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Interview: Joe, Owner of Pebble+Oak, Storyteller Extraordinaire

This interview with Joe, the owner of Pebble+Oak, discusses the importance of speaking to your audience in both blog posts and on your website. We don’t expect our in-house team to be able to write coherently on every topic nor get the voice of all of our clients, so we rely on other writers to step up and fill in the void. Joe at Pebble+Oak is one of our go to copywriters who’s able to understand the vision of a business and articulate the unique selling points and their competitive advantage of their service.

interview with pebble and oak

BIMS: So Joe, how did you get into the biz?

Joe: I have always had a passion for writing, and after spending 10 years and the technology sector I saw the opportunity to begin working with clients to discover their own voice in an online world.

BIMS: When you write for your clients how do you ensure that you are capturing their voice not your own?

Joe: At the end of the day, writing is simply telling a story. Before I put anything down on paper for a client, I spend some time getting to know them, their company, who they’re trying to serve, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. I find that these conversations are incredibly insightful in terms of identifying and interpreting their voice and their message.

BIMS: How important do you feel it is for business owners to concentrate on SEO in the blogs and articles that they are writing?

Joe: Is SEO important? Yes. But, I found when business owners and writers concentrate too much on specific keywords, the message they are trying to convey gets lost. When this happens the connection with prospects and customers suffers.

I recommend coming up with a topic and outlining your article, then writing it without necessarily thinking about the keywords. If you need to, you can always add these in afterwards to make it a little more clear for search engines. Often, however, just the process of creating an outline for your article will innately highlight your intended topics.

BIMS: If we aren’t necessarily focusing on keywords in articles, what can we do to make sure that we are getting a big bang for our buck when we are writing blog posts?

Joe: There are a few tips that I highly recommend. First, make sure you or your IT person correctly knows how to load a blog or article onto a website. This means utilizing header tags and adding alt tags to your images. It’s great if you can break up the long content utilizing bullet points or numbers! Within your blog post don’t hesitate to add links to other blogs on similar topics or pages on your website that relate to the blog post itself.

Second, always make sure that you are sharing your article to external sources. My favorites are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, digg, delicious, StumbleUpon, and reddit. (In other words, the Internet….)

And third, I always recommend finding external websites to write articles for rather than just your own site. Common examples include LinkedIn articles and Medium.com. Often, however, online publications and niche trade journals have the option for experts to contribute articles and content, as well. Contributing articles to these sources not only increases your reach beyond your current network, but it also helps to position you as an expert in the field. Above all, these articles create backlinks to your website!

BIMS: I know you are very busy, so thank you for your time! I’m sure you will be back for more interviews in the future. Before we sign off, do you have any closing remarks that could benefit new and old businesses alike?

Joe: There are a lot of buzzwords and “Flavors of the Week” when it comes to marketing your business online. It is easy to get lost in the noise and think “I should be doing that!” While many of these new ideas have merit, don’t lose sight of your values and your brand. Trends will come and go, but the companies who are consistent with who they are the ones that last.

60 blogs in 60 days challenge

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Exciting News from The BIMS Team

We wanted to invite you to learn more about some of these exciting new opportunities that the BIMS team is pursuing!

We are growing!

In 2017, Amber and myself have brought on 3 lovely ladies with diverse backgrounds to help us best represent our clients online! Brandy, Mari Ann, and Amanda each focus specifically on one or two social media networks or SEO tactics so we can follow the most effective strategies. Meanwhile Kathlyn and Joe continue to knock blogging out of the park for our clients!

Our first eCourse is about to launch!

With a long history of teaching courses and workshops in person, The BIMS Team is so excited to start helping businesses through eCourses! This first course, Blogging Your Business, launches May 1. This course covers:

  • Blogging 101: An Introduction
  • Building a Content Calendar
  • Tools to Manage your Content
  • How to Share your Blog
  • Tutorials for WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify
  • and Free Editorial Calendar Templates

When you preregister through April, this course is only $47! Learn More.

Building partnerships in Florida!

Amber has been building incredible partnerships in Florida and recently helped to launch Your Social Garden, which provides in-person workshops each month and has partnered with SCOR. If you are near Palm Harbor, be sure to reach out for more information regarding these fantastic classes.

