Marc's Blog

7 Reasons To Jump On Udemy Now

November 27, 2015 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Welcome to the Udemy Express. All aboard!

Okay, maybe I exaggerated that. But the main point is that Udemy is the opportunity you need to jump on now. Udemy is the main platform I devote my attention towards. The only reason the other parts of my business grow and stay afloat is because of outsourcing.

Udemy is a free platform that allows you to create and sell training courses. The way Udemy works is that they promote your course, and you split the commission 50/50. If you promote the course on your own and get a sale with one of your coupons, then you get a 97% commission.

Udemy makes it easy to create training courses, and those training courses can be highly profitable. In this blog post, I am going to share with you seven reasons why you need to get started on Udemy now:

#1: You Get To Make Revenue

This is the most obvious point, so I’ll get it over with. Udemy does a good job at promoting your course through its coupons. Once you publish a training course, you can literally get sales from Udemy without promoting the course.

Of course, you make more sales and rank higher on Udemy’s search engine if you decide to promote your own courses, but if you don’t promote your own courses, you can still make money. Some people like my friend Jerry Banfield make over $1,000 per day from Udemy sales.

#2: Free Email List Growth

Each person who gets access to one of your courses is a student. You can send email blasts to all of your students or a certain segment of the student body. Does that sound familiar? It should.

It’s just like email marketing, but for free. Email marketing with something like iContact or Aweber provides you with more capabilities, but it comes at a cost. Having 10,000 subscribers on iContact costs $79 per month. Having the same number of subscribers on Aweber costs $149 per month.

Having 10,000 students and emailing them with Udemy costs $0 per month. Not only does Udemy do the promotion for you, but you also get to save thousands of dollars by emailing your students instead of emailing your subscribers on iContact and Aweber.

I still recommend iContact and Aweber since your email list is critical, but Udemy is the ideal option for people who are starting out.

#3: Facebook Group Pages Dedicated To Udemy Promotions

Not only is Udemy a platform where you can grow a free email list, but it is a sophisticated platform with sophisticated users. There are many Facebook group pages that let you promote free coupon codes to your courses. You can choose the quantity of coupons you offer and the deadline of those coupons.

One of the best ways to get more students to your Udemy courses is by promoting the free coupons to these courses in those Facebook Group Pages. This is an easy way to get hundreds of new students on a platform that was just waiting for you.

In other words, an extra 100 subscribers. And you don’t have to pay for any of them. Some people get thousands of new students from these promotions alone. They work well, and if you effectively communicate with your students, many of the students who used the free coupon for one of your courses may decide to buy another one of your courses at the full price.

#4: Video Is A Requirement

Video is huge and Udemy is a wonderful opportunity. However, you can’t do anything with Udemy unless you start making videos. This restriction is a blessing in disguise because it makes you better at utilizing the most impactful type of content on the web.

As you get better at creating videos, you will also get better at making speeches. You will articulate yourself more clearly and learn more about your niche.

If you are not utilizing videos yet, but you want to utilize Udemy, then you will be forced to utilize video. If you don’t want to worry about lighting or are afraid of showing yourself on camera, then you can opt to use ScreenFlow/Camtasia and a good microphone for your computer.

That way, your videos are KeyNote/PowerPoint presentations with epic audio.

#5: Udemy Has A Large Student Base

While marketing will never present us with a true scenario of “create it and they will come,” Udemy comes close. With millions of students already on the platform, Udemy presents you with a massive audience.

If you do well with promoting your own course, and it performs well in Udemy’s search engine, then Udemy will kick the promotion of your course into hyper gear.

In the past, Udemy has sent email blasts to all of its users about special discounts. Imagine your course performs so well that Udemy promotes it in an email. Imagine, in other words, your course getting seen by millions of people.

The payoff is bound to be massive. And you didn’t spend any time building that audience of millions of people. Udemy did it for us (well, the instructors help out too. When people want to buy our courses but don’t have accounts, they create Udemy accounts to buy our courses).

#6: No Technical Work Required

Udemy is not a place where you have to know code and make sure the PayPal and Credit Card integration works. Udemy has all of that handled for you. All you have to worry about is creating your courses and getting them into the Udemy marketplace.

You don’t have to verify that the technology works by making $0.01 purchases of your courses over and over again until you know the technology part works.

