At home we have a problem with our neighbor’s yard, Grove Park Inn’s golf course, causing major runoff problems almost every time there is a burst of rain. This particular time I decided to step outside and make a little video with my cheap Flip video camera. It ended up being the lead story on the 6 o’clock news that week. This is how that happened, and how you can use video and social media to get some attention:

1. Capture simple video of something “remarkable”
2. Upload video to a sharing site like Youtube, etc.
3. Write a short blog post about and embed the video on the page
4. Mention it on Twitter, Facebook etc. (There are tools that can tie all these accounts together and make sharing easier.)
5. Get other people to mention it on Twitter, or “retweet” it
6. Get noticed by people with popular blogs (In this case it was Ashvegas)
7. Get noticed by local mainstream media such as the newspaper or TV stations
8. Agree to do the interview when they call, even if it’s inconvenient

I’ll admit that it may be a little harder to promote your business the same way, but not impossible. Surely you have something, at least occasionally, that will be interesting to a lot of people. But you have to put it out there, and give it a promotional nudge if you want people to see it.

If you don’t have a blog for your business, get one now. There are numerous free options and you don’t need technical skills. So there are no excuses. Then get a cheap video camera. We like the Flip product line, but the are other good brands and cameras out there for less than $200. Now, what are you going to video and blog about? We have a mind map about content creation that may help.

Video of newscast at WLOS.com

Post at Ashvegas blog

The backyard Flip video that got the social media ball rolling:

AVL Marketing is an Asheville marketing agency. We can help you tell your story.

Here’s a short video I made for my friend Dan. It’s really easy to add a WordPress blog your LinkedIn profile. As you can see from the video it took me less two minutes to do it, and that’s while I was blabbing about it. If you have a business-to-business enterprise, or if you’re a professional or consultant, a blog is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and experience while providing information of real value to your target market. But wait there’s more! Continually producing high quality content also has a massive SEO (search engine optimization) benefit. Your site will show up higher in search rankings if you’re using keywords related to your business. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

If you’re going to do the work of creating great content you should get as much leverage from it as possible by incorporating it into your social media marketing efforts and social networking sites. So take two minutes to integrate your blog with your LinkedIn. Once it’s done, new blog posts will be automatically be added. Now that’s modern marketing. You might be surprised how many people will find your content through your LinkedIn profile.

Let us know if you have any questions.

This is a version of the blog post checklist our writers use when they submit an article for one of our clients’ sites. The only items I have omitted are related to things that are part of our internal work flow. I’m giving it all away! Definitely watch the video because some of these items need explaining. We’ll do some more focused videos later where we can dive deep into things writing meta descriptions and title tags that can help “win the click” on the search engine results pages.

We use a checklist because we want to keep the quality consistently high, from writer to writer, blog to blog, post to post. It’s important that your business is regularly producing high quality content using SEO best practices. Doesn’t matter if the business is plumbing, a restaurant, or shoe store. Modern marketing means creating relevant media for your audience. If this type of blogging seems like more work than you want to do for your marketing program talk to us. This is what we do.

Check out the checklist below.

You can copy and paste it into Word for a printer friendly version. As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to help.

SEO Blog Post Writing Checklist

Topic

Keyword Research

Title / Headline

Linking

Word Count

Meta Description

Tags & Meta Keywords

I recently spoke to the incoming class at the business incubator here in Asheville about creating content to promote their businesses. This video shows the mind map I used in that talk. There are a lot of benefits to creating content for your site, no matter type of business you have. The ideas presented here are things anyone can do to get started.

Download the entire interactive SEO Content Creation mind map.

Let me know if you want info on a particular topic.

As part of our SEO efforts we write content for the blogs of our small business clients. This is how we make sure our bloggers are using the same keywords that people are searching for. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Thanks!