content marketing

6 Indispensable Factors For Attractive And Strong Content Marketing In 2017

August 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

This is a guest contribution from Junaid Ali Qureshi

As digital marketing and new social media platforms take over the internet, the need for establishing a strong and attractive content marketing arises. The content posted by a business brand offers an insight of the brand to the audience. It conveys the personal message of the brand and gives away information regarding the latest products and services.

If your content marketing is attractive and strong, it means it is able to direct a large number of people to the online brand stores. It also helps in increasing the sales of your product. The effectiveness and success rate of the content marketing shows how important it is for a business to succeed. Thus, to make your content marketing strategy strong, here are few factors that you need to keep in mind.

#1: Increased dependence on visual content

Image source: http://www.jeffbullas.com

Since the content plays such an important role in increasing the return on investment of a brand, it is necessary that you consider the type of content that is achieving great success in the recent times. In this regard, the social media company Dubai managed to share its statistics with us. They suggest that short videos are taking over the written content marketing strategy.

Visual content has become a necessity and every content marketer must consider this fact and give it its due importance. After inquiring more from the media company, we came to know that the infographics, high-quality images, videos, comics, graphics and slideshows are the types of visual content that are doing well on the internet. As far as the videos are concerned, here are few tips that you need to consider to generate unique videos:

Invest in interactive and informative videos
Make high-quality videos with good audio and understanding
Use latest tricks like 360-degree view and live streaming videos
Explain what you are doing in the videos.
Give a view of the behind the stage scenes to the viewers
Make sure the video target the right audience

#2: Is your content interactive?

Image source: https://www.slideshare.net/

When we double check the content, we need to make sure that the content showcase an interactive platform. Including interactive stages in the content has now become an essential factor of content marketing.

The consumers now like to play a major part in the industry by contributing their opinions and sharing their ideas. Presently, the interactive content is used less but it is expected to become dominant soon. As this style of content is not common yet, it gives you the edge of doing something different and unique.

Make use of this opportunity, make your content interactive and engage as many people as you can. Moreover, also ensure the looming presence of your interactive content. Whether it is a quiz, an image or a contest which engage the audience, it must be easily visible to the viewers. The viewer/ potential customer-to-be, by all means, must be able to clearly view and understand your content.

#3: Quality of the existing and new content

Image source: https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/

Whatever you do, compromising the quality of the content is out of the question. A poorly written content leads a business to nowhere. It fails to attract the traffic flow and reflects a bad impression of the brand on the audience. This is why, while making your content strategy, you need to ensure that the content that you post is high-quality content.

You need to use a unique style, whether it is a story telling style or a simple documentation style, the content must be great. It must engage the viewers so that the content is able to generate leads. This leads to increase in the sales and the return on investment.

Thus, make sure your content is grammar mistake and spelling-error free. It must be readable, easy to understand and well-written. The new content creation and blogging have become an essential part of inbound marketing as well. Presently, according to HubSpot research, 53% of the marketers consider content creation their top priority in inbound marketing. (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/)

Another thing that you can do is repurpose your present content as well. The content curation and syndication regulations allow you to republish the interesting content that brings benefits to the business. Producing new, original, evergreen and attractive content is outstanding but if you are facing problem in doing so, why not repurpose the already present content for a while?

#4: Promotion of the content to the right audience

Image source: http://bootcampdigital.com

The next factor that largely affects the strength of a content marketing strategy is the targeted promotion of the content. Generating high-quality and authentic content is not enough. The marketers need to make sure that it is directed to the right audience as well.

You can pick the right audience by collecting data on the geographic, demographics and on the behavior of the audience. And once you have collected the data, find out the most common issue and the problem that are prevailing among the audience. This data is sufficient to find out about the type of audience you are dealing with. You can then tally the feature of your product that benefits them the most and market accordingly.

Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute stated that there has been a shift between the content creation and promotion. Five years ago, 80% of efforts were focused on creation and 20% were focused on the promotion. But with the passage of time, and as the internet has become dense with content, the percentages flip-flopped.

This means that the present year and those that are yet to come are all going to be about promotion of the content. And every content marketer must look forward to new ideas to do so.

#5: Influencer Marketing

Image source: http://visual.ly

An influencer marketer is a person who is popular in different social circles and has a list of fans and followers. This individual can help a lot in content marketing. As people like to accept what the third-party recommends, using influencer marketing techniques will greatly enhance the business advertisement.

Data collected from different agencies that offer social media services Dubai shows that social media platforms are presently flooding with influencer marketers. This marketing trend is among the latest ones but it must be considered by the content marketers if they will to succeed in the competition.

Elephantation, a renowned digital marketing company, considers influencer marketing an essential factor and today they are succeeding at a great pace.

Do you want to slip some great tips regarding running the influencer marketing campaign down your sleeves? Here is your chance to do so:

Build good relations with the influencer so that you know he is on your side. This helps in ensuring the good quality of the content
The content must have an engaging and interactive story
Don’t forget to add a call to action in between
Make sure you are achieving your goals through the content
Do show empathy to the influencer’s schedule

Follow these tips and you’ll do great with the influencer marketing strategy.

#6: Consistency in delivering the content

Image source: http://blogpros.com

The stats from content marketing institute suggest that 85% of the top performers deliver content consistently. But it is because of the consistency in the job that the respective brand is able to make its position in the global market. The audience reviews one article and soon afterward they forget it.

