August 2015 – Interent Marketing Voices

The Real Value of Creating Value

Today’s guest on Hack the Entrepreneur is the co-founder and CEO of GroundMetrics, a unique technology startup in oil and gas exploration.
He began his career in business management and was a strategic marketing consultant. He then co-founded and ran CarCode Corporation, which was acquired by a major toll road management company in 2009.
In 2012, he won the Gold Award at the World’s Best Technology Competition, and the San Diego Venture Group’s Business Plan and Quick Pitch Competition awarded him second place.
Now, let’s hack …
George Eiskamp.
In this 28-minute episode, Hack the Entrepreneur host Jon Nastor and guest George Eiskamp discuss:

The positive effects of being an avid learner
Why you should become blissfully naive
How to become an expert in your field
The benefits of being wrong fast and making adjustments to fix it

Click Here to Listen toHack the Entrepreneur on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the authorRainmaker.FMRainmaker.FM is the premier digital commerce and content marketing podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

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How to Grab Great Ideas (Without Using Your Hands)

It’s funny, how we forget things. Sublime reflections and exalted ideas. Like they were never even there. But if they were so sublime and exalted, why did they not remain with us?
And it’s funny how we fear losing these ideas. The lengths we will go to preserve them. The legends are legion.
Keeping waterproof slates in your shower. Talking into your phone’s voice memo app while you pump gas on a dusty August day. Scribbling in your tiny notepad in the dark of night so you don’t wake your spouse. In the morning light, however, the handwriting is illegible. You might as well have been drunk.
I know. I’ve done it.
But at what point do you draw the line when it comes to stopping what you are doing to record an idea: How many times do you interrupt the family dinner? The mowing of the lawn? The cross-country run? How many times do you wake up in the middle of the night to write that rare never-before-thought idea down in your diary?
Not to mention, there’s the risk you may interrupt the full blossoming of an idea if you prematurely stop what you are doing to write it down.
Well, this is what you do when you can’t — or don’t want to — stop to write down an idea.
In this 8-minute episode of Rough Draft, host Demian Farnworth discusses:

Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules for writing
What to do if you want to memorize something
How to let an

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3 Resources to Help You Create Remarkable Visual Content

As someone who made an intentional decision to have a career working with words, talking to you about the importance of visual content makes me feel a little weird.
But I have to tell you, when I’ve been scrolling through my Twitter timeline lately, it’s the updates with intriguing visuals that catch my eye. They’re the ones I read, and the links I click.
In the current digital marketing landscape, the strategic use of visual content — whether it accompanies text or stands alone — is a smart move as you strive to produce the best experience for your audience.
This week’s Copyblogger Collection is a series of three handpicked articles that will help you learn:

How to create simple, captivating drawings
How to use images to engage distracted readers
How to create a visual brand

As you work your way through the material below, think of these lessons as a mini visual content creation course.

How to Create Simple Drawings to Clarify Your Ideas and Captivate Your Audience

If you think you can’t draw, Mike Davenport and Henneke are out to prove you wrong in How to Create Simple Drawings to Clarify Your Ideas and Captivate Your Audience.
They’ll show you how anyone can draw images without an art school education or fancy tools. Mike and Henneke explain that:
Simple images are quick to draw, and you don’t have to buy them. You might even find that readers engage more with hand-drawn images because they are more personal.
My favorite tip from this article

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Why Don’t Some Online Courses Sell?

Online courses are a great way to build a business. They’re also a great way to get better-qualified clients, or build an additional revenue stream by providing an alternative to your services.
But sometimes, things don’t go as planned. Your course isn’t selling as much as you’d like, or worse, it’s not selling at all.
There’s a methodical analysis you can perform to see if you can spot the problem. Of course, this is the same analysis you should perform before you create a course.
In this episode of Unemployable with Brian Clark, Brian discusses:

How to be absolutely sure what works
Why re-examining existing market demand is step one
How incorrect pricing can kill your sales and profits
What to do to increase your targeted reach
Copywriting techniques that work for courses
Testing demand with the MVP process
How split-testing reveals the truth

Click Here to Listen toUnemployable with Brian Clark on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the authorRainmaker.FMRainmaker.FM is the premier digital commerce and content marketing podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

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3 Easy Ways to Expand Your Creativity

Imagination is more important than knowledge. – Albert Einstein
Remember when you were little and the best gift of all was a large cardboard box?
That box could be anything from a small family home to the vanguard of an intergalactic attack fleet. With a few hastily drawn lines in permanent marker — and a wild imagination — we could go anywhere and be anything.
If you were given an empty box to play with today, would you find as many fascinating uses as you could back then?
As adults we tend to keep our imaginations locked in tightly controlled boxes — in case of emergency break glass.
We even schedule “brainstorms” as if it’s only appropriate to free our minds at a given time and in a specific environment. Are we afraid of what might happen if our imaginations come unglued?
It is only by being creative that we can create anything remarkable.

