To date, I have developed eight websites for no cost to some of my favorite non-profits, including Friends of Gold Butte. Make Your Marketing Program Blossom in 2012 I love January 1 st ! The noise of Christmas settles down and life promises to get back to normal— whatever that is! But the New Year brings new possibilities. It brings hope and the promises of new and not so new passions. Flowers bring hope and promise too. Somehow, every January my flowers push their little buds through the soil once again. They reach out with tender green shoots, testing the air for readiness. MORE >>

Or, will it just sit on your Resource page in your website hoping someone might discover it and find it worthwhile? Welcome to part one of the “bake a white paper from scratch” series. Here you sit, ready to start your new white paper. You might be a product manager who needs supporting collateral for sales, a marketing team member who’s been given the assignment, or perhaps you have a small or mid-size business, without the luxury of a marketing team, writing it yourself. Either way, you’re facing what might seem like a daunting project ahead. you better have a plan for its use. MORE >>

And, finish with your call to action – which might be reading a case study on your website, downloading an e-book, or even contacting a sales rep for more info. In Part One , we talked about planning for your white paper. You need to understand your purpose. White papers require a fair amount of effort, so you should be clear on what you expect to achieve. You also need a well-defined topic. Did you do your homework from last week? Great, let’s get started. find it’s easiest to begin with an outline. You want the reader to be quickly interested. This is probably 100-200 words. MORE >>

The first thought is to add it to the resources section of our company website. So there you have it—a nicely-written, neatly-formatted, white paper. You learned how to choose a topic and create an outline in part one , how to research and write the content in part two , and how to dress it up with graphs, quotes, and images in part three. Now, it’s sitting there, all shiny, just begging to be read. Now it’s time to make it available and get the word out. But, how about adding a small blurb and link on the relevant product page? We need to do more. Tweet about it. Bonus Section. MORE >>

Twitter – Grab your Twitter handle and make sure you fill out your profile, adding your website URL. Social media is still fairly new and understanding how to connect the various social media tools is not easy. Yet, that’s where the power lies, especially when it comes to dynamic content like blog posts. m often asked how to get more exposure leveraging social media, so I thought I’d give you the “101” on connecting, specifically your blog with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. First, this help assumes you have a hosted blog, particularly Wordpress. Let me know and I can help. MORE >>