UTL Business Agency

10 TIPS ON BUILDING A BLOG
Ask an Expert
1. Ask top marketing industry influencers to chime in on a recent marketing event or topic, then feature a roundup of influencer opinions.

2. Ask marketing experts their advice on a marketing task or topic, then feature a roundup of this expert advice.

3. Do a Q&A with digital marketing experts.

4. Use Help a Reporter Out to source expert opinions on a topic that’s important to your customers.

5. Follow relevant marketing groups on LinkedIn and find recent questions from participants, then write blog posts based on these questions.

6. Search Quora for popular marketing questions, answer the question in your blog and feature some quotes and advice from Quora in the blog.

7. Poll your audience on social media and write about the results.

Become a News Source
8. Run a weekly or monthly roundup series of marketing news.

9. Create a roundup of must-read marketing books for the year.

10. Curate a blog around a piece of timely marketing news and add your agency’s opinion.

11. Take a current event topic and relate marketing to it such as, “X Ways to Market Your Business During an Election Season.”

12. Respond to recent marketing research with your agency’s opinion on what it means for the industry.

13. Share the findings of a recent report and provide your own analysis and predictions.

Be Trendy
14. Talk about how a business can capitalize on the popularity of emojis in their marketing.

15. Write about how to reach millennials (or another generation) through marketing — while millennial might be a buzz topic, it’s still a relevant topic for your clients looking to reach that demographic.

16. Fill in the first blank with a celebrity or famous person and the second blank with a marketing platform or tactic: “What _____ can teach you about _____.”

17. Write a blog post for the holiday or season such as “Ways to Market Your Business for the Fourth of July.”

18. Talk about the latest social media trends.

19. Write about the latest content marketing trends.

20. Write a post updating your readers on the latest SEO updates or trends.

21. Post about your marketing predictions for the following year.

22. Analyze the marketing campaigns of each candidate for the presidential election.

23. Write a blog post weighing in and giving advice on usability every time there’s a significant product update from a big online platform that everyone uses such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest.

24. Collect Tweets around a popular topic, event or conference and feature these Tweets in a blog post using Storify.

25. Share the latest mobile marketing trends.

26. Add your comments on a popular blog post that’s gone viral in your industry.

Leverage Events
27. Write a recap of a recent marketing webinar that you gave or attended.

28. Attend a well-known marketing conference, and do a roundup of the best conference tips you heard and best sessions that you attended.

29. Follow a hashtag for a conference or event and pull the best tweets into a blog post.

Keep a Pulse on Important Brands
30. Do a roundup of the best marketing campaigns of the year (so far!).

31. Roundup examples of the best Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat accounts.

32. Do a roundup of the best charity (marketing) campaigns of the year and how your readers can utilize charity for good will and word-of-mouth marketing.

33. Write a numerical post for the top YouTube channels or stars to follow.

34. Feature the best Super Bowl ads — what your agency thinks worked, and what didn’t.

35. Invite other agencies to guest post on your blog.

36. Highlight a popular marketing campaign of a big brand, and give your agency’s opinion on what worked, what didn’t, and how your agency might have executed it differently.

Curate Awesome Content
37. Create a list of the top Ted talks to watch — bonus points if they’re all about relevant marketing topics!

38. Create a list of the best marketing podcasts that businesses should subscribe to.

39. Compile a list of the best marketing blogs to subscribe to.

40. Write a post that features the top blogs in your clients’ niche.

41. Share the best memes floating around the marketing industry or the industry you serve.

Recommend Tools & Products
42. Give your readers a roundup of inexpensive tools they can use to outsource marketing tasks that take a ton of time.

43. Do a roundup of the best marketing tools.

44. Create a resource list of free places to get marketing advice, templates and tools.

45. Walk through popular marketing software using ScreenFlow (or another screencasting platform) to record your tutorial, then automatically publish it to YouTube or Vimeo in one click.

46. Feature an entire blog post around one tool with a very detailed explanation of its features (this alone could be 20+ additional blogs).

47. Review two different competing tools and why one is better than the other.

48. Feature a list of the favorite marketing vendors or partners that your agency uses.

49. Feature the best WordPress plugins that your agency uses and would recommend.

50. Review a popular marketing book.

51. Create a list of your agency’s favorite resources for free (and non-cheesy) stock photography.

52. Talk about how the processes and apps your agency uses make you more efficient in your marketing efforts.

53. Create a roundup of your favorite time-saving social media management tools.

54. Compile a list of IFTTT recipes that will be valuable for your clients.

Create a Resource
55. Build a marketing budget spreadsheet for your clients and prospects to download and walk through the process of managing a marketing budget.

56. Create a how-to guide for a challenging marketing tactic.

57. Build out “101 guides” for marketing, content marketing or social media platforms.

58. After creating all your 101s, then write the intermediate version of those guides, or “201s.”

59. Create a step-by-step framework for building a great marketing analytics report.

60. Explain 50 of the top marketing jargon terms and what they mean.

61. Write a post featuring a free marketing template, and include a link for visitors to download the template.

62. Write an ultimate guide to marketing from A to Z.

63. Create an infographic from the data your agency collected and feature it within a blog post.

64. Write a guide on how to setup a business website.

65. Create an instructional guide on integrating video into your clients’ marketing efforts — recommend tools and topics for video content.

5 TIPS FOR INDEPENDENT ARTISTS

1. Selling Out Is In

The stigma is gone. You are a brand. Be the advertising. Sell your work. Sell yourself. A few musts:

a) Design a beautiful logo.
b) Print business cards with your logo, contact details, website and work (I recommend two-sided Moo cards).
c) Develop an information-rich website; share the link constantly.
d) Be socially smart — you don't have to be everywhere (Blog, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), just be really good wherever you are.

2. Live By The Schedule

The corporate world revolves around the schedule — so should your art career. Be rigid:

Know your hours — if you paint from 10PM - 5AM? Fine, just be consistent.
Organize your day carefully: emails, social media, create, business outreach, create, emails.
Set a deadline for each piece — stick to it*.
Plan exhibitions far in advance; set milestones (work creation, promotion, work delivery, event coordination, show take-down, etc.).
Takeaway: A traditional career path does not exist for an artist — scheduling is a variable you can, and must control.

3. Everything Under Contract

Never sell a piece of art without a contract. Family? Contract. Friend? Contract. Here's why:

a) For any entrepreneur, getting paid is difficult — without a contract, it's impossible.
b) You must protect your reproduction and exhibition rights.
c) Documentation is required to substantiate, and build your market.
d) Collectors will only take you as seriously as you take yourself.
Takeaway: If someone refuses to sign a basic contract of sale, walk away... no matter how much you need the money.

4. Price Your Work Responsibly

Many artists get a whiff of success, channel Damien Hirst and triple their prices. This is wrong. You must be reasonable:

Discover what similar artists are selling for, compare careers and set a reasonable price.
Never sell a work of art for less than you've sold a similar work of art.
Supply and demand: prices go up as inventory goes down, not the other way around.
Have a plan for growth: if your market is stagnant, seek advice from a savvy entrepreneur.
Takeaway: It's more sustainable to sell five sculptures at $2000, than to sell one at $5000.

Bonus: A volume of pricing information exists online — do your research.

5. Build Your Market

When you string together a series of sales — you have built a market. For this market to stabilize and grow, you must:

a) Document all sales and transactions.
b) Establish pricing integrity.
c) Communicate with your collectors frequently — keeping them apprised of your successes.
d) Plan your future pricing, always asking, "Is this increase sustainable?"