Consistency in posting content, whether written or visual, keeps the brand in front of their eyes until they actually know it by name, product variety, and quality. Thus, on whichever platform you are posting your content, make sure you do it regularly.

Now, when we say regularly, how often should you post content on the website or the social media platforms? Well, the content posting schedule depends on the marketing team of the brand. But if you ask us, if you are running an active marketing strategy and your brand is a new one, you should post new content weekly. If in case you have a popular business brand at hand, monthly content posting would do.

Also, don’t forget to take feedback from your viewers. This helps in finding out whether your content is good enough and doing its respected job of attracting the viewers or not. You can also find this by conducting an analytic program. It gives you the data regarding the performance of your website/ social media and how well the content is doing there.

Taking these 6 factors into account for a successful content marketing strategy is enough. Even a startup can succeed by making sure they have focused on these factors. The content marketing institute shares the base points of a good content marketing strategy. It includes having one content type, one main platform, consistent delivery and a long period of time to make sure it flourishes. So make sure you do everything in your power to make your strategy succeed and give it enough time to flourish.

About The Author:

Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and others.

How To Optimize The Back-End Of Your Book

August 1, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

books

When most people think about a book as an asset, they think of sales, authority, and connections. If you don’t think of your book as a gigantic sales letter, then you are leaving a lot of revenue on the table.

Let me explain.

A reader who completes your entire book is a very warm lead for other products and services that you offer. It would be a shame to not provide several calls-to-action at the back-end of your book.

It’s acceptable to provide CTAs at the back of your book because they are optional and don’t add to the main content within your book. People will only decide to learn more about your offers at the back-end if they are interested and really enjoyed the book.

What Could You Offer At The Back-End?

Before we proceed, it’s very important to decipher what a back-end is NOT. A back-end offer isn’t your landing page where you ask for an email address.

You can provide a link to your landing page at the beginning of your book to capitalize on Amazon’s book previewer option.

This option will result in more customers, but more importantly, non-customers (which you can convert later) to subscribe to your email list.

Here are a few products/services that would make a great addition to the back-end of your book.

Coaching: You’ve shared a lot of great advice in your book, but some of your readers need a nudge in order to take action. That’s what you’ll offer with coaching.

Training Course: A frequently updated, more detailed analysis of the ideas in your book and the ability for readers to ask you questions.

Mastermind: You can gather a few readers together who help and keep each other accountable with your occasional input. Masterminds result in less revenue than coaching but you can mastermind several people at once, while coaching involves a 1-to-1 relationship.

Done-For-You Service: Your reader loves the value you provided but would prefer that you do all of the work. This is where a done-for-you service comes in. When you start out, you’ll have to do the work on your own, but as you grow, you’ll hire more freelancers to do most of the work for you. Charging a premium will ensure that you continue to make profits and accept clients even with increasing freelancer costs.

Your Other Books: As your readers just finished reading your book, chances are they’ll be interested in more of your books. This will generate the least revenue but also be the easiest source of revenue. Including the same back-end offers in these books will make your readers more aware of them and turn them into customers. This is more of a long-term strategy for acquiring high paying customers

Provide Memorable Links

If a reader is interested in one of your back-end offers but doesn’t remember how to access it, you’ll lose out on a potentially lucrative sale. It’s true that a reader can simply go back to the book, but since most readers never get past the first chapter, imagine how few readers decide to crack open the book a second time.

This is why you should make the links as memorable as possible. For instance, you can use yoursite.com/mastermind to lead people to the mastermind offer. This is an easy URL to remember compared to yoursite.com/2017-book-mastermind-for-success. There’s a big difference.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the reader is willing to crack open the book for a second time. The main problem is that some readers will put it off as it’s a seemingly easy activity that rarely gets put on the schedule. The bigger the time gap, the more likely readers are to forget about their desire for your product or service…or go with someone else instead.

Make it as easy as possible for someone to buy something from you.

Create A Facebook Group

Some of your readers will go through your back-end offers and decide that none of them apply…for now.

But if you continue to build a relationship, over time you can get the same people to become your customers. So how do you build the relationship?

Start off with the essentials like consistently providing content and engaging with your audience, and then move to something slightly more advanced like a Facebook Group.

Create the Facebook Group and (this is important) include it in the same place you make the back-end offers. This way, if people aren’t immediately convinced, they can opt to join your Facebook Group (it’s free so they might as well join) and become part of your community.

As these readers continue to see you more often, they’ll think about your back-end offers more and more. This is how you turn a no into a maybe and then a yes.

Sprinkle Offers Throughout Your Book

While you showcase your offers at the back of your book, you can also sprinkle them throughout your book. Now it’s time to re-visualize your book as a gigantic sales letter. When appropriate, you can talk about success stories and experiences directly related to your product.

In a book about productivity, for example, I might talk about the level of productivity I needed to create one of my productivity courses. Choosing this topic gives me the ability to describe some of the benefits of the course without being salesy.

I can also share stories of people who went through the course and transformed their productivity – I can share what they did and, specifically, how the course helped.

Finally, you can start every chapter with a quote. In my Content Marketing Book (coming out in late October or early November), I began each chapter with evergreen quotes from my virtual summit.

