We are happy to announce our new Audience Development Consulting Program. For proprietary analytics, performance reviews and member-only on-demand training events, the Audience Development Consulting Program offers comprehensive SEO instruction.

The goal behind the Audience Development Consulting Program is to train audience development professionals, writers, editors, and content producers in the most effective way possible. Through detailed analytics, monthly consultation, and consistent educating, the Audience Development Consulting Program can align your entire team with the most successful, up-to-date audience development strategies.

The Free Program Guide explains all the parts of the Audience Development Consulting Program. You will also learn about your program leaders and what others are saying about our consulting programs.

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The Audience Development Consulting Program is broken into five sections:

Audience Development Consulting Program Section #1: Powerful Analytics

The analytics section of the Audience Development Consulting Program includes five distinct reports to direct the efforts of your audience development professionals and online editors. The reports show what content drives the most website traffic and ways to improve the content you produce.

The five reports combined comprise our Audience Development Analytics Suite (ADAS). These include:

-Google Visibility Report (GVR)
-Keyword Performance Report
-Content Performance Report
-Traffic Source Report
-Inbound Link Report

For a detailed description of each report, download a free copy of our Audience Development Consulting Program Brochure.

The Free Program Guide explains all the parts of the Audience Development Consulting Program. You will also learn about your program leaders and what others are saying about our consulting programs.

Get FREE Download!

You have our promise not to sell or share your email address, ever! Please read our Privacy Policy.

Audience Development Consulting Program Section #2: Monthly Consultations

Each month, you will have the opportunity to meet with Don Nicholas, CEO of Mequoda Group, and a reporting specialist. These meetings are typically held via WebEx and scheduled at your convenience.

During these monthly consultations, our audience development consultants will help you make sense of your SEO efforts. With their help, you will take a look at past efforts and set future goals. An actionable plan will be developed, presenting effective strategies for meeting your goals.

Audience Development Consulting Program Section #3: Member-only Events

Our semi-annual Gold Member meetings are attended by some of the best and brightest in digital publishing. As an audience development consulting client, you will be invited to these member-only events, where you’ll have the chance to learn from, and share with, an elite group of publishing peers.

From best practices for digital publishing success, to networking opportunities, you will leave these events with so much more than when you arrived.

The Free Program Guide explains all the parts of the Audience Development Consulting Program. You will also learn about your program leaders and what others are saying about our consulting programs.

Get FREE Download!

You have our promise not to sell or share your email address, ever! Please read our Privacy Policy.

Audience Development Consulting Program Section #4: Live Webinars

Eight times per year we present a new, live webinar which you and your entire staff will have the chance to attend. Come prepared for each 90-minute program with questions and to interface with other attendees as the program airs.

Each webinar is developed to address critical topics that digital publishers face in this evolutionary industry.

Audience Development Consulting Program Section #5: Unlimited On-Demand Training

More than 45 educational webinars can be found within our on-demand subscription product, which you will have full access to. This digital library is constantly growing and all 90-minute webinar programs can be watched at your leisure, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

To learn more about the Audience Development Consulting Program, download our free brochure now.

If you want to begin the program immediately, contact Ann Marie via email (Ann-Marie@Mequoda.com) or by phone at 866-713-1005.

The Free Program Guide explains all the parts of the Audience Development Consulting Program. You will also learn about your program leaders and what others are saying about our consulting programs.

Get FREE Download!

You have our promise not to sell or share your email address, ever! Please read our Privacy Policy.

Depending on the sources you believe, people spend between 2.6 and 30 seconds on the email you send them. Hopefully your efforts are able to create more engagement than these reported numbers.

However, a lot of engagement through email isn’t always the case. People receive dozens of email messages each day. Some of these are information-based or deal-based, while others are purely promotional pieces aiming to create a sale.

With the time spent on email, your communications are doomed unless they can stand out and provide real value.

For all of the naysayers, it’s worth pointing out that the value of email correspondence is still high. According to a survey from research firm Ipsos, email is used by 85% of respondents. This is compared to 62% of respondents who use social media, which is often considered an email killer. This survey polled nearly 20,000 people throughout 24 countries around the world.

To protect against falling victim to the dreaded opt-out, here are five tips for staying in tune with your email recipients. If you aren’t currently using these practices, give them a shot. I’m sure your email database will thank you.

Five ways to engage email audiences

It may only take one experience with your email newsletters or email marketing campaigns before audience members understand how you communicate through the popular medium. Consider these five strategies for engaging your audience through email.

Clarity: Email subscribers don’t like cluttered email inboxes, nor do they like cluttered emails. Your emails need to be clearly viewed, read, and understood or recipients will quickly lose interest.