In addition to not worrying about the technology, you also don’t have to worry about creating an affiliate program for your courses. Udemy has all of that handled for you too. They have their own affiliate program through LinkShare that all courses automatically become a part of. You get paid, the affiliate gets paid, and Udemy gets paid. Everyone wins.

If you don’t have the audience to promote your courses to, you can contact potential affiliates and have them promote the course for you. The way Udemy’s affiliate program is set up, every affiliate gets a 50% commission per sale while you and Udemy split the rest of the commission down the middle.

A 50% commission is desirable enough to get the attention of many affiliate marketers. Even if you don’t make as much per sale as you would by promoting your course with your own coupon, you still make revenue.

It is better to make some extra revenue than it is to make no extra revenue at all.

#7: YouTube and Udemy Go Hand-In-Hand

If you want to dominate YouTube, then Udemy is the right place for you to be. Many Udemy instructors who create dozens of courses become great at creating videos. This talent is visible on their YouTube channels which happen to have hundreds of videos.

These instructors can easily publish one YouTube video every day because some of them are creating 5-10 videos for their courses every day. For these people, publishing one YouTube video per day is light work.

If you take the time to create numerous Udemy courses, creating 5-10 videos per day will eventually become a comfortable habit. Then, your YouTube channel will get filled with awesome content and you will do better as an Udemy instructor.

In Conclusion

Udemy is a great opportunity, regardless of the size of your audience. While it is appealing for people with large audiences, it is especially appealing for people who have smaller audiences. Many of the most successful instructors came to Udemy before they had a large audience. These same people now have empires because of their success on Udemy.

The best way to learn about Udemy is to interact with other instructors and learn from them. That’s why I enjoy co-creating courses with other instructors (especially the ones who are more successful on Udemy than me).

Do you have any questions about utilizing Udemy? Is this your first time you have heard about Udemy or have you come across it before? Do you have a course up, and if not, do you plan on creating one? Sound off in the comments section below.

100 Social Media Tips In One Sentence Each

November 25, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Social media is a complicated tool. Once you know how to use it, social media presents one of the best opportunities for growing an audience and your business.

This blog post is a way for me to make the learning curve much easier for you. The best part is that all of these tips are one-sentence tips so they will be quick reads. Building a solid foundation for yourself is essential for you to take your social media strategy forward. Here’s the foundation:

#1: Do a little bit each day to move your social media strategy forward

#2: Be present on the top social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others)

#3: Choose which social network is the best one for you and spend 80% of your social media time on that one social network

#4: Master one social network before trying to master another social network (think of mastering social networks as learning different languages)

#5: Outsource some or all of the work

#6: Post on your social networks consistently by scheduling posts with HootSuite

#7: Have a social media post calendar that identifies when social media posts for specific social networks need to get scheduled

#8: Engage with your audience

#9: Get into other conversations

#10: When a chat related to your niche is trending, join that chat and tweet with the hashtag

#11: Most of your social media posts should point back to your content (one of your blog posts, guest posts, videos, etc)

#12: Use pictures in your social media posts to boost engagement

#13: Experiment with advertising on social media (Facebook ads work the best)

#14: Utilize hashtags in your social media posts (1-2 hashtags per tweet but Instagram posts should be stuffed with seven hashtags)

#15: Promote your landing page on your social networks, and if you don’t have a landing page, create one now.

#16: Don’t over promote your products on social media

#17: Make sure your bio highlights as much about you as possible

#18: Make your bio a sentence fragment with commas and no “and” or period to list as many credentials as possible

#19: Don’t let the shiny object (i.e. a new social network) distract you from mastering your main social network

#20: Get on new social networks immediately, but don’t let those new social networks ruin what you already have going on

#21: It is ridiculously easy to gain hundreds of daily followers on the day a new social network launches, but only if you use it (I was an early Periscope adopter and gained 1,000 followers on the first day because I did two broadcasts)

#22: Occasionally share other people’s content related to your niche to provide a variety of content for your audience

#23: Recognize the fact that social media is just one part of your business so you don’t spend too much time on social media

#24: Build relationships on social media

#25: Look through your interactions to see if one of your followers wants to interview you or have you as a guest blogger

#27: Contact people who have podcasts and guest blogs and offer your help (in the form of being a guest or contributor but do so with a nice tone since some people get a lot of these types of emails/social media posts)

#28: Look for methods to save as much time as possible on social media

#29: Pay extra money for social media tools if it means you save extra time

#30: Use HootSuite to do all of your social media activity instead of going on the actual social media sites (more productive since you don’t see the trending topics and other stuff)

#31: Write down important things that you learn about social media

#32: Create a blog about social media so you force yourself to learn something new about social media every day

#33: The avatar for all of your social media accounts must either be a picture of you or your company’s logo

#34: If you make the avatar for all of your social networks the same, your followers will have an easier time identifying all of your social media accounts.