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Are You Spending Too Long on Your Headline?

Do you find that you spend hours rethinking and rewording your headlines? What if there was a way to speed up the time it takes to write a compelling article title, email subject, or ad header that actually gets clicked?

Have you ever wondered if more people would read your blogs is they had a different title? Probably! The most important step to writing is taking the time to understand your customers’ wants and needs.

So how do you write a winning headline that  will get you heard?

The following “formulas” from Mike Samuels of the McMethod are proven to get your read!

1. A Question…

Ask the most pressing question in your niche.

Example: What is the best software for webinars?

2. How-to …

How to X (try to use numbers in your X)

Example: How to make $5,000 in 2 weeks.

3. Liar, Liar

X Lies About Y. Here the goal is to induce fear. Your goal is to invert a typical relationship of trust.

Example: 7 Lies your marketing director told you about measuring social ROI

4. The Promise …

Make a big promise about results client’s can see.

Example: Get 1,000 subscribers to your blog in 3 days.

5. A Comparison

Why X [is better than, instead of, rather than] y. This works well if the comparison dispels major myths in your industry.

Example: Why you should be building relationships with referral partners not end consumers.

And my favorite quick formula for writing winning headlines:

End Result Customer Wants + Specific Period of Time + Address the Objections

Example: Make $100 in your first week while working only 1 hour per day.

Why do these headlines work?

Following formulas like the ones above increase clicks because they are specific, client-centric, and give actionable tactics that lead to real results. As long as your blog ties into the headline that you write, your readers will thank you. Most importantly, these formulas keep you from being vague.

As you are writing the headline, also make sure you know exactly what your client wants. McMethod gives the example of not saying “Lose 10 Pounds” if your client actually wants to “get ripped”. This obviously ties into being specific and client-centric, but can often be overlooked!

Have you worked on transforming your headlines and titles? How have you seen your open and click rates change using these formulas?

Write a killed headline in a quarter of the time

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3 Tips to Increase Productivity as a Work from Home Mom

As a mom of a one year old it is incredibly important that when I am working I know exactly what needs to be accomplished and I have a framework for completing the tasks at hand. I’ve always been fairly good at not procrastinating, but I won’t say excellent, at prioritizing the things I need to get done. However, working from home with my daughter has proven to be quite challenging over the course of the year! For one, you never know if the nap is going to go longer or shorter than expected. Then there is the constant distraction of her learning new skills and growing to be more independent. Many of our clients, may second guess our decision to have Mary Catherine home while I work, however one of our big goals was that she would not have to be in daycare for the first year. Trust me, now that she is 12.5 months old, we are now looking at other options!

I have found the following steps to be essential to getting high caliber work done on time.

Tip one: First prioritize your day.

The night before I always create a list of the things that need to be accomplished the following day. From this list I know what are the top priority tasks. This helps me figure out those top three things that my business would not function without and what I could potentially hand off to one of our contractors. One way to prioritize your tasks is through the Bullet Journal technique. While I haven’t implemented this, folks I know who have found it to be incredibly helpful!

Tip two: Keep track of filler tasks.

In addition to the tasks that I know need to get done on a specific day, I also know the tasks that are outstanding but don’t need to be tackled immediately. There are additionally things that need to be done every week, but the day doesn’t really matter quite as much. These items I call my filler tasks. Filler tasks work wonderfully if Mary Catherine sleeps later than expected or is happy playing by herself, but still needs me to check in on her every once in a while.

Tip three: Structure around naps.

This next tip is combining the tasks above. My day is structured where my goal during Mary Catherine’s nap  is to complete as many of the top priorities as possible. When she sleeps longer I can fill the time with filler tasks. Additionally, during other parts of the day when I can concentrate on multiple items at once, I do these filler tasks, as well.

However, at times if Mary Catherine’s naps are much shorter than usual, I’ll need to tackle my list once my husband gets home from work and finish up the top priorities from the day. The worst, as I’m sure many of you have experience, is when you have multiple days of short naps and it feels like nothing ever gets done! During these days I put away my computer and just focus on Mary Catherine and the dog – hello work on weekends!