I’m also leading off with quotes from my Content Marketing Plaza course to drive more attention to that. Then I’ll feature CMSS, The Plaza, and a few other products at the back-end of my book.

In Conclusion

Writing a book is exciting. However, if you miss out on including back-end offers, you will miss out on thousands of dollars (or even more). Most of the people who read your book from start to finish will adore your knowledge and will want more.

That’s where your back-end offers come in, and at the very minimum, these readers will join your Facebook Group. Make sure the URLs are easy to remember so your readers have an easy time taking action on your back-end offers.

When sharing the URLs, consider that some can get outdated. For instance, contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com currently leads people to the summit that took place a few months ago.

In 2018, that same URL will lead people to the next CMSS.

I want to consistently lead readers to the 2017 version which is why I’ll incorporate contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com/2017 as the link. I want to lead readers to the 2017 version because that’s the one I currently have, and the book is based on the summit.

What are your thoughts about including back-end offers in your books? Have any tips for us? Do you have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

July 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

No one questions the importance of content for a content brand. Without content, content brands wouldn’t exist. The critical question surrounding content revolves around how much time we should spend on content creation versus content marketing.

As the theory goes, every minute you spend creating content you’ll lose on content marketing. But what if I told you that theory was completely wrong?

You can engage in content creation and content marketing all within the same minute. No, that doesn’t mean allocating 30 seconds for each task. Certain tasks fulfill both the creation and marketing components of successful content brands.

This is what Andy Crestodina referred to as the ‘gray area’ during my Content Marketing Success Summit. Andy explained that certain tasks fit both the creation and marketing parameters, tasks that we tend to separate as if they were oil and vinegar.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the gray area so your can create and market your content at a much faster pace.

Content Creation Gives You Marketing Ammo

You can’t market content unless you create it. But you can take the same piece of content and republish it on multiple platforms. It’s commonplace to see top content creators republishing their blog posts on LinkedIn, Medium, and elsewhere.

Each time someone in your preexisting audience shares your content – regardless of where they share it – it will lead to more people viewing that content.

If your blog posts, LinkedIn posts, and Medium posts each get 500 daily visitors, then you have a total of 1,500 visitors. And it only takes 5-10 minutes to republish already written blog posts on those platforms to see a big traffic increase.

As an added bonus, republishing your content on LinkedIn and Medium creates viral potential as more people engage with your content. This will put you content in front of a larger audience that you wouldn’t have reached on your own.

And when you publish on LinkedIn and Medium, you should include calls-to-action to drive people back to your blog.

At the start of one of these posts, use the anchor text, “This post was first published on [name of your blog].”

And at the end of your post, lead people to a relevant landing page (based on the topic of the content the visitor just read) that asks for the visitor’s email address.

You can also link to older blog posts throughout these posts to lead people back to your existing blog content. Just make sure these older blog posts are relevant to the topic your visitors are currently reading.

This model supports the idea of creating as much content as possible, assuming you have at least a decent sized audience on LinkedIn and Medium.

Influencer Outreach

Andy went into great detail about influencer outreach during our interview.

Basically, you contact several influencers and ask them for their opinions, recommendations, or a quote. This is content creation and marketing at its finest because you get thousands of words of content and influencers who will be happy to promote the post since they’re featured in it.

I leveraged this tactic for my blogging tools post. I asked dozens of influencers for their recommendations and 22 influencers came through. The post itself surpassed 4,000 words (and I added around 400 words at most).

Talk about an unfair advantage!

Other people basically wrote my content for me, and then more people marketed my content for me.

Granted, I did have to reach out to many people and copy and paste their content into the blog post. But many connections, combined with the power of HARO, made the mission easy to accomplish.

You don’t have to turn your entire post into other people’s opinions, quotes, and recommendations. But you can incorporate information from at least three influencers into your content.

Contact each influencer and see if they can provide 100-500 words. I typically ask for 100-250 words (unless it’s just a quote) because I want to make it as easy as possible for an influencer to provide me with free content (and share it with his or her audience).

If you can’t get the influencers to participate, you can hunt for quotes by reading their blog posts, watching their videos, listening to their podcasts, or reading interviews. You can then tell the influencer you mentioned him/her in your latest blog post and you may get a share, or at the very least some appreciation.

This strategy also allows you to build relationships with influencers so that in the future they might agree to be guests on your podcast, speakers at a virtual summit, etc.

For these relationships to work, you must get off the WIIFM Station (what’s in it for me). Only connect with influencers if you want to create a win-win atmosphere. My two favorite ways to build healthy relationships with influencers involve blog content and podcasts.

Incorporate Internal And External Links

Both internal and external links are important for SEO. Internal links lead people to your older blog posts. These links help keep people on your site longer as well as decrease your bounce rates, two metrics that are critical to your blog’s search ranking.

Internal links also drive LinkedIn and Medium readers directly to your blog, which allows you to keep these readers’ attention longer.

You can also connect certain blog posts together into a series. This requires readers to read all the posts in the series to get a complete overview of what you’re trying to achieve with your content.

External links to authority sites within your niche will allow you to piggyback on these sites’ search engine rankings. Search engines will recognize that you link to authority content. And the algorithms will assign more authority to your own site.

External linking is a long-term game. But you can immediately see the impact of internal links. And, if continued, they result in even sweeter results over the long-term.

