HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR MARKETING?

Boo hoo.
We don't have time.
We don't know how.
We might make mistakes.

These common explanations or reasons or excuses hold us back. Except when a sickness or another emergency rearranges our priorities

Equal

When you're sick, you're forced to make time. You're forced to learn how to get the  treatment. You’re motivated to overcome mistakes that could delay or complicate your recovery. Sickness makes us equal. Even billionaires have to adjust (Steve Jobs “buttoned up”), though having money buys more attention and brings more options.

Paradox

How strange that we have time for sickness but not for health.

For health, we face no crisis or deadline. When sickness strikes fast, it's easy to blame bad luck, especially if you catch the latest disease that’s in the news. When the consequences come slowly (e.g. from poor diet, inadequate exercise, excessive stress) we know who suffers. It’s tougher to tell who’s to blame.

Lest We Forget

Soon enough, we go back to our normal. We forget that …
… we have lots of time.
… we have lots of know how.
… we we learn from mistakes.

You know of actions you could take to make your business better. Just because the steps aren’t urgent doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

Even today, you can do business without a website, without being on LinkedIn, without having a smartphone. It's just that your results will likely suffer. The longer you wait, the further behind you get. Once you decide to act, you're at a significant disadvantage. Spending money may not be enough. As with exercise, you need time and what you learn along the way.

As Bruce Cockburn sang, the trouble with normal is it always gets worse. That means we better get better.

Links

• Steve Jobs “buttoned up”, have you?
• 9/13: prepare your disaster recovery plan now
• 9/11 and the end of innocence
• How healthy are you really?
• Thoughts on Michael Moore’s Sicko
• Napoleon Hill and the six basic fears from 1937
• image courtesy of dinostock

PS Start today. Tomorrow is 9/11.

THREE STEPS TO RECYCLE OLD CONTENT

You want people to read and share your content but lives are busy. They may not even notice, lack immediate interest or forget.

When you recycle content, you help them re-discover what you’ve already done.

1. Build To Last

To warrant future attention, your content needs to last. You can write about something which is of the moment but for similar effort, you can write something with future appeal too.

You may need to explain the interconnections.

For instance, my recent post about whether it’s better to pre-announce or ship compares strategies at Apple, Blackberry, Google and Microsoft. Blackberry had just announced they were for sale, which made the post timely. There are still ways to refer back to this post years later. Perhaps a company will have disappeared or changed strategies.

2. Build To Find

If your content is easy to find with a web search, you increase the chances of rediscovery with no further action from you (e.g., case study). You can’t count on this though.

You help with rediscovery when you embed links in your new content. I put links throughout my posts and at the bottom too. This allows readers to easily click to read something else (though not all links are to content I’ve created).

3. Build To Share

Content is easiest to share when all that’s needed is a click of a button. Social networks are your friend. You expand your reach when you have already built audiences on them. A newsletter is another mechanism, though sharing is often more complicated.

You may like creating PDFs, but they are awkward to read on a smartphone, consume bandwidth and take up storage space. Copy/pasting can be a hassle too. How do you track readership? Instead, you could put highlights in an easy-to-share-and-track blog post with links to the PDF.

Examples

When I write a blog post, here are the steps for initial readership

• automatic tweet
• manual posting on Google+
• manual update on LinkedIn
• inclusion in a monthly newsletter

School restarted today. I re-shared content from prior years (this and this) rather than writing something fresh.

This is Life Insurance Awareness Month. My new post about Boomer Esiason has links to timeless posts about prior spokespeople like Buddy Valastro, Lamar Odom and Leslie Bibb.

When there's a major storm, I've got ready-to-go content about inaccurate weather forecasts or snow plows or power failures or the aftermath.

As you create more content, you'll see more connections between what’s happening and you’ve already got. That creates more opportunities to recycle.

Links

• Case study: getting new traffic from old content
• Get ‘Back To School’ with your marketing
• Your digital tapestry is your legacy
• A teen predicts the future in 1978
• The six basic fears from 1937
• image courtesy of Tammy Mobley

PS It’s A Wonderful Life gets recycled each Christmas.