#35: Keep up with the latest social media news so you can determine if you need to make a change in your social media strategy

#36: Focus on the social networks that yield the best results

#37: Ask yourself what small changes to your social media strategy can yield better results (you’d be surprised)

#38: Remind yourself what are you aiming for in your social media strategy

#39: Get all of the social media mobile apps and engage with your audience on the go

#40: Hire one virtual assistant for your social media strategy and see how the experience goes

#41: Don’t get consumed by social media

#42: Focus on growing a targeted audience instead of merely growing an audience of people who may not even be interested in your content

#43: NEVER, EVER, EVER buy fake followers because it will taint your reputation and possibly result in your account getting suspended

#44: Cross-promote your content so all of your social networks are promoting each other

#45: If something is working very well for you right now, ride with it until it stops working

#46: Don’t get distracted by anything when you are using social media

#47: The way you use social media determines how successful you become on it

#48: Look at your post engagement so see what type of content your audience likes the most

#49: Then give them more of that content

#50: Thank the people who share your content by mentioning them or commenting on the post

#51: Understand that social media is the best platform for indirect and an okay platform for direct sales

#52: Getting indirect sales on social media means building trust and providing valuable content that eventually asks for an email address

#53: Get help if you need it

#54: Implement what you learn because most people stop at the learning part

#55: Ask your favorite experts some quick questions that don’t require lengthy answers because some of them may then respond and offer advice

#56: Follow back to build relationships

#57: Follow people in your niche who are likely to follow you back

#58: Post at the optimal times throughout the day (these differ for each social network, but for Twitter, if you are tweeting once every 15 minutes, then it doesn’t matter for Twitter)

#59: Tweet once every 15 minutes

#60: Publish two YouTube videos every week

#61: Post three Instagram pictures per day

#62: Post four Facebook posts on your FB Page per day

#63: Send pins consistently throughout the day (at least one pin per hour)

#64: Don’t do everything from Tips 59-63 if it means you are going to overwhelm yourself with work

#65: Outsource some or all of the work related to Tips 59-63

#66: Promote your social networks on your blog

#67: Promote your new blog posts at least five times on your social networks on the day your blog posts get published

#68: Create multiple social media accounts on the same social network to promote your content

#69: Create a team of ambassadors that will share your content on social media no matter what

#70: Create evergreen blog posts (they will still be valuable years later) and promote them on your social networks often

#71: It is okay to share the same thing on social media more than once

#72: It is okay to have a posting cycle that results in you sharing the same thing dozens of times throughout the year

#73: Use Twitter polls to create a new type of social media engagement

#74: Ask your followers what they want and use their suggestions as blog post or product ideas

#75: Publish your blog posts on LinkedIn so they have a greater reach

#76: Use AdWords to advertise your YouTube videos at the rate of $0.01 per view

#77: Use Facebook advertising to get your Page likes for less than $0.01 per like

#78: Constantly monitor your social media ads so you see which ones are consistent and which ones need to get tweaked

#79: Share content from authority sites like Forbes, The Huffington Post, and others

#80: Get you know your followers by name and avatar

#81: Answer a need on social media that you believe most people are missing

#82: Tweet about your niche 95% of the time because if you go off-topic too much then people won’t stick around

#83: Valuable content is content that your audience believes is valuable, not what you believe is valuable (I have read many blog posts about running but never tweet them out since my targeted audience cares more about digital marketing blog posts)

#84: Be patient with your social media success (to achieve any type of success, you must be very patient)

#85: Don’t get discouraged when you get bad results because you can always make a change

#86: Use social media in a meaningful way

#87: See what other experts in your niche do on social media and mimic then while adding in your own style