In Conclusion

Content creation and marketing are both critical to the success of a content brand. While both involve a significant time investment, you can tap into the gray area of creation and marketing and feed two birds with one scone.

This time-effective route, combined with delegation, will make it much easier for you to grow and sustain your content brand.

What are your thoughts about the gray area? Do took have any other content creation and marketing hacks for us? Want to ask a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Blogging Habits That Will Turn You Into A Full-Time Blogger

April 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

blogging

The blogging habits we use to guide us play a significant role in our content marketing efforts.

The most successful bloggers live by a series of habits that guide them through the world of blogging. Blog traffic comes easy to these individuals who enjoy hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors.

As part of my New Year’s resolution to surpass 100,000 monthly visitors, I decided to analyze these successful bloggers to see what makes them tick. How do they surpass 100,000 monthly visitors, and how can I achieve the same results?

With this in mind, I’ve written a blog post that details the habits successful bloggers use to attain their goals. There are five blogging habits you should develop if you want to become a full-time blogger.

#1: Write At Least 1,000 Words Per Day

No one said blogging would be easy. This first habit is perhaps the most important because you can’t promote content until you’ve created it.

Not only does writing content matter, but writing lengthy content matters, too. Most blog posts featured on the first page of Google search results exceed 2,000 words.

Writing at least 1,000 words a day will give you a total of 7,000 words each week that you can dedicate to your blog. If you write 2,000-word blog posts, you’ll have at least three blog posts every week.

However, some bloggers write even lengthier content more frequently and consistently. That’s why 1,000 words per day is the absolute minimum. But if you manage to write over 1,000 words, even better.

Writing 1,000 words per day requires time, and time is more scarce than ever. So how is it possible to accomplish this goal every single day?

The best way to free up your time is by outsourcing work to freelancers. If it weren’t for outsourcing, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish many other important tasks for my business.

I simply wouldn’t be able to write lengthy blog posts, produce one YouTube video every day, create training courses, or write books. Many of my ventures would be sidelined if I tried to do all of the work by myself. And I’m always looking for more ways to outsource my business.

The more you outsource, the more time you create for yourself.

With that said, you also need to use your own time productively. Many distractions will try to keep you from writing 1,000 words each day, but with practice, you can overcome them.

Most distractions are a result of bad habits. The best way to eliminate these bad habits is to replace them with better habits such as writing more content for your blog and reading books during your breaks.

Plus, writing 1,000 words a day will make you a better writer. Value will begin to come naturally. The challenge is to write valuable content even when you’re pressed for time.

#2: Conduct Research For Every Piece You Write

For every blog post you publish, you should conduct a massive amount of research. In the past, I would write lengthy blog posts without doing research, and then wonder why I wasn’t getting any long-term traffic.

But ever since I’ve added research to my content marketing efforts, my traffic has gone up. Many of the top bloggers I analyzed conduct hours of content research just to write one great blog post. And it makes sense because linking to great content benefits both you and your readers.

Your readers are getting higher quality content (and are more likely to share it), and you get more search engine traffic. Talk about a win-win. And there are more benefits to linking out than just that: Here’s the complete list from SEO Moz.

Each time you write a blog post, expand upon it by linking to other relevant blog posts found that help strengthen your content. Adding these links helps your blog grow, regardless of whether the links lead to your own content (internal links) or to someone else’s content (external links).

The benefit of internal linking is that people will spend more time on your blog, lowering your bounce rate (likelihood of someone leaving after viewing one page/post on your blog). And a lower bounce rate will help your SEO efforts.

External links to high-authority sites let search engines know that your blog also has authority. Since you’re promoting quality content, search engines think your content must also contain value, pushing it higher up the search engine rankings.

Content research takes a significant amount of time, but you’ll end up with a more valuable blog post. Readers will engage with it for longer periods of time and you’ll get more traffic.

I like to Google my way to the articles that I link to in my blog posts. And sometimes I use other tools for my content research.

Conducting content research becomes much easier as you spend more time writing content and engaging with people in your niche.

#3: Ask Questions To Expand Your Content

Have you ever finished a blog post only to realize that it’s too short for search engines? I have, several times, but not anymore. Before I reveal what I did differently, I’ll tell you what I was doing wrong.

For a blog post like this, I would have come up with the title and jotted down the five tactics I intended to mention within the post. While this approach made it easy to crank out content, I’d often get stuck at a little over 1,000 words. Sometimes I’d fall short at 800-900 words.

Now that never happens. Why? Because I ask myself questions that naturally make my content longer. Socratic questioning (asking yourself questions) is a form of conversation that has been used for thousands of years, and it still works today.

For all of the tactics I discuss in this blog post, I asked myself three questions. When asking these questions, I saw myself as a reader who wanted to learn as much as possible from this blog post.

What are three things people want to know about this particular tip? What would they ask?

By anticipating these questions in advance, I no longer have to worry about word count. Since I focus less on increasing word count, I have more time to focus on providing a better experience.

Here’s an example of an outline I did for the 4th habit I mention in this blog post:

#4: Follow The 80/20 Rule

•What is it?

•How do I market myself most effectively?

•How do I make it easy?

Keep this outline in mind when we get to the 80/20 rule.

