There are more than 500 million blogs on the internet today. With a statistic like that, how do you stand out? The good news is that a little bit of know-how will go a long way. In this guide, we’ll share 6 blogging strategies to build an audience for your website in 2019 and beyond. 

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1. Network with Other Bloggers

A lot of new bloggers make the mistake of thinking that other bloggers are their competition. While it’s true you might be competing for the same group of readers, you can use these other bloggers to your advantage with some smart networking. Unless you’re in a tiny niche, odds are there are already other bloggers talking about similar topics. 

By engaging with these other bloggers through social networks and their own blogs, you can build strong connections that matter. Not only will these bloggers be likely to recommend your content or link to your blog, but you’ll have an option for guest posting in the future. This is essential for showing you’re trustworthy in your niche. 

2. Publish Relevant Content

This sounds simple, but it’s actually the most important part of being a successful blogger. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to publish content your audience actually wants to read. Believe it or not, your blog can’t just be a public diary to post your daily musings. 

If you want to build an audience, you need to provide real value. Your content needs to be relevant for a specific, targeted audience, not just everyone. For example, if you blog about senior living marketing, you’ll need to include relevant information that can be used for businesses in this market. This will show you have value and that you’re serious about growing your readership. 

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3. Guest Blog on Top Blogs

Remember the networking tip we talked about earlier? Here’s why it’s so important. If you can identify blogs in your niche that already have an engaged, active audience, you can post on these to boost your own blog. 

To do this, start by connecting with the owner of this blog or become a member of the community. Learn the writing style and what’s needed to write a great guest post. From there, pitch your idea to the blogger and explain why it would be a good fit. Finally, follow through with a high-quality guest post. 

4. Promote Your Blog Posts

As we mentioned before, you can’t just click publish and expect readers to find your blog. You need to make sure you’re promoting your blog posts actively. The best way to do this is through social media. 

Your audience is likely already on social media, so make sure you’re active on social media as well and engaging with this community. Posting on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social media websites will help your audience know when there’s a new post. 

5. Build an Email List

Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience in a new way. Collecting emails of your best readers by offering something they’d like such as a free download, ecourse, or additional content is a great way to provide more value. 

Today, 81% of small businesses rely on email is their primary customer acquisition channel. That means its a powerful tool you can use to spread awareness about recent posts, products, or other important messages. 

6. Focus on User Experience

Last but not least, once you land a good number of users, you need to make sure they’re willing to come back. You do that by providing valuable content and by creating a trustworthy user experience. A positive user experience shows your readers you take your blog seriously, and it makes the time spent on your page much more enjoyable.

What matters when it comes to the user experience? Things like mobile-friendly design, fast load times, and easy to read text are all main factors. It’s about making the reading experience as simple and enjoyable as possible. 

Build a Powerful Blog

Now that you know the best ways to build an audience, it’s time to go out there and get started. These tips are so simple anyone can follow them. What are you waiting for?

From publishing relevant content to creating a user experience readers can trust, these things make all the difference. It can be hard to stand out in a sea of so many blogs, so it’s time to push your blog to the next level.

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B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

This is blog post number 522.

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Business Relationships – 6 tips to create better business relationships

1. Face to Face meetings

Take time to meet new people face to face and extend your circle of contacts. Approach these intro meetings with an open mind and no agenda. Do not pitch during these meetings and listen more than you speak.

2. Deliver Value

Make a point to help help out your contacts whenever you can and to connect them with people that they should meet. Do so without point scoring or expecting anything in return.

3. Surprise and Delight Your Clients & Customers

Execute all contracted projects and tasks well but make one of your objectives to surprise and delight them by delivering beyond their expectations. If you are unsure how to do this your staff and customer feedback will give you some very strong indicators.

4. Be Authentic

One of the benefits of being a business owner or entrepreneur is that you can create your own company and remain true to your values and vision. Do not lose sight of this when you are starting business relationships even if there are monetary reasons to do so. If your gut tells you that a potential relationship will be problematic – go with your gut.

5. Establish Trust

For any relationship to work there needs to be trust on both sides. Major deals and agreements need to be written down and formalised but a good relationship should be the basis. Be worthy of trust, open and and trust in others.

6. Frequency and Feedback

Regularly communicate with your contacts – this applies equally to your staff as well as contacts external to your business. Encourage the giving of and be receptive to feedback and reviews.

Implement these points and you will establish better business relationships – relationships that will help you build better business. The last word goes to Dale Carnegie

“You can close more business in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

We hope you have found this information useful.

Need help creating better business relationships? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO – Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post How do you Create Better Business Relationships? – 6 tips appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

How do you build a community? – 6 tips

1. Content & Rules

You will need to create Content for your community on a regular basis and let your desired community members know the reasons for the community. Explain how the community can interact with you the hosts and with each other. Decide how it will be moderated and what are the best uses of the community.