Give a reason to open: There are primarily two main reasons I can think of for opening an email: great content or special deals. Groupon is one email that I also open because I know there will be great prices associated with things I might actually care about. Publishers need to constantly present high quality content in their newsletters or audience members will grow weary of receiving the newsletter.

Are you providing great content? Try using this quick checklist:

-I provide actionable information that can help my audience do more things.

-I provide up-to-date information on my industry.

-I educate my audience on topics of interest to them.

-I ask to further the relationship through comments and social interactions.

If you checked at least two of those tips, then your content is probably in good shape.

Appeal to the senses: Providing imagery is one way to appeal to the senses of your email subscribers. Have you noticed pictures of people used in email campaigns, on websites and in brand nameplates? Seeing pictures of people makes a personal connection and brings a human element to an impersonal medium.

Appeal to emotion: Sometimes the features of your products aren’t enough to persuade a consumer to buy. Discuss the benefits too, and the hidden value behind owning a product may then become more apparent to the customer.

Ask your audience to get involved: The social aspects of the Internet are interesting to people because they get to share their life experiences, their knowledge, and the things they like. These social relationships need to be harnessed by online businesses, digital publishers, and content marketers.

How are you engaging audience members with email marketing? Please share your insight in the comments below.

An email feedback loop exists between email marketers and the recipients. And since email copywriters often assist email marketers, it’s important for email copywriters to understand how email feedback loops work.

To begin, let’s take a look at how an email feedback loop works. The process begins as the email copywriter and email marketer create an email newsletter or some form of promotional piece. The email is sent to their list and a recipient opens it. If the user is unhappy with the email and considers it to be spam, she can then hit the “report spam” button. By doing so, a complaint is passed to the ISP. If the email sender is signed up to receive feedback, the ISP will then report the complaints.

The reporting of complaints is valuable to email marketers. With it, they can remove subscribers who complain, which will help them keep their domain or IP complaint rate low. Having a low complaint rate aids in positive email deliverability.

Furthermore, knowing the type of campaigns that draw complaints can help email copywriters target content better. If a specific email marketing campaign used an unaligned email subject line, or the campaign’s content wasn’t useful, they will know to target their email copywriting differently in the future.

The popularity of email marketing is clear. Marketers and consumers both use the medium. And as opportunities develop, email marketing takes on new potential.

One such opportunity is using email to share video content. Since videos are rarely, if ever, placed directly in emails, email marketers need to use another way to utilize the growing popularity behind video. As it currently stands, video is hovering on mass-market status. eMarketer predicts spending on online video advertising alone will reach $3.12 billion in 2012. This is an increase of 54.7% since 2011.

So how can email marketers reach their audience with online video? The two most popular methods for viewing online video includes web-based streaming from user-created content sites like YouTube and streaming video embedded on other sites. This information comes from the Broadcom survey, conducted by JZ Analytics. 58.1% and 38.3% of respondents, respectively, cited these two video viewing venues.

If you are email your list about video content, drive them to either your site, or your videos on YouTube. Be direct with your call to action, and share information on the type of content that the video provides.

Do you drive a lot of traffic with the help of video content? Please share your strategies in the comments below.

Your editors are the leaders of your brand, and thus, they tell stories.

As editors of a marketing blog, it’d be easy for us at Mequoda to shout numbers and research quotes all day long. Thankfully, we “do all our own stunts” as they say, so every bit of marketing advice we give out comes with a story of how we discovered it (or at least who told us about it). Personally, I get pretty pumped about my research and I hope most of my posts reflect that. After all, when you spend days, weeks and months coming up with the strategy—why would I short-change on the story? Shouldn’t I be excited to share it, and not water it down in bullet points?

The tune of your publication is defined by the voices of your editors, because without them your brand identity risks looking shallow. Not valley girl shallow, but the small, empty and without depth kind of shallow. That’s knowledge that you have over the new media competition who haven’t all figured out that storytelling often trumps everything else when building a loyal readership. It’s actually this editorial storytelling, even when brief or to-the-point, that makes your editors likeable.

Do your editors incorporate a story?

Straight and to the point is great when you’re on a fact-finding mission, but even white-collar posts about things like analytics are digested more easily, and are taken with more than a grain of salt when provided with a backstory. Just ask Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, famous because he writes and talks like a human, not like a machine. Between 20 and 30 thousand unique visitors per month for a blog that only posts about once a month is decent proof of that.

And you can do the same, whether you’re talking about analytics or about cooking.

• So your spice of the month is paprika?
• Do you love paprika?
• Why do you love paprika?
• When did you first taste it? Was it on a deviled egg one summer when you were seven? What was that like?
• Tell them something more than just about the paprika, because if they only wanted to know about the topic at hand, they could go to Wikipedia and get that information.