Asking three questions definitely adds time to my outline process, but only by about 3-5 minutes, and it’s worth it when you consider my final draft.

So I may spend 5-10 minutes expanding upon my outline with thoughtful questions, depending on how long the outline is to begin with. But, in every case, it never takes an entire day.

I just write down the first three questions that come to mind. If I struggle to think of a third question, I leave it alone and address the next portion of my outline. I don’t want to sit around and ponder because I know I’ve got a behemoth of a blog post ahead of me.

The cool thing about using Socratic questioning is that you turn each of your tactics (or in this case, habits) into a mini blog post. You’ll want to write a blog post that contains a series of mini blog posts all wrapped up into one because that’s how you provide massive value that ranks well with search engines.

Creating an outline like this is easy. Writing the content is simple, albeit time consuming. But the more time you open for yourself, the more you serious you are about blogging.

#4: Follow The 80/20 Rule — 80% marketing, 20% content creation

The 80/20 rule is also known as Pareto’s Principle. With this principle, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

This 80/20 rule for blogging slightly different. It asks that you spend 80% of your time marketing your content and only 20% of your time actually creating content.

Thus, if it takes you an hour to write a blog post, you should spend four more hours marketing it. And since the Socratic questioning technique mentioned above increases your writing time, your marketing time will also increase.

Of course, you can skip the marketing all together, but you won’t get very far with your blog. There’s simply too much content, and competition, on the web. You’re not just creating content. You’re creating a content brand.

And just like any other business, your brand needs effective marketing to become a surefire winner. Successful bloggers write a bunch of epic blog posts, but their marketing efforts are why we end up reading them.

Most of the efforts you’ll make as a successful content marketer involve connecting with other bloggers. In an interview, Neil Patel explained that, when he was getting started, he would contact anywhere from 400-500 people about his new blog post.

He asked each person to share his latest blog post. Neil found these people using BuzzSumo, his go-to content marketing tool (he refers to it as God’s Gift To Marketers).

BuzzSumo lets you see everyone who has shared popular blog posts in your niche. You can then contact these people and let them know about your own blog post.

Of course, you can try to hunt down these people on social media, but it’s much more time consuming. The best way to do it for free is to use a social network’s search engine and search a blog post’s title.

Here’s what it would look like on Twitter if, for example, you wanted to search for my guest post 5 Ways To Flood Your Blog With Traffic Using Pinterest (currently my most successful guest post).

However, this strategy takes FOREVER and BuzzSumo does the same thing much faster. If you can fit $99/mo into your budget, BuzzSumo is a worthwhile investment for your content marketing efforts.

Regardless of which option you use, contacting hundreds of people involves a lot of work on your part. The best thing you can do to cut down your work time is to create a rubric message.

Rather than re-write the same email over and over, you can simply copy and paste the body of the email and change a few things to personalize it (addressing each person by his or her first name, for example).

#5: Voraciously Read Other Blogs

Successful bloggers constantly read other people’s blogs. If you look at any of their blog posts, you can tell they’ve read several other blog posts on the subject before finishing their own.

You wouldn’t be shocked to hear that authors read several books before writing their own. So it should come as no surprise that bloggers read several blog posts before writing their posts.

Sometimes a blogger will write two blog posts back to back, but even then, intense research goes into each one. The research is based on blog posts that were read in advance.

However, successful bloggers don’t just read any blog on the web. They read blogs related to their niche. They want to gather as much insight as possible. But they also want to see what’s working for audiences in their niche.

Which pull-words result in more engagement? How is this blogger getting more shares? How is the blogger making revenue? Successful bloggers ask themselves all of these questions, and they find the answers by conducting research.

During this exploration, more content ideas emerge. And it’s easier to learn something when you actively write about what you are learning. By repeatedly writing content about subjects they want to master, bloggers eventually become experts in their field.

Try to read other people’s content for at least 30 minutes every day. The great thing about blogs is that they’re available online as compared to books (unless you read eBooks, but I prefer paperbacks).

If you have your smartphone with you, you can easily search for blog posts anytime you’re waiting for something to happen. Read a blog post while you’re waiting for a performance to begin. If you are waiting for an Uber driver, read a blog post until he shows up.

As you read, take notes on what you learn and write down content ideas as you go. That way, you’ll be armed with more knowledge that you can refer to within your next blog post.

In Conclusion

The most successful bloggers spend hours upon hours in a given day on their blogs. They treat their blogs like a full-time brand because that’s exactly what they are.

You may only be able to commit to your blog part-time, but you can still live by these blogging habits. A blog post like this is a lot to soak up in one sitting. However, you can always start small and build upon these success habits.

Habits by nature are obtained through gradual development. Out of every success tactic I came across during my analysis, contacting 400-500 people for each of my blog posts seemed the most daunting.

Why does it have to be 400-500? Why not start with 10? You can then inch your way towards 20 people, 30, 40, and gradually make your way to the 400-500 threshold.

Neil no longer contacts 400-500 people every time he writes a new blog post. Why? Because he doesn’t have to. But when he was just getting started, he made those contacts in order to build momentum.

All of these habits will become easier over time and yield greater results as you exert more effort towards each.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

Which of these habits do you think is most important? Do you have a 6th habit for us?

Have a question for me? Leave a comment now. I read them all!

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, please be sure to pass it on.

