Signlas In The Noise – Issue 60

Making whit up as we go.

Free ebooks, content upgrades at the bottom of a blog post, exit intent pop-ups that offer a free 7-day email course, webinars, video-based product launch formula launches for online courses. What do all of these marketing tactics have in common? Someone made them up. Many of them can work exceptionally well, but what do you do if most of them make you feel like a sleazy online marketer? Well, for starters, you turn to a powerful form of thinking from the world of physics. It’s a method of thinking so powerful that it allows you to invent new, highly effective marketing methods that feel good to you and your market. This new post from me shows you how to pull off the unthinkable, and I promise, there are no calculus equations involved. 

Alexa, what is the future of content marketing?

In the not-too-distant future, we may all need to devote a substantial amount of time creating interactive voice content as part of our content marketing efforts. If you’re like me, you’ve avoided getting any voice-activated speaker/computer like Alexa or Google Home. (I don’t trust them not to get hacked and listen in to what’s happening in my house.) But the future of content marketing is very likely heading towards content that people can interact with via a voice-controlled computer. Convince and Convert has an excellent summary of the voice content trends and how to prepare for the coming wave of voice content. Excuse me while I go scream into the void of my not-connected-to-the-internet pillow. 

You know what your problem is?

Since reading a book by Donald Miller called “Building A Story Brand,” I’ve become a big fan of his. The approach he takes to crafting marketing messages, whether those messages are on your website or in your emails or videos, is so refreshing and simple. In this short video, Don points out two very simple, extremely clear messages to tell your prospects that will work every time. Marketing really can be this simple: stating a person’s problem and telling them how you can fix it.

Don’t Be Weevil

“[There’s been a] shift in Google’s behavior over the last few years away from an engine that drives searchers to other websites for the answers to their problems and toward self-hosted answers and solutions. That’s made SEO much more difficult, as Google, for the first time in its history, is sending less outbound traffic.” That’s Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro, on the coming death of search engine optimization as a viable means to drive traffic to your website. If you spend any time on search engine optimization, you’ll want to watch this presentation Rand gave at the Brighton SEO conference. In a nutshell, Google wants to become the destination for answers instead of sending people to your website for answers. This is bad news for anyone relying on SEO for website traffic. Some things can be done to combat this problem that Rand covers in his talk, though even those tactics will only work for a few more years. I’m having a hard time figuring out how Google’s company motto of “Don’t Be Evil” has led them to this strategy.