3 tips to increase productivity as a working mom

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Let’s Talk About Pricing

We are often chatting with new business owners about their pricing. No, this doesn’t necessarily relate directly to marketing, however, it is important to make sure that your business aligns with the market rates and what you’re worth.

In business school we learned about various models to formulate your pricing, however in real life this can be a lot simpler then how the large corporations do it.

There are three, techniques that we often see businesses use. These include using your cost plus a margin, setting prices at the competitive rate, and just choosing a random value. Let’s look at each of these more closely to see how your business can benefit from utilizing them.

Your cost plus a margin

The process here is to figure out the costs of all components of your product or service and add a percent margin over this cost. if you are a dropship store or retail store this is often figured out for you. The wholesale business will often tell you a MAP pricing or minimal pricing that you can sell the product at or the typical MRSP.

If you have a product take a look at the sourcing costs, packaging costs, shipping costs, and admin costs. Add these all up and then increase the price to have a margin of between 30% and 50%.

For a service-based business, you can use a similar frame of thought. Except, rather than adding up the cost of the product, you’ll be adding up the time that it takes to complete all of the different requirements with in a proposal and multiply by your hourly rate. The first step here is to write a list of everything, and I mean everything, that you do for a given client with in that package. When we double checked our calculations for packages this way, we include things ranging from adding the SEO to a blog post, to adding Twitter followers, and costs that we incur with advertising expenses. Our team even built a tool that we utilize that takes into consideration the other pricing models, as well. For any new client, we build the proposal off at this template.

We are currently in the process of building this tool for other service based businesses as well! Please contact me if you are interested in learning more.

The next obvious question here is how do you figure out your hourly rate. You will want to calculate this a few ways. First is figuring out how much you’d like to make every year and how many “billable” hours you expect (or would like) to work each week. How does that hourly rate look? A little high? What about all the other hours you will work prospecting, marketing, and in business development?

If the hourly rate number is within your industry standards or low, rethink the assumptions that you made. Do you really want to set your goal that low? We also always recommend brainstorming other ways that you can bring income into your business that doesn’t require your time and energy.

Competitive pricing

Competitive pricing is taking the same prices that your competitors use for their business. It’s often an easy way to get started, however, it can also tie you down. Before you simply choose the same price as your competitor, think about your brand. Do you want to be the lowest cost alternative and maybe get more volume? Or do you want to be seen as a luxury good or service?

The same product can be sold at many very different price points depending on how you position your marketing and your brand. Being mindful of this when you first roll out a service will help you with optimizing your marketing strategy and type of client.

Before simply researching what rate the others are charging, first decide if you want to position yourself as low-end or high-end.

Choosing a Random Number

You know your industry, so you may have a gut reaction or sense of what you should charge for your product or service. While I don’t recommend choosing a random number without doing research to back up your decision, often times you will be in the right ballpark. Just work your way back through to make sure you won’t be losing money in the long run!

What’s Missing?

None of these methods include the value You bring to the table. Sure you can build that into any of the techniques, but it often is overlooked. We once were hired to fill out keywords, meta titles, and meta descriptions for a site with over 40,000 listings that needed to be cataloged. I was to create the initial batch and teach their intern how to complete the remaining 39,900. The page content was all in a spreadsheet, so I created a variety of IF functions and a legend to combine different characteristics of the page to automatically create the SEO information directly on the sheet. An hour getting the formulas working properly and teaching the intern how to replicate the functions saved the company an estimated 100+ hours. In hindsight, I should have learned more about their project and charged based on the value I was bringing to the table.

How did you decide to set your pricing structure?

setting your pricing for business

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Finding Your Target Market Online

As a marketing professional, it is imperative to be able to find our client’s prospects online. Our clients often ask us how we make sure that the folks we are targeting fit their ideal customer persona, so I assume this is a common question for business owners. I wanted to lay out the steps we take so you can follow them for your own business.

Though many of us have accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SnapChat, Tumblr, etc, we can assume there are only one or two networks where we focus most of our online activity. Luckily, numerous agencies share data freely about the types of individuals that are found on each network and network growth over time.

For example, take a look at this chart from Smart Insights. 16-34 year olds dominate most networks, but if your market is 55-64 year olds (green marker), I would highly consider targeting LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. SnapChat wouldn’t be a valuable network for this age group.

social media demographics

Additionally, though it is common to hear that Facebook is on its way out, this is still the largest network of users. Twitter on the other hand has remained fairly stagnant over the past few years.