Like our writing muscles, our imaginations need regular attention and exercise if they are to serve us well. It’s so easy to get stuck on rails, doing what we always do, thinking the way we always think, producing what we always produce. Occasionally we need to break out of the norm and expand our repertoire, think differently, and keep our imaginations well-oiled.
Next time you need to create something new and original, try these creativity-boosting techniques:

Connect the Dots
Find connections between seemingly unrelated concepts such as a cardboard box and copywriting.
Change Your Perspective
Put yourself on the other

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Is Podcasting Replacing Written Content Marketing?

That is the question.
It’s the question I’m asked as soon as someone discovers that I manage the editorial team for Copyblogger.
You see back in March, there was a sudden influx of audio content here on the pages of Copyblogger. We launched our podcast network — Rainmaker.FM — and (of course) wanted to share the new content we were creating with all of you.
But we may have confused you, too. Based on the questions I get, we’ve certainly confused at least some of you.
I’m here today to set the record straight. I want to let you know what we really think about podcasting, and how it relates to written content, and where we see content marketing going in the future.

What’s so great about podcasting?
Podcasting boasts some pretty big advantages.
We’ve covered how podcasts have the power to connect you to your audience like nothing else.
But there’s something else that’s important to note about podcasts and we haven’t talked about it in detail here.
Podcasts are on-demand media. You can consume a podcast whenever you want, and almost wherever you want. And — this is a big one — you can consume podcasts while you’re doing something else.
I’ve listened to podcasts while:

Walking
Gardening
Driving a car
Cooking
Painting walls
Cleaning house
Flying on an airplane
Walking through a grocery store
Making artwork
Trying to fall asleep

Try doing that with a blog post!
That’s why we’re bullish on podcasting. There’s no other media that is as portable as a podcast, or as easy to consume while otherwise occupied.
It’s why

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How Neuroscientist Michael Grybko Defines Storytelling

Have you ever wondered why storytelling is such an omnipresent theme of human life? Welcome to another guest segment of “The Writer’s Brain,” where Kelton Reid picks the brain of a neuroscientist about elements of great writing.
Research scientist Michael Grybko — of the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington — returned to the podcast to help Kelton define storytelling from a scientific standpoint.
If you missed the first two installments of The Writer’s Brain — on How Neuroscience Defines both Creativity and Empathy — you can find them on writerfiles.fm and iTunes.
In this file, Kelton Reid and Michael Grybko discuss:

Why storytelling is the default mode of human communication
How empathy makes storytelling such an effective tool
Why Hollywood continually taps into ‘The Hero’s Journey’
How blueprints help writers connect with their audience
Why reading fiction makes us more empathetic
Writers’ addiction to stories (especially the dark ones)
Where humanity would be without storytelling

Click Here to Listen toThe Writer Files on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the authorRainmaker.FMRainmaker.FM is the premier digital commerce and content marketing podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

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Content Marketing Is Easier When You (Partially) Delegate These 12 Tasks

You might believe that it somehow gets easier — or requires less time — to market your business as your online presence grows.
You’d be wrong.
Instead, you switch from working your tail off to get known to working your tail off to keep up with being known.
Even if you stairstep the number of platforms, channels, and methods you use, there comes a point in which you just can’t keep up with it by yourself, let alone continue to grow into new areas.
The only options are to embrace the marketing ceiling or start delegating some of the marketing work.
The smart way to start delegating tasks
Let’s get real here: the hard part of content marketing is generating content that showcases your experience, expertise, and personality. On top of that, it should be some mix of useful, entertaining, or inspiring for your audience.
When delegating content generation, from a cost and efficacy perspective it’s often best to start with delegating parts of content marketing tasks and projects.
The major upshot of partial delegation workflows is that you can start today because they’re easy to implement.
The more you embrace the delegation habit and free up your bandwidth, the more you can focus on your high value activities.
Don’t delegate to save time; delegate to spend more time on your high value activities.
In the rest of the post, I’m going to apply the partial delegation concept to the content marketing activities you’re likely already doing.
I’m intentionally providing ideas other than content

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