LionShark Digital Marketing Blog

How to Love Writing About Boring Topics

2/22/2019

As a content marketer and experienced copywriter, I write about a lot of topics that are not particularly glamorous. For instance, in the last few months I’ve written about accounting, manufacturing, and toilets. When clients request articles on these types of “boring” subjects, I find it’s easy to get bogged down during the research phase and struggle with motivating myself to start writing. At times, it can also be challenging to stay focused once I’ve gotten started to craft something that will provide value for readers. In those instances, I use these tips:

How Much Does Your Content Cost?

10/9/2018

As a content marketer and professional copywriter, I work with business owners and other marketers every day that see the value in outsourcing content creation. These shrewd businesspeople understand that hiring a professional can save their time, sanity, and most of all budget.

But for every one of these clients, I have countless more that have turned down proposals due to cost. While this is routine, especially when working with budget-restricted small businesses, it still surprises me. The irony is that while smaller companies and teams should be even more discerning with how they spend their time, they tend to simply have a knee jerk reaction to spending money – opting to do things in-house that make more sense financially to hire out.

Balking at the cost of a quote without taking the time to do a thorough price comparison is never a wise decision. So, let’s take the time to look at how much your content actually costs.

Quoted Price
Some copywriters will just give you a total price for the project without any mention of how long it is expected to take or how many revisions are covered, but others will break down the cost on an hourly basis. Always try to find out how long the copywriter is budgeting for the project so that you can perform an accurate cost analysis comparison.

Let’s say you get a proposal to have a piece of content written by a freelance content marketer. The quoted cost is 4 hours of work for a price of $160 ($40/hr).

How much will it cost for your team (or yourself) to produce the same content?

Non-Obvious Ways to Make Your Blog Articles More Readable

9/6/2018

Creating fantastic content doesn’t mean much if no one reads it. But sadly, much of the web-based content out there these days prioritizes search engine optimization over readability. The result is well-ranking content that doesn’t achieve the brand objective of retaining and converting readers.

Many content marketers and copywriters use little tricks to break up their content, assuming that simply infusing more white space will convince readers to stick around longer. They shorten sentences and paragraphs, sprinkle in bulleted lists, and call it a day.

However, these tactics can only go so far. Once you’ve exhausted the obvious techniques for making your content bite-sized, you should implement more sophisticated strategies to make your content more readable.

9 Things You’ve Never Thought to Include in Your PPC Ads

8/22/2018

PPC ads and keywords are the essence of a paid search account. Without persuasive ads and comprehensive keywords, PPC efforts are doomed to fail. But as paid search has become more competitive, it’s gotten harder to create ads that stand out. The old tricks of including keywords and dynamic keyword insertion in ad text have begun to feel passé, and simply sprinkling in juicy offers and promotional coupon codes won’t cut it anymore either.

These out-of-the-box suggestions will get your ads noticed, attracting better targeted traffic and increasing conversion rates:

7 Ways to Make Your Content Longer Without Sacrificing Quality

8/8/2018

Anyone responsible for creating content has come across a situation where they’ve been asked to make content longer. Typically, this is in response to perceived audience demand for longer form content like whitepapers, case studies, and professional articles. Novice content marketers and copywriters will just “un-edit” their content – going through it to look for opportunities to elaborate on existing information or needlessly sprinkle in more text. However, simply increasing the word count doesn’t do anything to enrich content and may even backfire by discouraging readers.

So, how do you increase content length without sacrificing quality?

How to Write Above Your Pay Grade

7/25/2018

As a professional ghostwriter, I am often recruited to write well above my pay grade. Writing on behalf of executives for their peers can be a daunting task. C-suite executives are respected professionals and before they will put their name on anything, they need to feel confident that it is going to be professionally written and well-received. Ghostwriting for executives demands an understanding of the subject matter and the target audience to create the kind of content that adds value to the conversation.

How to Identify Your Top Keywords (and Make More Money Off Them)

7/10/2018

As with any other marketing effort, PPC success requires homing in on your most successful tactics and exploiting them to increase revenue. The key to your PPC is efforts is the right keyword selection. Using keywords that are too generic will drive up advertising costs while using keywords that are too long-tail will result in minimal exposure. The sweet spot is finding the right balance between the two. But even within that sweet spot you’ll still have keywords that are unprofitable.

Using these three steps will help you identify the best keywords to maximize revenue:

Fueling Your SEO Efforts with PPC Data

6/21/2018

It’s a well-known fact that doing SEO and PPC simultaneously can bolster both efforts.

While SEO works to increase relevancy in the eyes of search engines, boosting your organic ranking over time, PPC provides immediate visibility to increase traffic. These complementary strategies provide short-term and long-term benefits as well as increased competitiveness throughout the lifecycle of the business. In fact, studies have shown that focused SEO efforts continue to increase traffic long after they’ve been implemented, which is why SEO is such a lucrative investment.

But if you’re just counting on merely running PPC to diversify your overall online marketing strategy, you’re squandering a valuable opportunity. You can (and should) use your PPC data to improve your SEO efforts. The result will be a more informed organic search approach that’s poised to succeed.

Your SEO efforts need this cross-over PPC data:

Preparing Your PPC Account for Summer Vacation

6/5/2018

As a small business owner, the idea of taking a vacation is an alluring, albeit scary, proposition. You want to get away occasionally to reward yourself for your hard work, but you worry about everything that could go wrong while you’re away. The smaller your company is, the more anxiety you probably have because there just aren’t enough employees to cover everything you do in a typical day.

If you’re trying to take some time away from the office, these tips will help you to prepare your PPC account so that you can leave it unattended:

The Ultimate PPC Spring Cleaning Checklist

5/2/2018

Spring is here, which means the season of cleaning is underway. While most people are cleaning out their homes, desks, and cars, shrewd marketers know that this post-holiday lull is the perfect time to clean out their PPC accounts as well.

PPC accounts that are utilizing old keywords and ads are not only less likely to engage searchers and convert, they can also generate significant budget waste. Furthermore, accounts that haven’t been updated in some time can portray your business negatively, doing substantial brand damage. Avoid these perils by cleaning out your account using this actionable checklist:

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