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How To Play More Offense For Your Business

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business

The more offense you play for your business, the more successful you will become. All of the top entrepreneurs dedicate a portion of their time each day to play offense.

Playing offense does not mean writing the next blog post. It doesn’t mean engaging with your audience, creating videos, or doing anything else associated with being in your business.

Playing more offense involves you taking an aerial view of your entire business and asking yourself important questions. Is this working? What should I be focusing on? What small changes can I make that would yield dramatic results? How do I grow this?

This offense results in more directed action with a clearer path to victory. Instead of constantly creating content and marketing yourself, you now have more specific aims that you believe will create the most impact.

You may feel like you’re already on the right path, but taking 30 minutes to conduct that aerial view every day will open the door to old opportunities and platforms that can still lead to great results.

Write Down Everything That Constitutes Your Business

This is a one-time, time extensive task. You’ll occasionally go through this list as your business continues to grow. However, you need to take this step before you can truly play offense. Here are just some of the parts of my business:

  • Virtual Summits
  • Blog Posts
  • Guest Posts
  • Training Courses
  • Free Videos
  • Books
  • Public Speaking
  • Breakthrough Success Podcast
  • Coaching
  • Redistribution

Sometimes I focus so much of my time, attention, and energy on my virtual summits that I forget about other areas. When I took the aerial view, I rediscovered that I needed to pump out more content for my readers (plus, I LOVE writing content, and realized that I’d separated myself from my biggest passion for too long).

I also rediscovered my podcast outros need major updates. I didn’t see any traction from my previous outros because I mainly promoted my Udemy courses, but now I’m promoting more stuff on my site and a few tools which I use and am an affiliate for.

I also rediscovered that I could get more exposure by writing more guest posts and getting interviewed on more podcasts.

Discovering and doing are two different things, and if your schedule is constantly filled with in-business work, you never find the time to take that aerial view and ask yourself, “What should I really be doing?”

Then you need to rediscover and start implementing instead of letting these important tasks continue to remain unattended.

Writing down all of this information is so important because with tens of thousands of thoughts running through out minds every day, it’s easy to forget.

Start Delegating More Of Your Tasks

Delegating your tasks to others will open up hours of extra time. My freelancers are critical to my success because they subtract various tasks from my day. Over the long-term, I can easily see having a team of hundreds of freelancers, but I’m not there yet.

Some people may be interested in delegation but haven’t started yet. If that’s you, my friend Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation has some great advice for you.

The two main ingredients you need to get started delegating are a log of where you’re spending your time and a well-documented process.

The time log will tell you where the biggest opportunities for outsourcing lie. What’s sucking up the most of your day? Is that something you HAVE to do, or could someone else reasonably handle it with a little training?

Next, you’ll want to have clear process documentation and instructions. This is like your recipe for completing the task, and the more detailed the better. Don’t leave anything to chance here, even though you probably take for granted some of the steps, especially if you’ve been doing the task yourself for any length of time.

How I normally create the process documentation is I take a screen capture video of myself doing the job and talking through the steps. Then I write out the steps in a Google Doc so I can share both a visual and written version with my assistant.

Delegating more of your tasks will also give you more time to play offense. Take some time to think about some of the important parts of your business, how you can take action, and then just do it.

Checking on your freelancers is part of playing offense because you want to make sure they have work, and more importantly, that your freelancers are effectively getting their jobs done. You should have more 10-15 minute meetings fill up your schedule to ensure that you and your freelancers are both on the same page. These meetings do take up some time, but they work like a charm for keeping everyone on track.

In Conclusion

I thought of ways that I could extend this blog post beyond my usual 1,000 word marker, but I decided against it. Playing offense for your business simply comes down to…

  • Taking the aerial view of your brand
  • Discovering/rediscovering what you need to do for the optimal impact
  • Start taking action

I could have said it in several different ways, but that’s the premise to working on offense. Taking action just comes down to putting the tasks on your schedule. If a task isn’t on the schedule, it doesn’t get done. If it’s on the schedule, it has a much higher probability of getting done.

