Monthly Archives: October 2012

Interview with Sally McGraw, Style Blogger and Consultant

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I’m thrilled to present our first podcast, an interview with style blogger Sally McGraw. Click on the player to listen to the interview or read the transcript below! (My questions and comments are in bold.)

Sally McGraw, savvy businessperson

Hey, everyone! This is Unmana from Better Marketing. Today we’re talking to Sally McGraw of the style and body image blog AlreadyPretty.com.

I’ve been reading Sally’s blog for several years, uh, since way back when she was just another blogger with a day job, and now she manages her own thriving business. She’s here to tell you how she did it, and how you can, too.

Sally?

Yes!

So, um, tell us a little about your journey — about the blog and about the business?

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The Opposite of Marketing: Keeping Your Product Attributes A Secret

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Didn’t we say, don’t keep your customers guessing? Well, if that wasn’t clear enough, here is a story of how a company can make it very difficult for potential customers to understand its offering. SocialEdge is a product (or service?) by Infosys. In their words:

“Infosys SocialEdge provides a comprehensive way to engage with consumers, influence their purchase decisions and provide post-purchase assistance”.

Does that tell you what SocialEdge actually is or does? It doesn’t even explain how it’s “social”!

Below is a Twitter conversation I had about this yesterday. Continue reading →

6 Facebook Marketing Lessons from A Jewelry Retailer

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How do you get over 2,000 people talking about you on Facebook when you have less than 5,000 likes? Any brand with that kind of buzz is doing an amazing job of engaging with its fans… or is it?

We took a look at the Facebook Page of P N Gadgil & Sons. Right now, it has 4,955 likes, which is great for a local jewelry brand. What’s astounding, though, is the number of people talking about it: 2,160. That’s 44 percent. 

For those of you not in Pune, India, P N Gadgil is a jewelry brand with several stores in the city. (There’s also a P.N. Gadgil who style themselves PNG Jewelers and also have an active Facebook page.)

How is the brand getting this kind of engagement? Let’s find out! Continue reading →

Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: A Wide Assortment

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Cheesecake with assorted fruits

With the five links below, you can learn about blogging, websites, advertising on social media, motivation, and sales. Let’s start!

Hubspot tells you how you (yes, you) can be a business blogger.

Copyblogger tells you how to set up a WordPress website in fifteen minutes. (Though really, if you’re new to this, I think it will take you at least half an hour. Or a couple of hours — speaking as someone who’s technically-challenged but got this website up and running, with a little help from the other guy.)

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Interview with Gini Dietrich, PR and Marketing Expert

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Gini Dietrich manages the marketing blog Spin Sucks and is the founder and CEO of marketing firm Arment Dietrich. She talks to us about marketing, entrepreneurship… and cash!

Gini Dietrich of Spin SucksRead on. My questions and comments are in bold.

Tell us about Spin Sucks. Why call it that instead of something like, you know, the Arment Dietrich blog?

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: LinkedIn Endorsements and Twitter Follower Count

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This seems to be Tools Week! Neil Patel shares ten mission-critical tools for every modern marketer. How many of these do you use? I use only two — IFTTT and Hello Bar. But I plan to start using Hootsuite and KISSmetrics soon — these are both very popular and recommended tools, and I’m hoping they’ll help us!

Rand Fishkin, Founder and CEO of SEOMoz, shares 24 things that he wished he had known “then” (at the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey. My favorite is, obviously, #10:

“Better marketing often trumps a better product. Invest in both.”

Lisa Barone shares seven rules for writing awesome content. The first, of course, is telling stories.

I hate LinkedIn’s new Endorsement feature — I think it makes it far too easy for people to endorse others and makes it somewhat of a popularity contest. But since it’s there, you might as well use it, and Social Media Examiner has tips.

This study of 36 million Twitter users finds that the number of followers you have directly correlates to how often you tweet. So, how many tweets have you sent out this week?

7 Free Tools to Increase Your Productivity

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Being a small business or a startup means you don’t have much to spend on fancy tools, but a small business also needs to be extremely focused and productive to compete with bigger and more established businesses! Here are some tools I use that make my workweek easier, and that you might want to try out. Each of these is free, or has a free version you can use.

Evernote

Evernote lets you take notes (text, audio, video), store web-clips, documents and stores all of these on the cloud so you can access from any of your devices. It’s an installed application, so you can use it even when you are offline and it syncs the data when you are connected. Most of us use multiple devices nowadays with one computer at work, another at home and then smart phone and maybe a tablet – install Evernote on each one and your life will be much easier. There is a web version too, if you prefer that.

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Interview with Ruud Hein, Blog Editor and SEO at Search Engine People

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Ruud Hein of Search Engine PeopleRuud Hein is one of the faces of Search Engine People and editor of their popular blog. Ruud talks to us about blogging, SEO, and entrepreneurship.

Let’s get to it! My questions and comments are in bold.

There’s this story on your website about how Search Engine People got started. Tell us the story — how did you get involved?

Besides teaching English as a Second Language at the French Centre de Langues Internationales Charpentier (CLIC), I had taken up building and promoting websites. Much of my informal SEO education came from discussions on the Cre8asite Forums (recently bought by Jim Boykin) with brilliant people like Ammon Johns, Kim Krause, and Stockbridge Truslow – to name but a few.

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Networking and Content

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Happy Friday! This week, read up on how to improve your content, get more employees to blog, make sure you’ve got your WordPress website under control, and go out and network like a pro!

If you’re confused about all the different content marketing tactics — SEO, social media, conversion, analytics, email — this post explains exactly how you can use all of these tactics in the same piece of content. If you read nothing else this weekend, read this.

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The Importance of Visuals, Examples, and Conversations in Marketing

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Alice in Wonderland: "pictures or conversations"In the very first paragraph of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll writes:

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”

When I first read that as a kid, I nodded in agreement. But it’s not just when writing stories for children that you need to think about pictures and conversations. Alice in Wonderland isn’t exactly a marketing textbook, but this is great advice for marketers!

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