2. Location

Be very clear where this community is based – is it a dedicated portal with login? Is it a publicly hosted forum. Is it hosted on a third party platform: LinkedIn or Facebook being obvious examples. Note – It is preferable to have a dedicated portal that you control. Are there any offline aspects to the community? A regular meeting place for events, for example.

3. Customer Service

Deliver excellent customer service to your community but also to all of your customers and those who make enquiries. For more details on how to do this read this post – SME Owners – 10 ways to excel at customer service

4. Ability to Surprise

A good community has the ability to surprise and delight its members. This community should not be a platform used only for promotional offers. Your objective must be to deliver value to your members and to interact with them.

5. Interaction & Engagement

A key feature of any community is the amount of interaction and engagement – not just with the host but also with each other within the community. Build in flexibility to accommodate user generated features and you will reap the rewards. I was recently contacted by Quora asking me for my suggestions in this respect and it is clear this is one of the ways they are developing their platform.

6. Above and Beyond

Start with the mindset that you will go above and beyond the norm in an approach that both Napoleon Hill and Zig Ziglar famously referred to as ‘going the extra mile’ and you will give your community every chance of future success.

We hope you have found this information useful. We would be happy to discuss how creating a community around your products or services could work for you. Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

The post Entrepreneurs – How do you build a community? – 6 tips appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Hello everyone. I am going to start this post with an ugly looking word – productization. It is ugly but beautiful at the same time. Let me explain with a story. There was a business owner called Brad who owned an accountancy firm delivering professional services to small businesses. Over the course of a few years, he built up his client base and increased his number of staff to handle the increased number of clients. Brad’s business was growing – but only slowly. As the business got bigger Brad was getting pulled into activities that he did not perceive to be his strengths: activities like Human Resources, Health and Safety, Logistics. It seemed that the every small increase in profitability came at great cost to him in terms of time and focus.

During a weekend seminar, Brad heard about productization; productization is the process of creating products out of the services that your company or organisation provides. He also learned that it is easier to sell products online than it is to sell services. Bingo! Brad then created a new product development strategy that created products that included the following: proprietary accounting software, Ebooks, books, online courses, online workshops, webinars, downloadable PDFs, apps, podcasts and audio files. This enabled Brad’s company to reach many more customers than he and his staff could physically meet with during normal working hours. Over the course of the next 3 years, Brad’s company grew by a factor of five aided by productisation and appropriate use of technology.

Are you a professional services firm that would like to grow as Brad’s firm did? Below are 5 reasons why you should consider productization.

Productization – 5 Things to Consider

1. Scale – Productization well executed will create the opportunity to scale your business rather than grow.

2. Revenue – Productization can transform your website from purely an informational website into one that actually generates sales and revenue.

3. International Expansion – Once you have a suite of products available online you are able to do business internationally from the comfort of your own laptop. Platforms such as Amazon, the App Store and iTunes (for podcasts) deliver a level of kudos for your business too.

4. Business Card – Having a critically acclaimed product is a much better business card than any conventional business card. At networking events, you will be remembered.

5. Do the work once – Once you have created the product it is done. The book, the online course, the video series can be sold multiple times without you having to do any additional work. You may want to consider updates in the future but for the present the work is done.

We hope you have found this information useful. Productization can form part of a comprehensive Content Marketing strategy.

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Should Your Book Also be an AudioBook?

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B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt

Founder, Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

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The post Business strategy – Is Productization Right for you? 5 Considerations appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

How can Marketing Fundamentals Ltd Help you?

1. Content Marketing consultancy – We create blog & Social Media Content and implement it for you leaving you to focus on your core business. There are a number of different packages available and we can create a bespoke package too.

2. Video Content – We create video Content to promote your business and for use on YouTube / Vimeo etc.

3. Social Media Consultancy – We devise a Social Media Strategy and implement it for you. Watch a testimonial here

4. Blog Post Writing – We create a number of posts for you and supply to you for you to upload to your site. Thirty posts is a popular number because when you have created thirty blog post traffic to your site increases by up to 30% Source: Social Media Examiner.

5. Blog Mentoring – Regular face to face sessions instructing business owners and entrepreneurs how to blog to promote their business and organisations. Booked as 12 weekly sessions and can be delivered via Skype if distance prevents face to face meetings. Note – There is homework in between each session.

6. Email Copywriting – You’ve built a mailing list but don’t really know what to say to maintain momentum? We can do this for you.

7. Company Workshops – Content Marketing & Social Media 1 day Workshops delivered at your company’s premises. Watch a testimonial here.

8. Online Blogging Course – Learn on Demand by registering for our our Udemy course How to TurboCharge Your Business with a Blog’

9. Book – Buy our ‘How to TurboCharge Your Business with a Blog’ paperback book from Amazon. There is also a Kindle version available.