What are your thoughts on playing offense for your business? Do you have any tips for us? Have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Choose The Best Blog Post Topics

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blog post topics

Every blog post you write involves a time investment. And as you continue along the blogging journey, the time investment you put towards each post will most likely grow.

But to make your time worthwhile, you must choose the best blog post topics. That way, your visitors will love your blog and you will love writing the content.

The best way to discover your blog post topics is to start with the basics and expand from there.

The Basics

First and foremost, choosing the best topics for your blog posts comes down to asking yourself one question:“What do I enjoy?”

I have a strong passion for digital marketing, which is why I can effortlessly write about the topic. Once I allocated 15 minutes to write about digital marketing for the day but quickly became frustrated because I wanted to spend more than 15 minutes writing about digital marketing.

I was like the child who didn’t want recess to come to an end. That’s the mentality you must have when you’re writing your content and know that you’re running out of time.

Obviously, we have a range of answers to the question “What do I enjoy?” But we need to narrow our focus on the few things that we can write about for many years to come and that will continue to provide value.

At one point, I enjoyed writing about LEGO Sets. I haven’t written about LEGOs for a very long time because I prefer writing about digital marketing and embracing that topic.

It’s also a niche in which I can provide massive value given my experience (years of experience means nothing to me. Results determine the quality of those years and if I should care. But this is just a teen’s rant 🙂 ).

To determine if your content will thrive, you must also ask the question, “Is this something people want?” I know people want this blog post because several of my subscribers asked me to specifically write a blog post on this topic.

I like coming up with my own ideas, but if my audience suggests ideas, I’m more than happy to write about those topics as well, especially because I can be fairly sure they will resonate with my readers.

Pay Attention To Your Audience

As your content attracts more visitors, your visitors will suggest more ideas. Some of them will be direct…“Write about THIS.” These visitors are rare.

The majority of your visitors will indirectly suggest new content ideas. Here are some of the signs you should pay attention to:

What questions do they ask you in the comments? I always invite my visitors to ask questions in the comments. That way, I can answer these questions and write out future blog posts (sometimes I copy and paste comments together to form the skeleton of a new blog post).

If I see a lot of questions about, let’s say Pinterest, I know my audience wants a blog post about Pinterest.

What’s getting the most engagement. When I first started this blog, I wrote as many Twitter related blog posts as I could. These blog posts by far got the most engagement and each Twitter blog post worked like magic.

Now I’ve slowed down on Twitter related blog posts due to the immense library of them on this blog and the over-saturation of “10 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers” type of blog posts.

Engagement is like votes, and engagement can take the form of social signals, traffic, clicks, comments, and any other indicator.

Which of your posts are the top performers. Keep providing these types of posts and internally link them together so they each become top performers. You never know how long a post will retain its popularity, so you want to take action as quickly as possible.

For instance, one of my most popular blog posts was about getting Vine followers. Now it’s not doing so well since Vine isn’t a social network anymore. When you’re content is popular, ride that wave. Hope to never see the shore but write as if that shore is coming and you want to capitalize on all of the growth you can get from the final part of the wave.

See What Your Audience Says Off Your Blog

Your visitors spread their time across multiple blogs and social networks. This is valuable knowledge for discovering what your audience wants. During this stage, we observe others and chime in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

One of the policies I adopted is that I will respond to the comments I get from my blog. I knew it would be a tedious process, but I do so anyway. In these comments, my visitors ask questions, share suggestions, and weigh in on the blog post.

I got inspired to respond to every comment because Neil Patel does it. It’s commonplace for Neil to get dozens or even hundreds of comments for each blog post he publishes. He goes through all of those comments to gather more content ideas and discover what his readers want.

If you’re a digital marketer, especially if SEO is your speciality, then why aren’t YOU going through the comments Neil gets? After you leave a comment (yes, you definitely should), look at all of the Qs and suggestions Neil gets. Each of his blog posts (comments alone) offers a treasure trove of ideas, but you’ll only access that treasure trove if you read each one.

I know. It’s tedious, and I don’t read all of the comments for each of his blog posts. However, when I do, I get many ideas.

You can take a similar approach via Quora, a social networking site which allows users to ask and answer questions. When people ask questions about social media and blogging, I make it a point to be one of the first people to answer the question.