#88: For any social network, focus on getting past that 1,000 follower milestone through almost any means necessary (no buying fake followers or doing things you’ll regret later)

#89: Don’t use too many social media tools but instead ask yourself which social media tools you can live without

#90: Statistics for your social media strategy let you see your results, where you are, and how you can improve

#91: While these statistics are good, if you spend too much time viewing them without taking action, then you are walking into analysis paralysis

#92: Take a one-day break from your social networks if the workload gets too stressful

#93: Pin a tweet to the top of your profile that promotes your landing page so your audience always sees it

#94: Use social media to promote product discounts

#95: If you become a part of an affiliate program, use social media to promote other people’s landing pages that have your affiliate ID.

#96: The focus of social media should be to build trust between you and your audience

#97: Write blog posts at a consistent and frequent rate so you have more to share with your followers

#98: Search your blog’s URL on social media to see who’s sharing it (not everyone will mention you when they share your content)

#99: Use the Twitter Advanced Search to find very specific users who you can then engage with

#100: Always have fun on social media

In Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed these 100 one-sentence social media tips. It took me a while to compile the list.

The main purpose of providing you with all of these tips is to give you a foundation. I understand that you won’t implement all of these tips in one day. However, the hope is that a few of these tips grabbed your attention more than others. The tips that especially grabbed your attention are the ones that you need to get started on.

If I had to implement these tips, I would look into growing my audience and outsourcing the work. Outsourcing the work allows you to explore the implementation of more of these tips (and eventually outsource that too).

Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you have any other tips for social media success? Which social network do you spend most of your time on? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Better Serve Your Social Media Audience

November 23, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

You’ve got followers. They see your posts and send out posts of their own. These followers are individuals just like you and me. Most people only know a small portion of their audiences. However, it is possible for any person on social media to understand their entire audience.

It’s a strong statement to say that one person can understand his/her entire social media audience. But even the people with millions of followers can know some things about everyone in their audiences.

So how does someone with a large audience come to know the people within their audience? Better yet, how does this happen in a time efficient manner? The people with millions of followers are not scrolling through one follower at a time, looking at profiles, and having conversations with all of those people. That would take too long.

You serve your social media audience by knowing what that audience wants. The way you know your social media audience is by breaking them up into categories. You break them into categories based on how they engage with you and your content.

Each time you send a post, look at how people engage with that post. Some of your posts will get more engagement than others. When you see that your social media posts about a certain topic always get more shares, then you know your audience wants more of that content.

Early in the game, I discovered that the tweets of mine that received the most attention contained Twitter tips. Blog posts geared towards social media weren’t far behind.

When I made this realization, I decided to write more blog posts about Twitter. That’s why many of my blog posts are geared towards Twitter. The decision paid off. Most of the blog posts I have written about Twitter have been tweeted hundreds of times. My blog post 70 Amazing Twitter Tips has been tweeted over 1,000 times.

I simply knew what my audience wanted and gave them more of it.

While I enjoyed seeing the success of my Twitter related blog posts, I knew that there was more to me than Twitter. I didn’t want this blog to turn exclusively into a Twitter blog. I also wanted to write blog posts about Facebook, Pinterest, productivity, and other business-related topics.

I decided to write blog posts about a greater variety of topics and share them to my social media audience. I saw how my audience engaged with the content I posted and then drew conclusions. My blog posts about Pinterest and blogging received more attention. Then, my productivity blog posts started to pick up engagement.

But inevitably, some blog posts stood out from the others.

I analyzed every blog post I wrote to see which ones got the most social shares. It wasn’t enough for me to know that blog posts geared towards productivity got more social shares. I needed to know specific information (i.e. do more people in my audience engage with my time management blog post or my goal achievement blog post?).

I am not trying to limit the topics I can write about. Rather, I am identifying the most desirable topics. That allows me to know what topics to focus on but also which topics I can incorporate into my other blog posts.

When I write a blog post about Twitter, should I incorporate goal achievement or should I incorporate finding the time to make it happen? If I incorporate both of them, which one do I focus on more? Answering these challenging questions allows you to write better content that your social media audience will love.

