she’d tell me if I had spinach in my teeth, and lo, there was the idea for the blog post.

Tips For Better Blog Headlines 

(I could’ve used this as the post headline, but, don’t you think the one I selected instead is more enticing?)

Here are my tips for writing better blog headlines so yours don’t suck.

1. Go to the list of observations and don’ts and reverse them, of course.

2. Review your content and select some catchy words that serve to describe what you’re writing about; use those words.

3. Sex sells. Ask TheJackB how many times he’s used some sexual connotation as headline bait…works, doesn’t it, JackB?

4. Use tips — 10 Tips — is always a great puller; people love those lists.

5. How can you make me visualize a picture enough that I want to read the post? Be creative.

6. Never use one-word headlines; please, I beg you.

7. Why waste valuable real estate with peoples’ names in a header? Is that supposed to impress me and make me want to read because three people I don’t know are in the headline?

8. Key words? OK, if you have to, and guess what? Key words work for search marketing and they also work for readers. If I am seeking content on social media (which is often what I look for), then use that in the headline.

I’m always impressed by Mark Babbit’s headlines; without ever reading his content, I know he writes for interns, job seekers and about resumes. He always puts these key words in his headlines, and I applaud that.

Want to try some?

Old: My Boat That Sunk Yesterday

Suggestion: How To Repair Holes in Wooden Boats

 

Old: Special Halloween Family Dinners

Suggestion: Four Healthy, 15-Minute Kids Dinners Before Trick-or-Treat

 

Old: Why My Business Failed

Suggestion: Rescuing A Failing Business With A Lifestyle Coach

 

If anyone wants a bit of headline help, let me know. I’m happy to offer some tips or whip up a new thought for you to consider that is enticing, creative, and exemplifies your content.

 

Does Your Blog Have Spinach In Its Teeth?

By

Morris Creative

Tell me I have a typo in blog copy. Tell me my sharing plug in is challenging to work with. Show me the errors of my ways in comment systems that are complex. Provide me a hyperlink you’d prefer over the link I published for your blog.

Basically, tell me I have spinach in my teeth, would you?

And, what that means is I’m going to tell you the same. Please take no offense; please don’t kill the messenger; please know I say so with a loving heart so you can put your best face forward.

What these power tribes on Triberr have allowed me is to see several hundred new bloggers for the first time. As I attempt to wend my way around the ‘sphere to comment and share, there are issues with comment systems and sharing plug ins on some blogs.

I’d like you to share my content, and I want to share yours, too. When it’s a bit of a challenge because the blog infrastructure is creating difficulty, then I feel the need to politely share my troubles with the blog owner.

What do you think? Is a bit of ruffled feathers in the spirit of improving our presentation OK with you, or would you rather not know? What’s your preferred method hearing about spinach?

For me, share it in comments on the blog; that way others can echo a sentiment or offer up another comment I can actionalize (Yep! Word coin!)

Eight Reasons Why You Should Thank Twitter Followers

By

Credit: Sociable Boost

Twitter is not a one-way street. Your content gets retweeted by a follower, and they get crickets? Thanking followers should be something you incorporate into your daily tweets.

Some folks think “thanks for the RT” is just noise and clutters the stream. Others think it’s a hassle and are on the fence about whether it’s good practice or not. In my blog post last week “How Not To Use Triberr,” the issue of thanking followers popped up in comments.

Adam Toporek who writes Customers That Stick and Ralph Dopping, the Canadian architect who writes The View From Here, both suggested that acknowledging followers for a blog post retweet was not a practice they thought they should engage in.

So, I politely disagreed and thanked them for the idea for today’s post and hope they come back to lend a few cents below (and you, too, of course!).

Two Caveats

Before I share my reasons below, let’s review a few things…

  1. There are MANY ways to thank someone for their acknowledgment. You can comment on their blog in return; you can RT their RT with a thanks at the end; you can follow them on Twitter and say thanks; you can introduce them to someone else in your stream to ensure they’ve met; you can #FollowFriday; you can make up your own way to show appreciation!
  2. Peeps like A-lister bloggers and authors who have tens of thousands of Twitter followers are unable to thank or acknowledge mostly anyone. The stream is so unmanageable especially when you’re publishing top-quality content. I get that, and I don’t expect community leaders to attempt to do a one-off thanks; not possible.  Thus, what’s below is for we who are in building mode – newbies, mid-tier and less-than-12-month bloggers, and peeps who are growing their Twitter stream.

8 Twitter Tips

Here are my 8 reasons why I believe you should thank peeps for their engagement, acknowledgment, and ‘raderie on Twitter:

1. Twitter helps you build community. When you thank someone for an RT, a comment, a compliment, a supportive gesture, etc. it shows you’re paying attention, listening and appreciate someone for their time to engage.

2. When someone engages with your blog by sending along your content, that means they’ve taken time to either read, comment, share, and take the first step to build a relationship. Isn’t a “thanks for that”  peanuts when you think of your content being shared by a relative stranger?

 3. When you don’t know someone who has RT’d a post of yours, it offers you the opportunity to address them by name, say, “nice to tweet you,” and thank them at the same time. You just accomplished a trio of good community.

4. What profession are you in? If you’re in a specialty niche, customer service, like Adam is, then you ought to be building community with like- minded customer-service peeps. If one happens to find your blog and you speak the same language, then all the more reason to acknowledge them and say thanks.

5. Your stream can never be littered unless you’re spamming it with rotten content.  Who is the judge of what litter looks like in a Twitter stream? Has anyone told you that you put out garbage…that a “thank you for acknowledging me with an RT” is trash? Absolutely not. Gratitude is not litter; it humanizes your brand and makes you personable.