Data like this may sway where you want to put your attention on social media.

Exercise:
Write a description of your ideal customer. How old are they, what job do they hold, what do they do in their free time?

Look at the statistics of the social media networks, is there somewhere this person is most likely to be found (and active)?

Now work backwards. Make a list of each social media network. What type of customer have you had that would use this network? Now write what type of post they would be interested in seeing on that network (yes, you should tailor your social media posts to the market they are getting in front of)

Beyond data, our team also analyses what works for your competition. We often hear a client raving about how well Business X uses Facebook, for example, but when we actually take a look, their posts aren’t receiving any traction or they only are posting once per month. This leads to a conversation about what our client’s are viewing as a success.

By “spying” on competition, you can learn what has worked well, what seems to be a waste of time, and they types of graphics and posts your target market is used to seeing on each social media network.

Exercise:
Brainstorm a list of your competitors and other businesses that sell to your target market. Then find them on social media. Gather notes on their network size, average number of likes, shares, RT’s, and comments on their posts, the topics they post about, and if there is one network that seems to garner most of their attention. You can also use Fanpage Karma – http://www.fanpagekarma.com/ – to gather insights.

You don’t need to necessarily present this research in any specific way unless you are proposing it to a board or others at your organization. I use this research as a gut check and to establish expectations for clients. I do believe that if you are 100% devoted to a particular network, you can find results, so don’t necessarily cross off SnapChat, for example, if your competition hasn’t jumped on board yet.

My recommendation is to use this research from “spying” on your competition to gain a better understanding of the online landscape within your industry.

Know Yourself

Lastly, take a moment to reflect on your own interests. We’ve already looked at the overall trends for social media networks and seeing how your competition uses social media, but how do YOU use and interact with social media. Is there one network you absolutely love?

No matter what the research says, if you are passionate about a specific social media network, start there. Even though there are few 65+ individuals using SnapChat, you can still work to capture a portion of these individuals if you commit to working SnapChat.

If you are just jumping in, take a moment to consider where you would like to spend your time marketing your business. Use this as a starting point. You can always add more social media networks once you are confident in the process of marketing your business online.

Finding Your Target Market Online

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Google Analytics: Top 3 Reports to Run

Do you know if writing your blogs and sharing them is actually leading to more traffic? Is it helping you reach your business goals?

Maybe not yet, but I wanted to share some help reports through Google Analytics that will help you to see the benefit of the blogs you are writing. We use Google Analytics on nearly all of our client websites because it is free, it is user friendly, and even though some of the data is hidden, it allows us to make clear, actionable changes based on how users are interacting with a website.

Which Google Analytics reports should you run?Top three reports to run on Google Analytics

Report 1: Audience >> Location/Technology/Mobile Reports

BIMS Presentation – Introduction to Google AnalyticsHere take a look at the Location, Technology, and Mobile reports which will tell you:

  • Where your site visitors are coming from. If you are targeting a very specific location, you will want to make sure visitors are actually coming from here. Or, if you run a specialized campaign on Google Adwords for a conference, for example, you’ll be better understanding if these folks actually came to the site.
  • The Technology and Mobile reports allow you to see if folks are using one browser or device over others. This could sway marketing decisions in the future.
    Audience reports google analytics Audience reports google analytics

Report 2: Acquisition >> Source/Medium Report

  • The Source/Medium report shows which sites drive traffic to your blog.
  • Within this report you can dive down to Keyword to see how your blogs are translating to organic traffic.

Acquisition reports google analytics Acquisition reports google analytics Acquisition reports google analytics

Report 3: Behavior >> All Pages

  • The All Pages report will show you which pages people are viewing the most frequently.
  • It can give insights into other topics you should be blogging about.

Behavior reports google analyticsBehavior reports google analytics

Each of these reports can be altered to provide more detail, but these will provide a good start to understanding how visitors get to and interact with your website and blog.

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Best Themes for Ecommerce

1. Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme by ThemeFusion
$60

avada theme for photography

Sometimes it is overwhelming having so many different ways to customize this theme! WooCommerce, as expected, works great with the Avada theme and offers many different ways to view products and collections.