Quick Summary Of Categories

Here are some of the categories that my followers are in (it is possible for certain followers to be in more than one category):

Twitter advice

Social media advice

Pinterest advice

Blogging advice

Productivity

With this list, I know which blog posts I should write. I can also think of ways to combine certain topics together so I can appeal to a larger percentage of my social media audience.

Observe How Your Social Media Audience Engages With You

The larger your social media audience becomes, the more you can rely on the notifications tab to understand your audience. I look at the notifications tab to see what people say about my content. I see what people like (and dislike).

Checking every day allows me to see certain patterns develop. This is how I identify which of my blog posts are outperforming most of my other blog posts. This identification is critical for getting more blog traffic from Twitter.

In the beginning, I could tweet more frequently and automatically double my daily visitors from Twitter. Now I tweet once every 15 minutes. I don’t envision myself tweeting once every 7.5 minutes anytime soon. That’s too much even for me.

I get more traffic from Twitter by tweeting my most popular content more often. If this popular content continues to gain popularity, then I know this is a topic my social media audience is interested in. At that point, I begin to create a training course all about that topic.

That’s why Twitter Domination was the first training course I ever published on Udemy. At the time, people recognized me as a Twitter expert more than anything else.

Once you serve your audience and see how they respond, you get to know your audience. Then, you can create products based on what you know about your audience. This cycle ultimately results in you constantly serving your audience and providing them with more value as the days go by.

In Conclusion

Social media is the best platform to grow an audience without paying a penny. I had over 100,000 followers spread across my social networks before I started investing in tools and ads that I now use to exponentially grow my audience.

Regardless of your audience’s size and growth rate, you must learn more about the individuals within your audience. What type of content do they want to read? What do they need that you can provide? Answering these two questions will let you know how you can serve your audience better.

Serving your audience better allows you to know the people in your audience better. Once you serve your audience with free content that you know they like, you can then serve them with products related to those same topics.

How do you engage with your social media audience? What tips do you have for us so we can better serve our audiences? Do you know what your social media audience wants? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Reasons Why Most People Don’t Make Enough Money

November 20, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Money. It’s something that we think about. Some of us think about it too often, but we all think about it one way or the other. Many people aspire to earn full-time incomes and have financial independence.

Sure enough, not everyone earns a full-time income. And not all of the people who make a full-time income do so with a smile. Making a full-time income by doing what you love to do involves putting in the work. However, there are common pitfalls that prevent most people from making enough money. Here are the big five:

#1: They Only Want The Money For The Sake Of Having It

Don’t think about having money for the sake of having money. Instead, think of what the money you are after would give you. Think about the financial independence, the ability to buy more things, and the ability to use your money to make the world a better place.

Most people don’t establish a strong WHY for making the money. Making money for the sake of making it isn’t good enough. Financial independence is a start, but you can dig deeper. What would financial independence allow you to do that you can’t do now?

The deeper you go, the more fuel you will add to the fire. Soon enough, you will approach your work with more motivation than before.

#2: Money Is At The Forefront Of Everything

The moment you put money at the forefront of everything else is the moment you don’t get as much of it. Some people in the desperate scramble to make revenue may create subpar products and charge high prices for them. They want the money immediately, so quantity and high prices seem like the logical option—at least on the surface.

Providing value is more important than having a quantity of products. Building the relationship between you and your customers in which you focus on helping the customer is more valuable than building the relationship just for the sake of making money.

If you only engage with your audience to get their dollar bills, then they will catch on. If you engage with your audience because you actually care for them, then the people in your audience will be more likely to buy your products.

#3: Doubt

It is too common for people who aren’t making money to doubt themselves. They blame their lack of expertise and/or certain circumstances that prevent them from making money. Blaming in this regard results in you staying in the pit of despair for a longer period of time.

Doubting yourself will hinder your progress and keep you in that pit longer. The only way to get out of that pit is by climbing out of it. Just ask The Dark Knight.

#4: They Aren’t Putting In The Right Work

Whether willing or unwilling, the people who don’t make enough money often are not putting in enough productive work. We are good at putting in work, but productive work is a different story.

Most people like to believe that all work is productive. However, that is not the case. Certain work that you do is just busy work that takes time out of your day. As my social media audience grew larger, continuing the growth became busy work. My social media audience was growing but my income was not changing.

As a result, I focused all of my attention on Twitter and eventually outsourced most of the activity on all of my social networks.