10. App – Buy our SME Marketing App on App Store and Android platforms

11. Blog – Read our Marketing Fundamentals Ltd blog.

12. YouTube – Watch Marketing Fundamentals Ltd videos on our You Tube Channel.

13. Twitter   Twitter: TurboCharge Your Twitter Presence Course

We hope you have found this information useful and we look forward to hearing from you. Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

The post How can Marketing Fundamentals Ltd help you? – 13 ways appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

I was interviewed by the lovely Melinda Yeaman for the Outlier Podcast series. Click here to listen to the interview.

Click here to listen.

B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

I hope you find this information useful.

Best wishes,

Mike Pitt

Founder & CEO

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

Follow Mike on Quora

Subscribe to

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Buy our book!

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The post Mike Pitt – ‘Unleashing the Power of Content’ Podcast for Outlier Magazine appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

5 reasons why business storytelling will lead to greater engagement with your Target Audience

1. Emotional and not rational connection – Storytelling will build an emotional rather than a rational connection with your audience. Stories connect people – Ideally you will have both a rational and an emotional connection over time but connecting with your audience emotionally is a major plus.

2. Broader appeal – A well told story will have a broader appeal than a product demonstration or list of product benefits. Film-making is storytelling.

3. Memorable – People remember stories and the connection to your product/services rather than product claims.

4. Ideas/ themes – Stories can contain ideas and themes that are bigger than products.

5. Cultural relevance – Storytelling is part of the human experience and developed along side speech and language.

Parents of young children know very well the power of the bed-time story and its importance to their children’s development. Once you are able to harness storytelling in your content you will create a stronger relationship with your customers and prospects.

Need help creating stories for your business? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

The post Entrepreneurs – Once upon a time – 5 reasons why storytelling will lead to greater engagement appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

1. What has worked well this year?

2. What did not work well this year?

3. What new challenges do you expect next year?

4. What trends have you identified in sales of your products and services?

5. What are the trends in your sector or niche?

6. What would represent a massive achievement were you to achieve it next year?

7. Are you using the much vaunted Social Media platforms effectively?

8. Do you have a Content Strategy?

9. How successful do you feel your email activity has been?

10. Is it easy for you to identify the ‘raving fans’ of your business? Do you have a specific strategy for them?

11. What is your growth or scaling strategy?

12. Are you to busy to think about this because you are working in the business?

These are just a few of the many considerations for next year – we would be happy to help you create a plan for next year and introduced our Strategy Days for this specific purpose. We work with you to construct a plan for your business. Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to set up your strategy day or you could just fill out this form

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

The post Entrepreneurs – How is 2014 looking for you? 12 considerations for your marketing plan appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

1. Research – What does upmarket look like in your niche? Is there an upmarket segment? Is there potential for one? Do not skip this step – it is vital. Your repositioning needs to be commercially viable.

2. Value proposition -What is to be your new value proposition? What will you offer to consumers that is different to what you are currently offering and also different to your competitors?

3. Consistency or congruence – Are your brand assets consistent with your new positioning or will they need to be updated. This could include website, stores, communications materials, staff uniforms etc

4. New positioning or sub brand? – Is it feasible to take your brand upmarket? Or should you consider a sub brand and start fresh as Toyota did with Lexus?

5. Customer experience – What changes will need to be made to the overall customer experience to substantiate the new upmarket positioning? You will need to list these out.

6. Stop anti- brand activity – If you are running any price promotion activity – stop it . As I said above brand is reputation and if yours is ‘Closing down sale’ ,’2for 1′ or ‘60% off’ then that becomes your reputation.

7. Social proof – What do customers say of your customer experience? Is there some evidence within the feedback you have received of potential for your brand to be reappraised? Do you already have an upmarket segment of your customer base?

8. Products and services – What changes do you need to make to your products or services to be congruent with an upmarket positioning? It might mean removing some and adding others. You may already have clear customer segmentation which will help the transformation process.

9. Distribution – Your distribution network needs to be consistent with your new positioning. If your product is on sale in dumpbins at a discount retailer you will not be able to take your brand upmarket.

10. Implementation – Great news ! If you are a SME owner or entrepreneur – with a relatively small number of staff (up to 50) and low number of sites – in most cases it is considerably easier to plan and execute a brand repositioning than it is for large multinationals. The advantage is with you and the potential rewards can be too.

Are you considering re-positioning your brand? We would like to help you. Feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

I hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO
Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post Entrepreneurs – How do you take your brand upmarket? 10 considerations appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Recently I was interviewed on Kent Business Radio for their Business Bunker show. The show was a lot of fun as you can see from the picture. On the show I discussed blogging and how to use the appropriate Social Media platforms to promote your business or organisation.

You can listen to the whole show here.

Note – if you want to start with my interview segment start playback at around 45 minutes.

Once you’ve listened to the audio leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

We can help you achieve success for your business with blogging as part of a Content Marketing strategy. Feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 226247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We are a leading B2B Content Marketing agency in London.

We hope you have found this information inspirational.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO of Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post What did Mike Pitt say on Kent Business Radio? appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.