Managing editors with control issues may consider this frivolous, but stories make for likable editors, more comments and more loyal readers. People don’t connect with numbers and jargon, they connect with other people. That’s why social media turned traditional marketing on its head. Speaking of which…

Are your editors active in social media?

Even if you don’t feel comfortable putting their shining faces as your Twitter avatar, are your editors active enough to represent you, and are those efforts well-received?

• Do your editors promote their own blog posts in their personal feeds?
• Do they act as a brand ambassador for you, or do they separate their work/life balance so much that their Twitter feed makes you uncomfortable?
• Do they befriend others in your market to build partnerships?

To be likable, your editors need to be genuinely interested in the people who are reading your blog. Keeping the goals of your business and blog in mind, your blog posts should be written directly to the reader and not through a thick veil of marketing. The more likable your editors, the better your products will sell. That’s a promise.

Do your editors respond to their readers?

The mark of a likable editor (especially when blessed with a high volume of traffic) is a steady stream of comments, and especially when they’re addressed directly to the writer. Blogs who mask their editor’s identities behind a brand are doing their readers a disservice by removing the ability to the address the author, and vice versa. Chris Brogan, who’s actually a consultant, gets hundreds of comments on his blog posts. Almost all of the posts  are brief (500 words-ish), incorporate a short story, and Chris would answer “yes” to all of the below:

• Do your editors respond to blog comments?
• Do they leave comments on other blogs in your market?
• Do they thank other blogs for linking to their blog posts?
• Do they conduct surveys of their readers to ask what type of content they want?

Active listening is a skill that all likable editors (and likable people in general) have mastered. Basically, “tell me what you like, what you don’t like, and how I can improve, and I’ll do that for you because I’m writing for you, not me.” Being genuine, humble, and curious are wonderful traits of likable editors.

On the other side of the coin, all of these tips, when used in conjunction with the wrong editor, could make them extremely un-likeable. Is that such a bad thing though? If Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch and possibly the most “hated” tech blogger in the industry, had stopped blogging based on the (many) rude comments he gets, AOL never would have bought his company for something like thirty-million dollars.

Likable or not, the best editors create loyal readers who want to connect with them more intimately, and sometimes that wonderful gateway involves selling a product.

This issue is similar to a problem many editors and writers have: a lack of objectivity with their art form. We’ve all experienced it. You create a piece you absolutely love, and feel connected to, but it just doesn’t reach the amount of people you expected.

Then I learned about two important elements related to an online editor’s job: the Google Keyword Tool and Google Analytics.

The Google Keyword Tool helped me find the exact keyword phrases my target audience was searching. All I had to provide was the starting point – the keyword phrases endemic to the brand and our industry. Then the process of keyword searching could begin.

Acquainting myself with Google Analytics helps me find the content audience members are already interested in so I can make it better. Analytics has also helped me identify key elements in posts that drive a lot of website traffic. With this knowledge, I’ve created blockbuster posts that target specific keyword phrases, incorporate popular verbiage, and successfully drive a significant amount of website traffic.

What type of editorial skills are you utilizing online? Is it different than you’re familiar with in a traditional editorial position? Please share your story in the comments below.

Knowing how to write a white paper is one step in building your audience. We often talk about optimizing landing pages to get new users to your website. It is typically free white papers that these visitors are seeking. However, if you provide poor quality white papers, the audience member may opt out of your email list and never have interaction with your brand again.

Knowing how to write a white paper will allow you to introduce new audience members to your brand and the information you provide. Take a look at the following seven steps on how to write a white paper that utilizes the art of storytelling. These specific examples help you take your editorial content and develop it into a more reader-friendly white paper.

Tip #1 on how to write a white paper: Use anecdotes when applicable. Telling the story of specific situations helps communicate an idea, concept or strategy easier.

Tip #2 on how to write a white paper: Paint a picture with your words, so audience members can envision the process and outcome you share.

Tip #3 on how to write a white paper: Talk to and connect with the audience by addressing them and the issues they experience.

Tip #4 on how to write a white paper: Using provocative statements throughout your content helps keep the attention of your readers.

Tip #5 on how to write a white paper: All the content you provide in the white paper should have value. Don’t include any unnecessary filler.

Tip #6 on how to write a white paper: Keep the content on topic and straight to the point.

Tip #7 on how to write a white paper: The beginning and end are very important. The beginning is responsible for enticing readers to continue with the white paper. The end should point to more of your resources or similar content so audience members will continue their relationship with your brand.

For more tips, download our free How to Write a White Paper free report now.