2. X | The Theme by THEMECO
$65

X Theme for Photographers

Any business should consider the X Theme. Which wonderful support, if you have any questions, this theme has someone the quickly answer them. Take a look and see for yourself how the X Theme can transform your eCommerce store!

3. Enfold – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme by Kriesi
$60

Enfold theme for photography

We’ve been in love with Enfold for a while now, and for eCommerce, this theme continues to outperform others. The new layout editor offers demo designs you can upload and it is incredibly simple to update specific elements in the theme options. I don’t think we will ever grow tired of how easily Enfold integrates with WooCommerce.

4. uDesign – Responsive WordPress Theme by AndonDesign
$59

uDesign WordPress Theme

uDesign offers WooCommerce integration for easy eCommerce set up. It’s a wonderful theme for high-end SEO, mobile friendly design, and over 2,000 fonts to choose from for extreme branding and customization!

5. Flatsome | Multi-Purpose Responsive WooCommerce Theme by UX-themes
$59

Flastsome WordPress theme ecommerce

Like the other themes listed for eCommerce, Flatsome allows for incredible customizations, is responsive, and offers fast page-load speeds. If there is a demo your like, you can copy these page layouts to customize in one click, which make it easy to get up and running quickly.

What about other CMS platforms?

And, of course, please take a look at Shopify. Shopify truly is an incredible interface built with eCommerce in mind. The back end is structured a little differently from WordPress, but you will quickly learn to love the interface! Unlike using WordPress and WooCommerce, Shopify can handle payments on your behalf or run through PayPal, Amazon, or other merchant accounts. It is a breeze to keep your store running with Shopify.

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4 Ways to Humanize Your Brand

Humanizing your brand is crucial to the success of your business. We all know that brands are made by humans. But let’s face it. Some of you have probably dealt with some businesses that use a monotone branded voice across all channels.

People connect to and trust other people. They are more likely to do business with you if they know that know that they are interacting with a real person, not a money-making machine that pushes sales-heavy content and deliver marketing messages like a robot. People are more likely to trust you if you start making your brand’s voice more real.

In this blog post, you’ll find 4 ways to humanize your brand. Use these tips to get you started today.

Be available

Most business just schedule posts on their social media pages to keep people updated about what’s going on in their business. What they fail to realize is that humanizing a brand includes being available to answer people’s questions, concerns and even responding to comments. It’s not enough to post regularly to your social media platforms. Someone has to take time to do engage with your audience.

Use everyday languages

Most brands engage with their fans and followers on social media. To build more meaningful relationships, use everyday language during conversations. Talk to them as you would with your family and friends. This way, you appear more approachable and human to them.

No one wants to listen to industry jargons and business-speak while having casual conversations. Remember, you’re in social media, not in a business meeting.

Show sense of humor

Humor works well for brands, especially when used on social media. People love sharing things that make them laugh. Well-placed humor draws an audience’s attention in and helps you engage with your fans and followers. It shows people that your team enjoys humor just like everyone else and that you’re not taking everything too seriously. It’s fine to inject humor in your posts, as long as your humor isn’t hurting anyone.

Introduce the people behind your brand

People are often curious about the people behind the company and what they do on a regular basis. Go ahead and share photos or videos of your team hanging around and having a blast together. Share photos of during corporate events or team building. Share the photos and videos of your team being human. This will not only help humanize your brand, it will also help you build a stronger relationship with your clients and customers.

 

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WordPress Tutorial: Add a New Page/Edit a Page

This guide is specifically for folks who need just a quick cheat sheet for updating their WordPress pages, specifically adding and editing pages.

Adding a new page:
1. Log into WordPress Dashboard.
2. Click “Pages > New Page”
3. Type Page Title to “Enter title here” text field
4. Type Page Content
5. Click Insert Media button, Click Media Library, and search for the image. Click Insert into Post. I will help you with this.
6. Click Publish

To edit Page Content (Home, About, Contact, etc):
1. Log into WordPress Dashboard.
2. Click “Pages > All Pages”
3. To edit a page click the page title. This will bring you to the page you can add the content.
4. Click Update to save changes

Blogging Your Business

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