Cultivating Word of Mouth recommendations is valuable for any business but especially SMB and SME organisations. This post discusses one way to easily implement some content marketing strategy and increase your Word of Mouth referrals.

How often do you pass on the details of a blog post or an online article to your network? I do it all the time. I’m particularly inclined to do it when I can click on a widget to do the work for me. Time is in short supply in my office and I don’t always stop to shorten a link and send it along. Give me a tool to construct a message and I’ll happily broadcast it.

What a great idea!
I was delighted last week to see someone use a sharing widget in a different way. A company based in Sydney called Ideas into Action have a Share This Site button on their home page. That’s right, they’re encouraging a Word of Mouth recommendation by making it easy to share the details of their website. When you select the Twitter option on the widget, you conveniently get the following tweet crafted for you:

Small Business Marketing Consultants, Services & Strategies, Sydney | Ideas into Action: http://bit.ly/d9bTQ8 via @addthis

The Take-Away
Put a sharing widget on your home page. With very little effort, customers and prospects give you a valuable Word of Mouth (WoM) recommendation. It has the potential to generate unique user traffic, improving your SEO. If you're a small business, it's a potent piece of content marketing. I’ve added it to my list of website upgrades.

What cool little marketing tricks do you use?

Follow Sarah Mitchell on Twitter: @globalcopywrite

website: www.globalcopywriting.com

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Writing a blog is one thing. Getting people to read it is an entirely different matter. This post explores simple ways you can increase the traffic to your blog.

Blogs come with two problems. 1) You have to keep them regularly updated. (Yes, that’s a blush creeping up my face.) 2) You have to get people to read them. Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t full time bloggers. Few blogs enjoy massive reading audiences. That’s okay with me as long as I’m reaching the people I want to.

Read Sarah Mitchell’s full post: Avoid the Post and Hope Syndrome

Follow Sarah on Twitter: @globalcopywrite

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A lot is being written about content marketing. When I first started research for a seminar, I realised much of what is published has been done with the assumption the reader understands the main components of content marketing. I wrote this post to help anyone new to content marketing or wanting basic information.

Content marketing is gaining a lot of traction in the mindset of marketers and, especially, small business owners. I recently presented a seminar on the topic at the Brew Small Business Expo in Perth. While doing my research I realised much of what is being written about content marketing assumes the reader understands the basic components. I didn’t fully understand them when I started so I thought it made sense to lay the groundwork here.

Read the rest of Sarah’s post: 3 Components of Content Marketing

Follow Sarah Mitchell on Twitter: @globalcopywrite

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The birth of every every new communications medium is followed by a period during which the underlying technology actually cramps the communication it’s supposed to be enabling.  When it comes to Twitter, we’re all in the middle of this period – Gartner would probably call it the Trough of Technobabble – right now.

Look what happens when a simple tweet gets passed through the Twitter machine:

The original tweet

The tweet has a simple message: check out our recent blog post on The 16 Ways to Alienate a B2B Buyer.  Already, it’s got a fugly URL attached that will look hilariously retro in about five years.  Then there’s the arguably valuable Twitterchrome: who posted it, the photo, date, time and origination app.

Now the Tweet gets picked up by one of my “Followers” (I prefer ‘disciple’ but will go with the flow on this one) and becomes:

The first retweet

Already, the short, simple tweet has begun its transformation into what I call Twitterjunk. No offense to ‘rapril’ who was just doing what we all do, but look how much harder this version is to read than the original.  We’ve got two hashtags, attached like barnacles to the hull of my message.  We’ve got the RT @dougkessler prefix (a nice piece of Twitter etiquette that inhibits outright plagiarism but also kills your opener).  Then we’ve got rapril’s editoral comment (now constrained to ten characters): ‘Liked this’. (thanks rap).

Glance at this tweet and already your eye is like a hummingbird looking for a place to land in a thatch of brambles on a windy day. If your eye is like most hummingbirds faced with this problem, it will flit away in the time it takes a hummingbird heart to beat, say, a few thousands times.

But it gets worse...

More on the Velocity B2B Marketing blog.

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According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of tweets are generated by just 10% of Twitter users. Apparently this is a higher concentration than for Wikipedia and much, much higher than for other social networks,  where the top 10% are responsible for 30% of the stuff produced.

These people are practicing something called "Lethal Generosity" and it's a powerful force in B2B marketing and social media marketing.

More on the Velocity B2B Marketing agency post here.

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The thought of standing in front of a crowd and delivering a speech, presentation or even an introduction strikes fear in many hearts. This week I had the chance to judge and be judged in the public speaking forum.

Writers spend a lot of time sitting behind a desk in solitude with their thoughts. I enjoy working on a project, researching and revising until the copy is the way I want it. I usually deliver my work via the internet and have customers I’ve never laid eyes on. It’s a stress-free job especially when you work from a home office as I do. This week I was away from my desk and, on two occasions, remembered work can be nerve-racking.

Read Sarah’s full post: Public Speaking: The ultimate terror or extreme lead generation?

Follow Sarah on Twitter: @globalcopywrite

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