Now I focus more of my time on creating and marketing my training courses.

In our constantly busy lives, we put in a lot of work. Creating the distinction between busy work and productive work allows you to identify where you need to spend your time.

Spending time on one activity means sacrificing some of the time you could have spent on another activity. This is the economic concept of an opportunity cost. You could be losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime because you are not utilizing your time wisely.

Sometimes, we know what we must do to move forward, but we don’t find the time to make it happen in our schedules. Don’t be that person.

#5: Exploration Without Commitment

If your strategy is to pursue shiny object after shiny object, then prepare for disappointment. Many people fall prey to shiny object syndrome in which they do a lot of exploration but don’t commit to anything.

It’s like shopping at Macy’s for two hours without buying any clothing. It’s like spending two hours looking for the best trails in your area but then not running on any of those trails. Basically, it’s a waste of time.

You need to do some exploration to find the right opportunity for you. However, you must also drop the anchor when you find an opportunity that appeals to you.

You don’t have to drop the anchor many times, but you have to drop it eventually. I don’t drop the anchor often. The first time I truly dropped the anchor was when I decided to focus most of my time on Twitter. Over 250,000 followers later, I am happy that I temporarily ditched all of my other social media accounts.

In Conclusion

For better or for worse, we think about money. If we could earn a dollar every time we thought of money, some of us would be millionaires just for that.

We want money, but in order to get what we are looking for, our thinking pattern must change. Instead of making money just for the sake of making money, go deep and ask yourself what the money would do for you.

As you go deep and motivate yourself to make more money, remind yourself that money is a good servant but a bad master. Don’t let the thought of making money become the forefront of everything that you will do. Your work will be less enjoyable and you will think more about what you don’t have than what you actually have. When we focus on what we do not have, we get discouraged.

Making money does require putting in the work, but it also requires approaching money-making with a different perspective from the traditional one.

Which of these reasons resonates with you the most? Did I miss any reasons why people don’t make enough money? Have any tips to share? Sound off in the comments section below.

What To Outsource In Your Twitter Strategy

November 18, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Twitter, just as all social networks, is a double-edged sword. Twitter can provide many opportunities, but it can also take up too much of our time. Small business owners constantly want to utilize social networks like Twitter but rarely have enough time to do so.

Twitter is the main reason I became a digital marketing expert. Once I got comfortable with Twitter, it was easier to get comfortable with the other social networks. In addition to the comfort, most of the interviews and guest blogging opportunities came directly from people who first saw me on Twitter.

Then time became a factor. During my junior year of high school, I had so little time for my business that the only thing I could focus on was Twitter. I saw the growth of my audience and was happy. However, I wasn’t fully utilizing the revenue generating opportunities.

Many small business owners find themselves on the seesaw with social media activity on one side and revenue generating activity (quicker revenue versus long-term revenue and social proof you get from social media) on the other side.

No matter how much you try, you won’t perfectly balance on the seesaw. Unless you have freelancers working for you.

The most significant decision I have made for my business in 2015 was outsourcing my workload. The only thing I do on Twitter now is engage with my followers. Virtually everything else I do on Twitter is outsourced.

This one decision has saved me an enormous amount of time. I want you to see similar results. Here’s what you need to outsource in your Twitter strategy:

#1: Prewritten Tweets

Many Twitter users find themselves tweeting the same type of content. Some Twitter users find themselves tweeting the same tweets in a cycle. If you are not one of these two Twitter users, you may find it difficult to schedule any tweets at all.

Regardless of which type of tweeter you are, outsourcing that work solves the problem. All of my tweets are scheduled by someone else. That saves me 15 minutes per day. 15 minutes per day may not seem like a lot, but the crumbs add up.

We all want to be successful on social media. Therefore, it only makes sense to look at successful social media accounts. Take a look at The Huffington Post’s account. Arriana Huffington does not publish the tweets that show up on @HuffingtonPost.

All of the top brands have social media management teams. However, you don’t need to be as big as The Huffington Post to outsource your tweets. You can find a freelancer on a place like Fiverr or UpWork. Then tell the freelancer what types of tweets you want them to write and publish on your account. Be specific.

Then you can devote your time towards other areas of your business. If you find yourself tweeting multiple on-the-fly tweets, you can potentially anticipate those tweets (i.e. if you know you will tweet affiliate links for the next three weeks) and tell the freelancer to schedule the tweets.