6. Why would you regard “thanks so much” as noise? Noise and clutter…hmm. I mentioned that I was choosing not to re-tweet posts from bloggers writing about Halloween family dinners and baby products. These topics are not for my brand or my community. Were I to consistently retweet these to my followers, this would be regarded as noise and a dilution of my brand.

7. Are you self-employed and building a company? If Ralph is an architect blogging for some fun and not to boost his business (because he works for a firm), and I’m in B-to-B social media marketing and PR, then absolutely you betcha I’m going to thank people for acknowledging my content. When someone RTs my content, I recognize immediately if they are new to my stream. That’s how tuned in I am to my followers. Because my followers are organic I have had measured growth, and that’s enabled me to monitor the stream well.

8. What are your goals as a blogger? If you want to be an influencer, thought leader, earn more comments, build a community, monetize and sell products, earn credibility, get ranked, etc. then you need subscribers, right? A thank you to those who pass along your content seems minimal when it comes to these larger goals.

What did I miss; do you agree or disagree?

 

 

 

Three Things Threatening Authenticity; Do You Agree?

By

(This post originally appeared on Spin Sucks August 8, 2011, written by Jayme Soulati). And, the 162 comments (love that!) are worth their weight in gold.

credit: Modern 8

Public relations practitioners strive to develop authentic relationships; we want genuine and sincere romance with our tiered audiences, and we get there with engagement.

The word “authentic” itself begs for definition. It was used in a variety of ways by a variety of practitioners when I launched an effort awhile back to define public relations on my blog. Social media allows for creating real communities with give and take, with nurturing and education, and with growth by engagement. Combined, these contribute to authenticism (I often coin words).

Enter automation.

My growing fear is social media automation is quickly winning over authenticity. If you follow me online, this statement comes as no surprise. I have been lamenting scheduled tweets, the success of Triberr, and the disappearance of Twitter banter (nowadays that’s just about anything without a link!).

  1. Automating Tweets: I freely admit I schedule tweets on occasion; in fact, I was encouraged to do more of it to push attention to the blog. You can’t get traffic if you tweet a new post once. So, I did, and lo – more traffic. I also use Triberr religiously. I automate post distribution in the three tribes I’m in. In fact, I’m kind of jazzed; I recently launched Globe Spotting – a tribe with seven bloggers from seven countries.
  2. Optimizing Writing: I’m struggling with the whole optimization thing; it compromises authenticity! (While optimization is not automation, there are enough automated tools to enhance optimization, so they’re, like, kissing cousins.) A recent blog post over at Live Your Love by Brankica Underwoodhad me stewing. (She’s an expert about writing with keywords and measuring web analytics.) Bran shared how she wrote a keyword rich post and watched the traffic roll in. Then, she increased her traffic by writing a how-to post because keywords and search terms told her the market was seeking that information.
  3. Quantifying Influence: How about Klout? I predicted recently that employers and clients would begin reviewing Klout scores and select candidates with the higher scores. I just read a blog post where that prediction rang true. People on Twitter who schedule unique content, RT consistently, and write about keywords can automatically boost Klout scores – even when the keywords for which peeps are being considered influential mean nothing, such as “cougar,” “heavy metal,” or “sheep.”

All my fears for the future are likely a yearning for the past. As I’ve been pondering this preponderance of push marketing, others have stated, “nothing stays the same…to grow we need to automate.”…OK, but at what expense?

 

 

How Not To Use Triberr

By

This past weekend I created a tribe and was invited into four others; something was in the water! One particular tribe was formed by someone seeking multiple shares of his content, and thus he formed a tribe of 100 “power sharers.”

A handful of my peers are in the group; the other 95 I have not had the privilege of meeting. That’s almost a good thing…you want to be in tribes with people you’ve not yet met so you can read new material, share new content and build on your community.

I accepted the invitation on Sunday; by Monday evening I was exhausted having visited my Triberr stream more than four times that day to stay abreast of the posts that were everywhere from people I didn’t know (and thus could not gauge the quality of their writing).

I began to panic and truly wonder whether I should back out of the tribe and not engage. I thought I’d give it a week to see what happens and tough it out. It’s been a few days, but the volume of content/posts in my Triberr stream is absolutely overwhelming.

Adam Toporek gave me a tip that you can hide people from the stream; I didn’t know that. If there is someone littering the stream with poor-quality content, I’m going to need to check into that little tool.

What’s making me most nervous is my consciousness about being a good influencer. I don’t want to forward schlock; I’m trying to read before I forward; however, it’s impossible for me to read more than the title and the intro.  (There’s a tip to pay special attention to your blog title and the introduction.)

There are definitely peeps writing excellent content in this bunch of 100 bloggers, and there is content I have no interest in. The breadth of content is amazing and having it all in one place is kind of exciting.

I’m getting a glimpse of some cool monetization from the mommy blogger and real estate sales person. I’m seeing ideas for content curation, and reviews by tech geeks, as well as many, many authors trying a go with blogging and book reviews.

What this “experiment” is doing for me is the following:

1. Immediate introduction to a variety of bloggers I don’t know.

2. Testing whether my peers in this tribe truly are power sharers. I’ve shared more of others’ content than they have shared of mine.

3. Getting a Twitter bump; more followers coming on board as a result.

4. Enabling me the opportunity to write this piece more neutrally (which is the right thing to do).

5. Showing me how Triberr should ultimately be used as a best practice.

6. Making me appreciate the tribes I’m in and the ones I’ve created of like-topic bloggers within my peer group and vertical.

7. Giving me a new appreciation for what Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo have built in this channel. We were there in its pre-infancy, and now look at it — astonishing growth and universe of bloggers all in one place.

Triberr comes and Triberr goes…bloggers should NOT underestimate its power to build influence, community, and brand. Trust me, I’m a case study.