[Tweet “5 #Blogging Habits That Will Turn You Into A Full-Time Blogger.”]

If you’re new here, join my mailing list using the form below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

7 Secrets To Find Your Target Audience

March 25, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Every marketer’s mission is to find, and understand, their target audience. Once you find your audience, you’ll come in contact with people who warmly receive your message.

My target audience doesn’t consist of music lovers. You may love music, but you’re probably here to learn about digital marketing and productivity. If you want to learn how to play the guitar, this blog isn’t for you.

We all know the importance of a target audience, but how do you find YOUR target audience? That’s what this blog post is all about!

#1: Identify Your Target Audience

If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, you’ll struggle to find your target audience. Before you do any research or write any new content, you first need to understand exactly who you are trying to reach.

Instead of thinking of your target audience as a large group of faceless people, think about one person who would be interested in hearing your message. Is this person a guy, a gal, or does it matter? My brand is for guys and gals alike, but other brands like WBENC cater more to women.

When I began to identify my target audience, I asked myself the following questions:

What are their goals?
What problems do they have?
Where do they work?
What is their age and occupation?
Where do they hang out on- and offline?
Who are their friends?
What do they do for fun?
How do they think and feel?
What leg of the journey are they in right now (beginner, intermediate, or advanced)?

Try to answer these questions as specifically as you can, you should create customer personas for each use case, or user type, relevant to your product or service.

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, segment according to your buyer personas to tailor your messaging according to what you know about each.

Here are some practical methods for gathering that information:

Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?

You can also use the forms on your website to capture important persona information. For example, if your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms. You could also gather information on what forms of social media your leads use by asking a question about social media accounts.

In sum, for each persona you should identify background, demographics, identifiers such as demeanor and communication methods, goals, challenges (and how you meet them), plus real quotes and common objections.

Once you identify your buyer personas, you should try to provide free value that matches the needs and preferences of each. For example, one individual within my audience suggested that I write a blog post about finding your target audience.

This individual certainly isn’t the only person who wants to find and grow a target audience, but he or she likely represents others in my audience who have similar questions. I wrote this blog post for that individual, but by so doing so, I will reach other members of my audience at the same time.

In the beginning, you’ll do an intense amount of investigative work to understand your target audience. But once they start embracing your content, your audience will begin to grow by default.

#2: Grow A Targeted Social Media Audience

Social media is a free tool that helps content creators grow a target audience. Most social networks follow the same path to growth.

Find an influencer in your niche
Follow that person’s newest followers
Watch your own follower counts grow

If you use this tactic, day after day, you could end up with results like this:

target audience

Growing my Twitter account in this way has resulted in 100,000+ people visiting my blog every year from Twitter alone. The additional social media traffic also has a significant impact on my SEO traffic.

However, simply following others doesn’t guarantee people will follow you back. To earn a follow, you must be worthy of that follow. More importantly, you’ll never be worthy of everyone’s follow. Rather, you want to position yourself in such a way that you attract followers who are part of your target audience.

You can do this by posting valuable content to your social networks. Valuable content is defined as content that helps specific people. With this definition, each person has a different view of what value means. Fashion articles don’t provide much value to me, because I’m not very interested in fashion.

On the other hand, a productivity book would grab my attention and provide me with an immense amount of value (as long as it’s a great book). Not everyone will like your content, and that’s okay. Stay focused on your target audience and the rewards will come.

This is how you find your target audience on social media: find people of interest and make it as easy as possible for them to find you, follow you, and consume your content.

Once you start growing your target audience, you’ll want them to perform certain actions. You may want your social media followers to join your email list, for example.

Some people try to push their social media followers through their sales funnel, directly from the networks themselves, but this tactic almost always results in failure.

You shouldn’t promote your products directly on social media, at least not very often. However, social media is a brilliant indirect sales machine.

Promote your call-to-actions daily to increase sign-ups. For my Twitter strategy, I tweet one of my landing pages every hour. I even have a pinned tweet of my landing page that generates powerful social proof for my offer.

target audience

If you want your audience to perform a certain action, put that call-to-action in front of your target audience as much as possible without being annoying. You may be surprised to hear that tweeting your landing page every hour isn’t annoying if you’re generally tweeting about other things every 10 minutes.

But on Facebook, and most other social networks, you shouldn’t promote your landing page at that frequency. The best way to determine the ideal frequency for any social network is to experiment. I experimented with my tweeting frequency 10 different times before I decided on my current plan of action.

As you grow your social media audience, it will take additional time to engage in consistent interaction and to provide even more high-value content. At this stage, you may want to outsource certain tasks to lighten your social media, and overall, workload.

Outsourcing helps keep these various tasks from taking over your work day. You’ll have more time to explore new opportunities and build upon the opportunities you’re currently pursuing.

When outsourcing, just make sure you don’t over reach. The ideal approach is to grow your freelancer army gradually.

#3: Answer Questions On Quora

Quora is perhaps one of the most underrated sources of blog traffic. Not only will you increase your blog traffic, you’ll also find your target audience in a powerful way — through their questions.

Quora is a social networking site that has 160,000 monthly users who ask questions and submit answers. Back in 2015, Quora’s CEO, Adam D’Angelo had this to say about Quora’s traffic.

quora ceo post

Wouldn’t you want a slice of that pie… especially if it helps you find your target audience?