Not only does the first answer tend to get the most views, but I can also use my answers as the starting points for future blog posts. Quora’s additional advantage is that as a big social network, it’s commonplace for me to find dozens of questions that I could answer in the form of high-demand blog posts.

Sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Wiki Answers are great for discovering more topics that your visitors want. I prefer Quora because I believe it’s the easiest to use, but the decision is up to you.

In Conclusion

When you choose a blog post topic and start writing, it involves a considerable amount of your time. Not only do you write the blog post from start to finish, but you also need to promote it so that blog post gains traction.

With so much of your time hinging on each idea, it’s important to choose the blog post topics that will resonate the most with your audience.

You can discover which topics work by observing your audience on and off your blog.

What are your thoughts on choosing the best blog post topic? Do you have any suggestions for discovering the best content ideas? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

July 2017 Performance Report

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success

Dramatic changes happened in this month. I’m jumping straight into the recap in this performance report, and will be brutally honest about my flaws and successes.

The Question That Opened My Eyes

I received this question from one of my Twitter followers: “Would you please share that how did you become such a great influencer?”

I’m happy to share the answer in a future blog post, but the point I’m making here is that reading the question was like getting drenched with a bucket of cold water.

I was so absorbed in future projections that I almost never took the time to appreciate anything I had done in the past.

For instance, I never stopped to think I’m providing my freelancers with a source of income. And some of them depend on that income for their livelihoods. Now I realize that if I slack off, or am slightly off, I’m potentially letting everyone down.

In our pursuit of the future, we often fail to acknowledge the beauty of what we’ve already accomplished. But we can use this acknowledgment to keep us going and motivated to achieve our goals.

Maybe this part of the Performance Report was your version of the eye-opener. Maybe you’ll hear someone say, “How do you do that so well?”

Everyone’s eye-opener will come sooner or later. I hope you’re open to yours now. Take time to appreciate what you’ve done and celebrate the small wins.

Publishing 1 New Piece Of Content Every Day

I love becoming as efficient as possible. I think of ways to write content faster so I can move on to other tasks. While some of these ideas (content batching and writing blog posts on my smartphone) have worked wonderfully, others (writing less content and ineffective communication) have been disastrous.

At one point I was publishing one new blog post every 12 hours. But then I developed a bad habit of publishing one blog post every week (and was emailing my subscribers even less frequently). That changes now!

I got so focused on revenue generation (still important) that I sacrificed content creation, something I hold dearly. Under the new schedule, I’ll publish new blog posts on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I want to provide more content because I love it.

I have also updated my Publishing Calendar to reflect these changes. On Wednesdays, I’ll publish an episode from my Breakthrough Success Podcast.

That leaves Mondays, Fridays, and Sundays on the table. I’m still thinking of ideas and might return to publishing YouTube videos. But if you have an idea of what you’d like to see from me on those days, let me know in the comments.

How Am I Making Revenue Then?

I mentioned that I got so focused on revenue generation that I sacrificed content creation. But as I began to expand the time I spent creating content, I faced another problem.

How do I continue making revenue? I can get the traffic, but if I sacrifice revenue, then eventually I can’t financially support my brand. Here are the streams I’m utilizing:

#1: Virtual Summits—I am happy to say that I have landed 50+ speakers for the Productivity Virtual Summit. Tom Ziglar, Grant Cardone, and Dan LeFave are some of the many superstar speakers you’ll learn from. I love virtual summits because I provide top value content, a product, and I get to learn a lot about productivity.

#2: Books—I am in the process of writing a book that details how your content brand can absolutely crush it. I’m publishing it in late October or early November.

#3: Affiliate Marketing—I promote some of the top products and tools and receive a commission for each sale.

#4: Funnels—These funnels will lead people to various training courses, upsells, and downsells.

#5: Coaching—I’ll teach you what you need to know and keep you accountable. Contact me marc@marcguberti.com if you’re interested.

The important thing about these revenue streams is that after the initial work, these are set-and-forget systems that bring in revenue. At this stage, all I have to do is check the stats and tweak things here and there to boost optimization.