#2: Audience Growth

Imagine gaining hundreds of Twitter followers every day without being on Twitter every day. Just a year ago, I thought this was impossible. I thought I would have to put in all of the work to grow my Twitter audience.

Then I hired a freelancer and told him what to do. Now that part of my strategy is automated. This decision allowed me to save an extra 30 minutes per day.

Remember how those small crumbs add up. Now I’m saving 45 minutes per day (and Twitter isn’t the only thing I outsourced so I save more time than 45 minutes).

Learn how to grow your audience and examine how your freelancer grows your audience. That way, you are bound to achieve rapid audience growth without putting in any time.

#3: Account Problems

One of my CSV files had a bug where apostrophes were replaced by question marks. Here’s what happened:

Original Tweet: 5 Ways To Boost Your Blog’s Traffic

With The Bug: 5 Ways To Boost Your Blog??s Traffic

I told my freelancer (the one who schedules my tweets) about the problem. I proposed some ideas about why the problem occurs and then my freelancer was on it.

I no longer worry about these issues because I have a team around me putting in the time to fix these issues.

#4: Engagement

Engagement is the one thing on this list that I will never outsource. For some people however, it may be a good idea to outsource the interaction between your account and your followers. That depends on the amount of interaction your account receives each day and if you feel comfortable with someone interacting with them for you.

If you don’t interact with your followers because you don’t have the time, then outsource this part of your Twitter strategy. It’s better for your Twitter interaction to get outsourced than it is for no interaction to happen at all. Be very careful with this one. Make sure you set very clear expectations with this one.

In Conclusion

Outsourcing your Twitter strategy will open up more time that you can repurpose towards other areas in your business. When you choose to outsource your Twitter strategy, the only thing you must do is make sure your freelancers are doing their work.

In the beginning, never assume that you and your freelancers are on the same page. It is usual for miscommunications to occur in the beginning until you and your freelancers get into a groove. Look over their work and make sure they are doing a great job.

What are your thoughts about outsourcing your Twitter strategy? What do you want to start outsourcing? Do you have any ideas for other parts of the Twitter strategy that you believe should get outsourced? Sound off in the comments section below.

What Makes An M.V.P. Social Media Post

November 16, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Ever view social media as a giant maze? Maybe you wonder what types of posts get more attention or the small changes you can make to give your posts an edge. Yes, there are specific changes you can make such as crafting 70-100 character tweets and creating a call-to-action at the end of your posts. I discuss specific ways to strengthen your tweets in this free eBook.

But how do you write an awesome post every single time? I’m not just talking about a post that gets engagement. I am talking about a post that is so powerful and attention grabbing that people crave your content. I am talking about a post that makes your audience beg for more.

I am talking about the M.V.Ps—Most Valuable Posts—of social media. Those are the posts that we desperately want more of. We know them when we see them, but how can we craft M.V.Ps of our own?

True to the acronym M.V.P., the first method starts with an M, the second method starts with a V, and the third method starts with a P.

Message

The message of your post all comes down to the purpose of that social media post. Are you trying to make your audience laugh? @MLBMemes does a great job at that (if you are a baseball fan) Are you trying to provide them with information? That’s my aim with social media.

Your desired message must be tailored to your audience. Knowing your audience allows you to realize what type of reaction is a good one. If @MLBMemes started to tweet social media articles, people would get thrown off. If I tweeted MLB memes too much, then sure enough my followers would get thrown off too.

So once you know what type of message to craft, how do you craft it?

The answer depends on the social network you are utilizing. On Twitter, brevity wins in large part because you can only use a maximum of 140 characters.

For the most part, brevity wins. Have a short intro to the article or picture you are sharing and then let the article or picture tell the story. For other social networks like YouTube, you have to tell the story within the post.

The best way to understand how to craft your message is by examining how other people within your niche craft your message. When I needed to learn how to use Twitter, I looked at how Jeff Bullas and Kim Garst used the platform. I tweeted in my own style and combined that style with how they sent their tweets.

Combining my style with their styles is the reason I tweet the way I do.

Sure enough, there are plenty of blog posts you can read that let you know more of the specifics. However, the best way to learn how to do something is to see an example and then implement based on that example. Observing results in learning. Then it’s just a matter of doing.

