Category: Content Marketing

Are you a nonprofit or a foundation? It’s time to start thinking about GivingTuesday. GivingTuesday is a “global movement for generosity,” and it happens the Tuesday after Cyber Monday.

When is GivingTuesday?

So it goes  American Thanksgiving, Black Friday, which is for in-person businesses. Then you have Small Business Saturday, the shop small movement, which is sponsored by American Express. Then you have Cyber Monday which is for online businesses and then GivingTuesday.

The short answer is GivingTuesday is always the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. This year Giving Tuesday is November 30. Want a to-do list to get going? . 

Focus Your Fundraising Campaigns on GivingTuesday

GivingTuesday is a campaign in and of itself — separate from your general fund campaigns. It’s best if your organization starts working on that special campaign in the summer. Of course, now it’s already mid-September. But you still have time to ork on what one thing do you want to raise money for in November.

What one thing do you want to raise money for on GivingTuesday? Write that copy. Make a landing page. Make a specific donation page only for that.

This is where a plugin like GiveWP.com comes in handy. So that you can measure your campaigns against, um, one another. The funds can all go to the same bank account or to the same general fund, but you really want to see how your campaigns are going.

Get Email Marketing Ready for GivingTuesday

You’re going to want to make sure that you have a mailing list specifically for GivingTuesday. So you might want to start inviting people to just subscribe to that mailing list. You even may want to create swag for donors who specifically donate on GivingTuesday.

GivingTuesday is a Good Opportunity for Co-Marketing 

You might want to work with a branding partner or co-market with a for-profit business for #GivingTuesday. So start thinking about that in June. Get it all squared away by the 1st of August. Make those landing pages. They don’t have to be live but make sure that you have filled your calendar with all of the things that you need to do and to accomplish before that.

Yes, We Wrote a Marketing Book for Your Nonprofit

just to help your nonprofit focus its marketing efforts. More than my GivingTuesday worksheet, there is an entire chapter on GivingTuesday that you’ll want to read which includes optimizing your donation forms. But it also includes information on websites, landing pages, and marketing automation. 

What are you waiting for? People want to donate to your organization.

Watch the My Video 

The Only Online Marketing Book You Need for Your Nonprofit

The Only Online Marketing Book You Need for Your Nonprofit is the second book in a series of three intended to help businesses, schools, and organisations get a grasp on the sometimes dizzying world of online marketing. This book will fuel your interest and excitement about what digital offers your nonprofit or foundation, and how you can use the internet to succeed. Your digital presence is an extension of all the things your business does online and offline. It’s an exciting time!

Successful businesses and nonprofits have marketing campaigns. The only difference is that one campaign is to sell a product to fit a customer’s lifestyle and identity and the other sells a donation or way to give that fits that lifestyle and identity.

This book also includes a chapter written by the founder of Groundhogg, Adrian Tobey called “Your nonprofit is bleeding money if you’re not leveraging CRM & Marketing Automation.”

This is the second book in a three-book series for small businesses, nonprofits, and schools.

Online marketing and communication is a way for you to make new connections and share with the world. It’s a foundational skill that you can apply to grow your organization for years to come, no matter how quickly technology changes and trends rise and fall. If you’re uncomfortable with tech, that’s okay. Communication, online or offline, is not a contest.

Participate. Try. Fail. Learn. Try again. Succeed!

Purchase the book on Amazon.com.

When you write a blog post it’s more than just an essay that you used to write for school projects. You need to write in a way that’s educational, informative, and slightly entertaining. This is marketing copy; it’s not a term paper.

A blog post is not a journalistic article. People are used to seeing news articles and writing that way. Marketing copy is more like an infomercial. You want to have consumable, bite-sized chunks of content that people can scan.

The Video Tutorial

Readability Matters

Making sure the reading level isn’t above ninth grade is important. Newspapers aim for 5th grade, maybe the Wall Street Journal aims for 12th grade. Know your audience. For the most part, people come to your website from an article that you shared on social media. They scan it to see if it’s worth reading. This is why headings are so important. Also headings help with SEO which is how you’re found on the internet.

