Website Bogged Down?

In the past 150 years, peat farmers in northern Europe have found about 1,000 so-called bog men, those accidentally mummified curiosities now thought to have been failed kings.

Your customers have a better chance of finding a bog man than they do your website, if your site's outdated.

That's because Google feeds on freshness, says Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group.

And because freshness equals relevance to Google, you have to keep your site fresh. You need to:

• Attract new backlinks from other (authoritative) sites.
• Add new pages to your site (20-30% more each year).
• Publish new content consistently.
• Freshen up your old content regularly, revising outdated statements, fixing broken links, adding new visuals, etc.
• Encourage and respond to comments.

When ranking your site, Google loves to see steady increases in click-throughs and dwell-time. You won't earn those, unless you keep your website fresh.

Your old content may once have been king. Today it's just a curiosity.

Give and Take

There are only two types of speakers in the world: the givers and the takers.

Why the takers don't "get it" mystifies.

You can plug your ears and still spot a taker by observing his audience. Everyone's mobile comes out within the first 120 seconds.

"Reputation is everything," Chris Anderson says in TED Talks.

"You want to build a reputation as a generous person, bringing something wonderful to your audiences, not as a tedious self-promoter. It's boring and frustrating to be pitched to, especially when you're expecting something else."

TED actively discourages speakers even from subtle pitches, such as mentioning a funding shortfall or using a book as a prop.

Anderson compares the encounter with a taker at a conference to the coffee break you agree to have with a friend who within minutes reveals she wants to tell you all about her "must-invest time-share scheme."

Giving, on the other hand, evokes a response. Delivering stories, insights, humor and revelations leaves audiences ready to buy.

Content Precedes Connection

Before the web, organizing a successful B2B event was child's play, as easy as saying, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!"

But content shock has made event organizing hard. 

Really hard.

If you want to attract a content-shocked audience today, you'd better get your own content right, says Ricardo Molina, cofounder of Bright Bull. 

"Marketing B2B brand events is basically impossible to do successfully unless you have this step done right," Molina says.

Your ability to identify content that connects can only come from one place, as Warwick Davies, owner of The Event Mechanic!, says: "Knowing what’s going on in your market from a DNA level."

"Imported" knowledge of your market won't cut it.

Scratch any failed B2B event and, under the skin, you'll likely find the organizer got the content wrong.

"Get your event content straight," Molina says. "Make sure it's the kind of stuff people want to hear about. Make sure you're offering something that's definitely going to drag them away from their desks and into a room with you."

9 Easy Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Sarah Smith contributed today's post. She works for an online resource for beginning bloggers, StartBloggingOnline.com.

There are lots of reasons your website draws traffic that doesn't convert to sales. 

One is content. You might think you have the best website out there: it looks good, is colorful, and has all the necessary images and videos. But none of that matters, if visitors don’t get anything of value from your site. Visitors need not just information about your products, but about their benefits. Simply labeling them isn't enough. You need to explain their advantages and lasting impact, and prove why visitors should open their pocketbooks.

Another reason is staleness. You need to keep updating your site with fresh information. You can’t feel complacent just because you have gone live and the site looks amazing. You need to keep providing useful updates, and interacting with visitors to make them feel like you appreciate their visits.

Here's an infographic with more tips for converting traffic into sales.

The Storytelling Trifecta

How often do you encounter content posing an idea, but nothing else?

An idea for a story isn't a story, says writing coach Larry Brooks, "unless you juice it with some combination of the Trifecta elements."

Each single element of the Trifecta "stands alone as a potential windfall;" all three combined are "pure gold."

Intrigue. "A story is often a proposition, a puzzle, a problem and a paradox," Brooks says. Intrigue arises "when you (the reader) find yourself hooked because you have to know what happens… or whodunnit… or what the underlying answers are." But intrigue need not depend on drama or mystery. "Sometimes intrigue is delivered by the writing itself. A story without all that much depth or challenge can be a lot of fun, simply because the writer is funny. Or scary. Or poetic. Or brilliant on some level that lends the otherwise mundane a certain relevance and resonance."

Emotional resonance. A story provokes a feeling, Brooks says. "It makes us cry. Laugh. It makes us angry. It frightens, it seduces, it confounds and compels. Every love story, every story about injustice and pain and children and reuniting with families and forgiveness—name your theme—is dipping into the well of emotional resonance for its power."

Vicarious experience. A story takes for a ride we'll remember. The juice of a story "isn’t so much the dramatic question or the plucking of your heart strings as much as the ride itself," Brooks says. "The places you’ll go, the things you’ll see, the characters you’ll encounter, the things you’ll experience." A story gives you "an E-ticket on the Slice of Life attraction."