I have intentionally chosen to focus on set-and-forget methods of revenue generation (with the exception of coaching) so I have more time to create high value content. And as the content brings in more visitors it will result in more revenue from my set-and-forget systems.

As I make more revenue, I’ll outsource more of the parts that I can’t forget about (i.e. recruiting affiliates).

TSMD Still Needs The Royal Treatment

I did very little for TSMD this month even though I was all-in the previous month.

The reason I haven’t been taking action is solely because I don’t like the prep work for videos. Although I love thinking up ideas and completing the videos, I don’t enjoy doing the lighting, editing, descriptions, and uploading.

Even though I’ve outsourced editing and uploading, it’s still a pain in the neck. My solution is to do more live videos so I can skip many of these cumbersome steps. My brother religiously incorporates videos into his brand, so I’ll pick his brain before proceeding.

Books I Read

Extreme Productivity

Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Robert C. Pozen

48 Days by Dan Miller

Born To Win by Zig Ziglar

#AskGaryVee by Gary Vaynerchuk

Double Double by Cameron Herold

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management by Kevin Kruse

Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

View From The Top by Aaron Walker

You Were Born Rich by Bob Proctor

Win by Frank I. Luntz

Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday

Live It by Jairek Robbins

Scrum by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland

7 Strategies For Wealth & Happiness by Jim Rohn

July’s Blog Posts

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Strategy

Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy Using The Buyer’s Journey

How To Freelance Without Losing Control Of Your Blog

5 Hacks For Writing Blog Posts Faster

Decoded: Make Thousands From Your First Virtual Summit

July’s Podcast Episodes

E45: Are You Winning The Brand VS Wild Battle With Jonathan David Lewis

E46: Penniless Immigrant Now Living The American Dream With Nitin Chhoda

E47: Creating A Positive Impact On The World Through Our Businesses With Hamilton Perkins

E48: Open The Door To Happiness And Szen With Gary Szenderski

Review Of July 2017 Goals

#1: Have 10 Streams Of Income: I didn’t want to spread myself too thin, especially with the uptick of content creation. Once I have more set-and-forget streams of income, I’ll work my way towards 10 streams.

#2: Hire 3 New Freelancers: I hired one new freelancer and rehired another freelancer. It could have been better. The next freelancer I hire will most likely be a revenue generating freelancer instead of a time saving freelancer.

#3: Stop Over-Monitoring “Useless” Info: Mission accomplished.

#4: Conduct All 50+ Summit Interviews: I didn’t conduct all 50+ interviews this month, but I interviewed an overwhelming majority of the summit speakers in July.

#5: Host Weekly Webinars: This was a disaster as I didn’t even attempt it. I’ll change things up by hosting one webinar before I commit to hosting several webinars.

#6: Recruit 100+ Affiliates: It was initially difficult to recruit affiliates because I couldn’t find productivity-related products that offer affiliate programs similar to mine.

But I found my niche with JLD’s Freedom and Mastery Journals. Since then, I’ve contacted many affiliates and got several YESes. I plan on sending an email out to my entire list very soon.

August 2017 Goals

#1: Set Up A Strong Set-And-Forget Revenue Stream

The strongest form of a set-and-forget revenue I have is the Content Marketing Success Summit set-up. The only problem is that the summit is now over and it’s harder to promote a past summit.

I will use all of the order bumps and upsells I created for that summit to create the Set-And-Forget revenue stream. I’ll also modify my 27 Ways To Get More Retweets set-up to boost the revenue potential.

#2: Contact 1,000 Potential Affiliates

I want the Productivity Virtual Summit to dwarf my Content Marketing Success Summit. I’m focusing more of my time, attention, and energy on recruiting affiliates.

#3: Finalize The Street Team For My Upcoming Book

Because contacting 1,000 affiliates and finalizing a street team in the same month makes sense 🙂

#4: Finish Writing My Book Draft

I need to finish the book draft so I can start receiving early praise for the book.

#5: Finish The PVS Portal

For CMSS, I interviewed the last speaker four days before the summit was launched. During this time, videos were still getting edited and the portal wasn’t finalized. None of the CMSS order bumps or upsells were ready.