Headings seem to confuse a lot of people because they think it’s a way of formatting their texts. Headings are for organizational structure and it falls under the category of Semantic HTML. This is important, not just for screen readers which is an accessibility issue, but also for SEO. People will scan your website; they don’t read the whole thing.

Know Your Audience

Understanding user behavior when reading articles is really important. In Google analytics, you can find out how many people are coming to your website from mobile vs. desktop. You can also find out how long they’re reading from each. This should inform you on how long your post should be.

For SEO, you’ll want at least 300 words in your blog post. I generally write 300 to 500 words; sometimes 750 is my sweet spot but it really depends upon that article. I’ve gone as high as 1,200 to 1,800 words on it in a blog post on this site because it couldn’t be broken up. However, if you are writing that much, consider breaking it up into one or two parts — maybe even three.

Short Content Brings People Back

Breaking up your topics and to consumable pieces allows your reader to come to your site multiple times. Think about your blog as hors d’oeuvres at a party. You don’t want people sitting down and eating a meal and holding a plate. No. You want them to have a little snack, move around, keep talking, and enjoy the party.

So in the same way, you want people to enjoy the atmosphere of your website. This means the content that’s on there should be fun; it should be funny; it should be useful.

How Many Headings Do I Need?

Headings should break up about 150-300 words. They should make sense in the context. It should be a heading then a paragraph; a heading then a paragraph, and so on.

So, right now I’m typing this with voice typing in a Google doc. I’m going to make a video that shows you how to take text it’s already written edit it was Hemingwayapp.com. Then add in your headings and then paste it into your WordPress website with the classic editor enabled.

Semantic HTML Matters

You can write your blog post with semantic HTML. (Semantic is the grammar of HTML). Headings use semantic order which is H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the title. H2 should be all the headings and H3 would be a heading under an H2.

This is similar to an outline. Roman numeral one and then the points on the Roman numeral one will be 1 to 3. Then the points under number 1 are a, b, c. That’s how headings work in websites.

Embed Videos In Your Blog Posts

One of the best parts about recording video is that you give people another way to see your content. They can see your expressions, they can hear your tone of voice, and that makes a huge difference. Remember, people do business with other people that they know like and trust. This is why having a video with captions and a transcript is so important.

How Do You Get Captions?

One of my favorite tools for adding subtitles and getting a transcript is Temi.com. You can upload the video to Temi.com or you can give them a URL or to a video on Facebook or YouTube. They will provide a transcript based on artificial intelligence (AI). This costs $0.15 a minute and is very accurate.

Once the order is ready there are orange words in the transcript that you can change. It’s important to look over your transcript to make sure that any technical words are spelled correctly.

Why Does Video Matter?

Repurposing content, such as a video that you created, is a great way to add a blog post to your website. If your website is on WordPress you can embed the video right in the blog post by copying the URL or link from YouTube.

What WordPress does is it renders that link into a video that people can play right there in the blog article. Don’t worry about views because YouTube counts embedded views just like views on your channel.

Quickly Write and Publish

You should be able to do this work with the writing, a quick edit, adding headings, your featured image, and publishing within an hour. The more you do it the better it’ll get. The cool thing is when you get a transcript from Temi.com, you can actually add the transcript at the very bottom of the blog post. As a bonus, you have more words for Google to read as they crawl your website.

What Do I Do After the Post is Published?

After you publish, submit the URL to Google Analytics to make sure that it indexes the page. Scrape it with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and check it with Twitter’s Card Validator. This will ensure that it shows up correctly when the post is shared on social media.

In my ebook called “If You Don’t Mind Your Business Who Will?” I give actionable tips on how to block your time, how to keep a journal of pain points, as well as affirmations and prompts for each month. Spending about two hours a month should give you one published article on your site.

The more time you spend writing and Publishing, the better the more healthy your website will be.