The best part about creating Blockbuster SEO posts is that, when done correctly, they will continuously drive a significant amount of traffic to your website.

One of the key steps to developing Blockbuster SEO posts is inferring a question (Don Nicholas, CEO of Mequoda, outlines the other steps in this article). Your knowledge of the subject matter and your audience comes into play when you infer questions. You need to determine the questions your audience has so you can give solid answers to them.

After writing a great article on the topic, publishing to the web and promoting it to your audience, you can monitor the results to track the success of your Blockbuster SEO post.

The Digital Publishing Bootcamp will share the exact strategy we’ve used to create perennial performers – Blockbuster SEO posts that bring in tens of thousands of visitors each year. Bring your online editors to this program to get them up to speed with the process of creating Blockbuster SEO posts.

As a consultant, author, and speaker for more than 20 years, I’ve had some practice writing many variations of my professional bio. For me, it’s much easier to write a bio for someone else, than it is to write one about myself. Back in college, writing your own bio was an early learning assignment. My favorite version of the workup was to write the bio you’d like to have in 10 years. Later in life, I took a course on seminar marketing, which focused intensely on writing long form bios for seminar leaders. Most recently, I’ve added search engine optimization to the biography writing process. While every good bio should be optimized for the individual’s proper name, there are instances where it’s possible to take it a step further and optimize the bio for generic search terms.

Audience development consultant above all else

For those of you who know me, it won’t come as a surprise that I have a lot of options in terms of describing my professional capabilities. Some might call me an eclectic or a Renaissance man. Others may politely point out that I’m bored easily, and am always looking for something new to learn and teach. Both statements would be largely true.

Fortunately, the biography format I’ve been most recently using allows me to pick three facets of my professional persona and profile those in my professional biography. For the Don 2012 update, I’ve chosen audience development consultant, website architect, teacher and author. You’ll note I cheated in my third selection by combining two items, which I feel are compatible. You be the judge of whether or not I got away with it.

Good copywriting rules apply

A good biography should tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. Oddly though, it starts with the end and goes backwards through the middle and beginning. Your bio should outline your capabilities in a light that lets potential employers and others who can hire you understand how your skills and experience can help them reach their organizational and professional goals. To make your case, you’ll need to include specifics about yourself that demonstrate  what you know, who you know, and what you’ve done. In my line of work, a list of books and articles I’ve written indicates that I am an authority in my field, and gives those thinking about hiring me a place to do further research before they reach out and contact me. Professional associations indicate that you are active in an industry, and show interested parties your areas of specialization. These days it has also become popular to add some personal tidbits that humanize you in the eyes of the reader.

Social media connections

After writing your ultimate biography, it’s important to make sure that it’s synchronized with both short and long versions that may show up on various social media websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Since the format for each of these is different, it will take a little time to make sure you have all your information lined up properly. Those contemplating hiring you are likely to check multiple sources while sizing you up.

To help you with that process, here is a link to my new author page, LinkedIn profile, Twitter profile, and Facebook page.

If you discovered other variations or elements that bring life to your professional biography, feel free to share them below including a link to your online bio.

There are many audience development strategies that can be used to find audience members, and allow audience members to find your content directly.

SEO is one of these audience development strategies.

The concept of SEO is one that has evolved throughout the years. It’s true that targeting specific keywords and using them throughout the webpages is one of the ways to do on-page SEO. The way you present your content is another factor that relates to SEO. As search engines gear their ranking to websites with high-quality content, there are specific ways to participate in creating white hat SEO content.

The following examples provide actionable suggestions for white hat on-page SEO for audience development efforts.

On-page SEO for audience development element #1: Unique meta descriptions – Duplicate content can hurt your SEO efforts. A meta description should be unique, and tell the audience member what content is the page.

On-page SEO for audience development element #2: Shorten Title tags – Sometimes title tags don’t incorporate the primary keywords at the beginning. Since keywords should be at the beginning of title tags when possible, keep this in mind while publishing new posts and pages.

On-page SEO for audience development element #3: Unique Title tags – The same concept applies as above; make the title tags unique, keyword rich, and informative.

On-page SEO for audience development element #4: Context – If you are citing other sources within your content, make sure you put the information in context the other sources failed to do.

On-page SEO for audience development element #5: Content – Your content needs to align with what’s described in title tags and meta descriptions. It should be audience-centric – providing helpful information and doing so with proper grammar and spelling.

On-page SEO for audience development element #6: Added Value – This is a standard of journalism that needs to be upheld while developing audiences.

On-page SEO for audience development element #7: Help readers understand – Does your content teach readers and help them understand topics better? You should always be asking yourself this before publishing content.

What on-page SEO elements do you pay attention to?