If you’re interested in increasing your online visibility, then you need to create quality content that engages your audience. There are many channels that you can use to distribute this content: your website, your blog, an email newsletter, online videos, photo sharing sites, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, webinars, ebooks and more.

Many businesses struggle with how to create new content after they exhaust a few obvious topics. However, there are plenty of online tools that businesses can use to drill deeper, to find more long-tail search terms that they blog about or could create a webinar that would attract new business.

One of the tools that helps accomplish this–and is fun to play with as well–is Google’s Wonder Wheel. It’s a mashup of a mind mapping tool crossed with search results.

I created a short video of how to to use Wonder Wheel to create new content ideas for your own business.

You can watch the video below or check out How to Increase Your Online Visibility With Google’s Wonder Wheel on YouTube.

Comments

I’m a mental health professional and I have a website. I’ve been told that I should be building a list of contacts, but I don’t really see the point. Outside of my sessions I don’t really have anything to sell, so what’s the point of building a list of contacts that I’ll never do business with?

–Listless in Lisbon

Dear Listless (heh-heh),

While it’s true you may not have anything to sell to people now, that may change in the future. You’re probably a specialist in something–maybe dealing with children with ADHD, or adults with OCD, or helping repair relationships. Over times, your experience will grow, and so will your ability to help people.

But, you’re still only going to have 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

Imagine if you had a free download, such as 10 Tips for Helping Your Kids Manage Their ADHD, or 5 Surefire Ways to Stop OCD from Ruining Your Life, or 3 Strategies to Try Before Calling the Divorce Lawyer, and tied that to an email newsletter signup. Any one of those might be a valuable enough offer to get people to subscribe.

Then you publish a monthly ezine on your topic of choice, archiving each article on your website or blog (for SEO benefits, ‘natch.) Over time, you’re going to develop quite a list of interested people.

So, in two, five or ten years from now, when you’re ready to publish that book (or ebook, or put on that webinar, or develop that online course), you’ll have a ready list of opt-in, interested people who want to learn from you and buy from you, and who will likely share your good name with their networks.

Just be sure to include me in the acknowledgements.

If you’d like to learn more, but sure to check out this month’s flyte log article, List Building: How to Build a List of Contacts at Your Website.

Comments

Paper.li is a free service that takes links from the people you follow on Twitter and organizes those links into a virtual paper for easy reading.

Creating a newspaper is easy: you log into paper.li with your Twitter account and then have four ways of creating a newspaper:

• Twitter user + those being followed (note, this doesn’t have to be you)
• Twitter #tag (such as #seo, #maine or #bacon)
• Twitter @list (any list you or another tweep have created, such as Maineiacs or Henchmen
• Custom paper (which gives you a little more control over your newspaper, including focus based on an advanced twitter search, like this

Once you choose a source your paper will be created, and updated daily. There’s a home page, and sections for Travel, Business, Technology and popular hashtags. The newspaper also includes shared videos, tweets, and, of course, advertisements. (No, you don’t get a share of the profits. However, I can imagine that in the near future we’ll see competitors who are willing to share ad revenue to increase participation.)

You can also choose to have paper.li promote your newspaper when it comes hot off the presses through your Twitter account. This is a good way to share some of the highlights from your feed, as well as promoting some of the people you follow (a new twist on #followfriday.)

This is also a good way of getting the attention of people you follow who may not follow you back, or just don’t have as much interaction with you as possible. I’ve noticed that quite a few people have retweeted my paper.li tweets when they see their name there.

This too will run its course, just like #followfriday did before it. However, for now, paper.li is easy to set up, fun to use, and can be a visually engaging way of seeing what your tweeps are sharing.

Feel free to check out some of my newspapers:

• The Maineiacs Daily
• The Social Media Examiner Authors Daily
• The Rich Brooks Daily (or should that be The The Rich Brooks Daily?)
• flyte times

Comments

• Flexible HTML templates that can be updated without HTML knowledge. Entrepreneurs and small business people should be able to choose a template, make some quick changes (upload a logo, change fonts and colors, etc.)
• Ability to create or enhance standard HTML templates. Those with advanced design and coding skills should be able to go “under the hood” and make additional changes to the templates. This gives Web designers the opportunity to create non-cookie-cutter solutions for their clients. (And a big reason flyte uses Constant Contact.)
• Ability to do A/B split testing. This is email marketing, after all. I should be able to quickly create a split so that I can test the efficacy of competing subject lines or calls-to-action. (This is missing from Constant Contact and probably my biggest pet peeve.)
• Ability to track different signup paths to an ezine and give appropriate confirmation and welcome messages based on those signups. In other words, I want to know if it’s my blog or Web site that is generating more signups. Plus, it would be nice to know if people are subscribing to flyte log because of a particular article (10 Questions to Ask Before Setting up a Web Site or The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make) or just signing up through a signup box on our site. These are important marketing questions that will help drive my business thinking down the road.
• Ability to track down people who filed spam reports and beat them about the head and neck. I mean, who are these people? I run a double opt-in mailing list. You can’t get on my list without subscribing on our site and then clicking on a confirmation link. That’s not spam, that’s free choice! If you no longer want to receive the ezine then unsubscribe! Geez….

OK, I’m sure there are other items that belong on the wish list. What do you look for/want out of an email service provider?

Comments