This time, I am finalizing the entire summit so I can focus more of my time on order bumps and upsells. My strategy for virtual summits is to offer as many order bumps and upsells as possible (even if I haven’t created them yet) to force myself to take action. I also have all of the necessary order bumps and upsells for a future funnel.

In Conclusion

I wrote more content in July than I have in any other month in 2017. That made me happy because I enjoy every moment of content creation. You’ll see a lot more blog posts from me in August, and I look forward to increasing that number in September and October as well.

The Productivity Virtual Summit and my upcoming book are the two main projects I’m working on now.

What were your thoughts on this performance reports? Have any tips for us so we can achieve our goals? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Optimize The Back-End Of Your Book

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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

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content creationNo 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.

4 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Strategy

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social media strategy

A social media presence is paramount to the success of any business in the digital age. These days, no marketing strategy can be complete without a social media strategy. With the social media landscape constantly changing, we need evergreen tactics that can form the core of our social media strategy regardless of which social networks are our top dogs. The following are four ways you can quickly improve your social media strategy and get better results.

#1: Leverage On Messaging

Customer service is at the heart of successful businesses. Get customer service wrong and before long, your business could run out of revenue. You can leverage the messaging power of social media and turn it into a potent customer service channel that goes beyond special offers and resolving disputes.

Social media has vastly changed customer service landscape. This was inevitable given that many people spend a considerable amount of time daily on social networks. Just take a look at some of these eye-opening stats:

  • According to Pew Research, 70% of Facebook users log on daily, including 43% who do so several times a day. 59% of Instagram users, 38% of Twitter users, 27% of Pinterest users and 22% of Linked users log on daily.
  • In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Americans spend an average of 40 minutes per day on Facebook.
  • Research by Nielsen has found that 33% of customers prefer to contact brands using social media as opposed to the telephone.
  • JD Power conducted a study that established that two-thirds of customers go to Twitter and Facebook for customer service.

Clearly, if you aren’t using social media messaging for customer service, you are losing out on a great opportunity.

But, there is a caveat. Engaging customers on social media is time-consuming and at times complicated. Sifting through hundreds of comments looking for complaints and/or suggestions is just part of the game.

The only way to effectively use social media for customer service and stay sane is to use Messenger Bots. Facebook’s recently popularized Messenger Bot makes it easy to quickly respond to common requests such as initial greetings. Other messaging apps like Telegram even have built-in functionality that allows customers to get quick answers from a menu selection.

#2: Mix Paid Content with SEO

Content marketing will only continue to grow stronger in future. So, it’s important to keep creating valuable content. But, to expand distribution, it is advisable to use paid content if you can afford to. Organic traffic is fantastic but if you can reach a bigger audience with paid content that converts visitors into sales, then it’s worth a try?

Unlike a few years ago, paid content today is customized for the platforms and targeting options allow one to target a niche audience. Think of paid content as a useful ally to build an audience faster. Paid content is great for startups and local businesses especially when launching new products or running a seasonal campaign.

#3: Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

Mark Zuckerberg once stated, “the biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Where social media is concerned, you must boldly experiment. The dynamic nature of social media means that new ways of doing things, technologies and tools keep coming up on a daily basis. The innovators that try out the new stuff before the rest of us often get to benefit from upgrades.

Instagram Stories is the latest feature that early adopters happily jumped on. While this feature hasn’t been around for long, it already has over 150 million daily users. Experiment with new features whenever they launch and sign-up for early releases where possible. You might just stumble on something that completely revamps your social media strategy and turbocharges your business.

#4: Don’t Forget the Golden Rule

Active interaction. That’s right. This is the golden rule of a successful strategy. A quiet audience that doesn’t interact with your posts is a clear indication that something is wrong. It could be your content isn’t relevant, interesting and useful enough or your response rate is low. Invest in a good analytics tool to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Remember that social media includes the word social. Don’t solely use social media to shout out your message at your audience. Instead, take the time to ask questions and interact with the people who engage with your content.

In Conclusion

About 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises are using social media to drive sales and business growth. Rather than just having a presence on social media, you need to go deeper and understand how to make the maximum use of the features to provide better service to your customers and improve your bottom line.

What are your thoughts on creating a social media strategy? Have any suggestions for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.