I make it a goal to answer at least three questions on Quora every day. That way, my content gets seen by more people. The case study I mentioned earlier does a good job at depicting how Quora can lead people in your target audience to your blog.

While I currently don’t get enough results worthy of a case study, it’s great to know that a good number of people are viewing my answers.

target audience

I posted most of these answers several weeks ago. Here are the initial spikes I got when the answers were recently published:

target audience

As you can see, answering questions won’t lead to immediate gratification from your stats. But if you continue answering questions, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people will eventually view your answers on a daily basis.

Plus, they make for great starting points for future blog posts.

Getting this many views on Quora requires that you consistently answer questions from your target audience. I personally prefer to answer as many questions as possible, regardless of popularity.

Most questions on Quora have the potential to spread like wildfire. A good rule of thumb is to answer questions that have under 10 responses and little more than 10 followers. These questions have more potential to spread, and if you answer first, you’re in a position to reap most of the traffic.

On Quora, the first few answers tend get more views and traction than those that follow. But sometimes you can piggyback off a popular question with hundreds of answers and still get a lot of views.

In the beginning, I advise that you answer at least three questions each day and don’t focus on getting more views. Once you get comfortable with answering questions, then get serious about increasing your views.

If you answer a lot of questions related to a particular topic, you can set up notifications. With a preset notification, you’ll receive emails with new questions related to the topic. This way, you are often one of the first people to answer the question.

Answering questions first puts you in a position to get more views and earn more respect from the person who asked the question, and everyone else who reads your answer.

#4: Comment On Blogs In Your Niche

Some people believe that commenting on blogs in your niche to increase traffic is a futile approach. If you’re one of those people, then marketing guru Neil Patel disagrees with you. Commenting on blogs in your niche (and your guest posts) still matters. The reason is simple:

That’s where you find your target audience.

Your target audience doesn’t only read your blog. They read other people’s blogs, too. If my visitors read a post on Jeff Bullas’ Blog, and see my comment at the bottom, they are instantly reminded of another blog they can visit.

At the same time, if I get the original blogger’s attention, I am scoring points for my influencer marketing efforts. It’s easy to get an influencer’s attention simply by leaving a comment on his or her blog. For instance, if you leave a comment on this post, I will certainly respond.

When you leave a comment on someone else’s blog, make sure it provides value. To provide value in a comment, you can either add some relevant insights or ask a great follow-up question, which indicates that you took the time to read the entire post.

Your comment will attract attention from incoming visitors and possibly garner a response from the person who wrote the blog post. However, don’t use comments to promote your own content.

Linking to your blog or landing page within the comment itself is a big no-no. But you often get the chance to include a link to your website and/or landing page before you even begin typing your comment.

My advice for commenting on other blogs is to avoid commenting simply for the sake of leaving a comment. When you reach the end of a blog post, leave a comment only if you can add value to the conversation. It only takes 30-45 seconds and, more often than not, will result in more exposure.

#5: Engage In Twitter Chats Related To Your Niche

A great way to find your target audience is by engaging in Twitter chats related to your niche. Twitter chats usually take Twitter by storm and sometimes end up as trending topics… as long as there’s not a football game at the same time.

While Twitter chats are rare finds, you’ll often come across recurring Twitter chats that take place every week or month. Every time these Twitter chats occur, engage with the people who use the dedicated hashtag, and follow them. You’re bound to get many follow backs from people interested in your niche.

Right now, Tweet Reports is the best tool for finding Twitter chats. Simply subscribe to various bloggers and brands within your niche and pay attention to when they’re conducting Twitter chats.

#6: Pay Attention To Where You Spend Your Time

When you begin the journey to find your target audience, always remember that you are also part of the audience you seek. My target audience consists of people conscious of their productivity and eager to get better digital marketing results.

I’m also a part of that audience. I read blog posts related to digital marketing and have bought more productivity books than I can count. I’m not the only person in my target audience reading those blog posts and buying those books. I can reach people in my target audience simply by leaving a trail of where I go and what I do.

That’s why I encourage you leave a comment on blog posts that you read from start to finish. People who read the entire post are more attentive. They often scroll and read comments. If you don’t spend enough time consuming the content within your niche, you are stunting your growth. Expand upon your knowledge so you can provide more valuable content and give your target audience more reasons to pay attention to your brand.

#7: Partner With Influencers In Your Niche

You’ll spend countless hours in the pursuit of identifying and finding your target audience. But there’s one method to turbocharge your results. This method is to partner with influencers in your niche. Here’s how it works:

Contact an influencer in your niche with a similar audience size as your own
Agree to promote one another’s content or landing page
As your email lists grow, new subscribers benefit both sides

You can make this process easier with an affiliate program that rewards people for getting people to subscribe to your email lists. And you can take this method to an entirely new level by hosting a virtual summit. Virtual summits can do wonders for email list growth and income.

In Conclusion

You must be willing to commit countless hours of your time to spread your message in order to reach the right people. The best way to find your target audience is to understand where they hang out online and build a presence there.

That’s why I have a big presence on several social media platforms. It’s the reason why I take the time to answer questions on Quora, and leave comments at the end of every blog post I read.

This series of actions, carried out over a long period of time, will most certainly result in a goldmine of traffic that helps you prosper.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What are your thoughts on finding a target audience? Did you find any of the insights in this post especially useful?

Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone else who may benefit from this post, please be sure to pass it on.

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And if you’re new here, join our mailing list! The form is below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

4 Ways To Use Social Media To Understand Your Customers

February 7, 2017 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

Have you ever bought something simply because someone you know recommended it? I’m sure you have. But while this behavior might seem trivial on the surface, underneath lies one of the greatest truths about social media marketing, and marketing in general.

We often rely on our friends to get product recommendations. After all, we know and trust our friends. More importantly, they know us. If you’re an avid reader, for example, your friends won’t likely recommend a good baseball glove. Rather, they’ll recommend a good book.

Having said that, one way to describe marketing is product recommendation. Even when we are trying to sell a product, we are, in essence, recommending it. Some messages are crafted better than others but, in the end, we don’t actually sell products. We recommend them. It’s the customer who takes action.

Part of making a great recommendation is to know your customers as well as you know your friends. It’s easy to recommend something to a lifelong friend. Imagine if it was just as easy to make recommendations for your potential customers. Now imagine if your potential customers responded the same way as your friends.

That’s possible, but only when you learn as much as you can about your customer. And social media can help you extract the information you need. Once you learn more about your customers through social media, you’ll get more sales and generate more revenue.

Let’s get started!

#1: See What Your Customers Share

You can learn A LOT about a person just by what they share on social media. For instance, I share blog posts about productivity, digital marketing, and blogging. Whether you believe I’m an expert on those subjects or not, you know right away that I care about those topics.

I’m interested in getting more traffic from my digital marketing efforts. I want to boost my productivity. And I want to write killer blog posts. And no matter how much I improve my skills, I’ll always want to do better.

Take a look at what your customers are sharing on social media. They share the products they like using, the articles and information they find interesting, and they often share how they feel about certain people and issues.

If a majority of my Twitter followers started sharing Pinterest-related articles, my next training course would be about Pinterest. See what I mean? When you know people already want something, offer them relevant solutions and your product recommendations will carry more weight.

#2: Read Their Bios

A bio can say a lot about a person. For instance, here’s my 160 character bio on Twitter:

Based on my tweets, you know that I care about social media marketing, blogging, and digital marketing (note: I don’t say that I’m passionate about them because people don’t always share what they’re passionate about, but they always share what they care about).

Looking at my bio, you also know I’m a runner, dog lover, and Red Sox fan. Do you offer a DVD workout routine that helps me cut 10 seconds off my mile within 30 days? If so, I’m all ears. And if you recommend something that will make my dog love me even more, you have my attention.

If you have some epic Red Sox memorabilia, I’m listening to you. I will not listen to anyone who offers Yankees memorabilia (unless it has something to do with Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera). Likewise, if you’re selling a cat bowl, you will lose my attention immediately.

Doing this type of homework lets you discover what to recommend, and what not to recommend, to your customers. Depending on what you offer, and the information you provide in your bio, you can offer something that appeals to multiple interests.

If you recommend a Red Sox dog costume, you’ve won my heart. Envisioning my dog in a Red Sox outfit satisfies my love for dogs and my desire to watch the Red Sox win another World Series (and then another one. That cycle of desire will continue forever).

#3: Look At Who Your Customers Follow

Almost every social network lets you to discover who your customers are following. From a marketing perspective, we aren’t concerned about every individual a customer follows. We are more concerned with patterns.

Are your customers following accounts that post inspirational quotes? Are they following social media influencers? Understanding these common patterns will allow you to identify which recommendations will resonate strongest with your customers.

Now I’m going to share a trick to ensure your audience will become more receptive to your recommendations. Let’s say I want an audience consisting of people who follow other social media influencers.

These people were interested in social media marketing before I discovered them. Following them, and getting them to follow me back, will result in more individuals who will see my recommendations and potentially take action.

#4: See How Your Audience Engage With Your Content

If you follow an influencer’s followers, you are more likely to grow an audience. Combine that with the above-mentioned tips and you’ll grow a targeted audience.

But even when you have a targeted audience, you won’t FULLY understand what they want. If your audience is interested in social media, for instance, you may not know which social network they use most. But there are two ways to figure this out:

Conduct a survey and ask your audience to fill it out (keep in mind this method works better with an email list).
Examine how your audience engages with your social media content.

A few years ago, I noticed that my Twitter and blogging-related content received the most retweets. That’s why my first training courses were about Twitter and blogging.

Then I saw increased engagement for my productivity and social media-related blog posts (social media in general, not specific networks).

Therefore, I created more training courses about productivity and social media. The more often you share content on social media, the more data you’ll have to play with. Having more data to play with always allows you to make more accurate conclusions.

In Conclusion

Speaking of conclusions, you’ve reached the near-end of this blog post. Understanding your customers allows you to provide products and services that your customers will buy before you even say a word.

So far, social media is the most revolutionary marketing tool of the 21st century. While we’ve learned many methods of social media marketing, we still have much to learn. The evolving trends in social media marketing will be very exciting.

Regardless of how marketing evolves, the emphasis will always revolve around knowing your customer. By knowing your customer like you know a friend, you can make recommendations that result in happy customers and more revenue that you can use to expand your business.

What are your thoughts on using social media to learn more about your customers? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.