Value

I love this word. I could have used quality but value does more justice (and it allows me to stay consistent with the acronym).

First off, let’s start by defining value from a social media strategy perspective. Valuable content is NOT awesome content. Valuable content is awesome content that resonates with your audience. That is an important distinction.

I come across many blog posts that I believe are valuable. The blog posts that I believe are valuable could easily be defined as meaningless in the eyes of someone else. Since I am learning how to play the piano, I am learning about the different symbols and their meanings.

I’ll Google something like “piano symbols and their meanings.” If I find an article that does a good job at explaining several of those symbols, I continue reading it for a while. It’s something I want to learn more about.

However, if I were to tweet that article to my Twitter followers, I wouldn’t get much of a reaction. If I branded myself as a pianist and singer in the making, then I would get more attention. However, I brand myself as a digital marketing expert. People who follow me want digital marketing advice.

While the piano article is valuable to me, it wouldn’t be valuable to my audience.

Understanding that distinction allows you to put more of your time and effort into the right direction. It also allows you to create M.V.Ps.

The truth about M.V.P.s is that only a certain audience sees a certain social media post as an M.V.P. If you don’t know anything about baseball, then you won’t find any of @MLBMemes’ tweets as entertaining. I don’t know much about basketball which is why I am indifferent to the NBA memes that dominate the web.

Now comes the point when you define value in your niche. A valuable video or blog post within your niche is something that triggers the desired reaction. If you want your audience to laugh, then that’s the reaction you are looking for. If you want your audience to acquire more knowledge by thoroughly reading the blog post you promoted, then that’s the reaction you are looking for.

The best way to identify value in your niche is by seeing what works. Look at what the highly regarded experts post. Better yet, see which posts get the most attention from the people within your audience. Just search for some keywords relating to your niche and look through the posts that get the most engagement.

That’s what your audience likes. Mimic it while adding your own style.

Picture

With a sea of tips that specifically apply to certain social networks, it is difficult to come across tips that apply to all of them. Social media is constantly changing and more options become available as the days go by.

In a constantly changing atmosphere, it is difficult to find the constants (had to do it). One constant that will always remain is the impact of pictures. Social media posts with pictures get more than twice as much engagement as social media posts without pictures.

All of the social networks have adapted over the years based on this fact. It’s the reason why we don’t see those pic.twitter links anymore and why you can’t be a player on Instagram and Pinterest unless you post pictures.

When you promote one of your articles on your social networks, the picture you use in your article is just as important as the content as itself. The human mind registers a picture 60,000 times faster than plain text. The picture matters.

The best free tool to create awesome pictures without any help is by using Canva. Canva is a free tool with an arsenal of options to improve your pictures. I used to use Canva until I hired someone with more expertise to create the pictures for me.

For some of the pictures I created with Canva, you can tell that some of them were rushed. I didn’t have much time to begin with because of my school schedule. To make matters worse, I was in my junior year. So I handed that responsibility over to a freelancer who creates awesome pictures. I didn’t create the picture in this blog post. My freelancer did.

Pictures are essential to getting and keeping attention. If you don’t create good pictures, then don’t give yourself that task. Pay someone else to get the job done right. You save time and get an awesome picture. Some freelancers charge $1 per picture.

When you share one of your articles on social media, make sure you include that picture within your social media post. In my experience, my tweets with pictures get more engagement than my tweets without pictures.

In Conclusion

At first glance, any goal you go after will look impossible. That includes the M.V.P. status. When you stare straight into your goal and observe the examples around you, that goal becomes easier. In some cases, that goal even becomes child’s play.

I love using sports analogies of some of the best athletes, so I’ll do that again here. At some point in his life, it was difficult for LeBron James to make a shot in basketball. Now he makes the shots that most of us would never even attempt.

All writers start off struggling to write the 250 word essay. Some of these same writers became bestselling authors.

You may struggle with crafting awesome social media posts now. You may be intimidated because you only took the first glance. However, when you stare this goal straight in the eye and take action, this goal will soon become easy for you. Soon enough, you’ll be crafting and publishing M.V.Ps left and right.

What are your thoughts on the M.V.P. method? Do you have any suggestions for crafting better social media posts? Sound off in the comments section below.