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The Five Forgotten Factors Of Social Media Success

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Social Media Success

Social media constantly grows. More people join the action every day. More people stick around for a few hours every day to see what tweets get posted on Twitter and what gets posted on their Facebook feeds.

With social media’s ever-growing popularity, some of the key components of success on social media have been forgotten. When people think of success on social media, they think of having a big audience, but success on social media is more than that. Success on social media is the combination of factors that most of us have forgotten. These are five of those forgotten factors of social media success:

 

#1: Be Social

The entire purpose of social media was to provide people with a way to communicate with one another from anywhere in the world. Social media was not originally created to give businesses an additional edge. When most entrepreneurs use social media, they focus on the business side. They focus on promoting their own content and their own products without bothering to interact with their audiences.

Interacting with your audience will allow you to develop stronger relationships with the members of your audience. Interacting will make people feel respected and make them feel as if they belong in your social media community. You want the people in your audience to feel as if they belong in your audience because this sense of feeling belonged results in strong relationships, returning visitors, word of mouth promotion, and sales.

When you interact to make your followers feel as if they belong, you must do so for the right reason. Don’t interact with someone just in hopes of making a sale. Only interact with your followers if that is what you want to do. There should never be an ulterior motive for social media interaction.

 

#2: It’s About Providing Value, Not Talking About Yourself

Many social media users make it a point to constantly talk about themselves or their own businesses. Some people tell their followers about their breakfast while other people talk about more meaningful things in your life such as relationship statuses and vacations. Mentioning those types of details once in a blue moon will allow your audiences to know about you, but if these details are common on your social networks, people will unfollow you because your social media posts will bore them.

You may wonder why celebrities who post pictures of themselves eating their breakfast, going on vacation, or getting married get more positive attention than the person who constantly tweets about the sandwich he had for breakfast. The reason celebrities get good exposure when they send out these types of posts is because the celebrities already have a large amount of attention, and most of the content on various celebrities’ feeds is about their professions. Singers primarily post content on their social networks related to their songs and audiences.

They don’t post pictures of their breakfast or vacations as much. That is why when those pictures are posted, they are more appreciated than the pictures from someone who exclusively posts those types of pictures.

Do less talking about yourself and focus on providing more value. You can do this by writing valuable blog posts and promoting them. Many bloggers including myself use social media to promote our own blog posts very often. We do this because we trust in the value our content provides and want to empower our followers with that value. Followers who feel empowered with value will stick around.

Followers who feel empowered with value will stick around.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1wZnBPB”]#SocialMedia Followers who feel empowered with value will stick around.[/tweetthis]

 

#3: Push Out More Content

Many social media users do their best to publish one new piece of content on at least one social network every day. However, that is not enough to get noticed. Social media is a noisy place with countless posts being sent every second. Billions of social media posts get created and published every day. It is challenging to stand out in the middle of that noise.

Instead of posting one new tweet on Twitter every day, I post 100 new tweets every day. Instead of doing one new YouTube video every month, I do one new YouTube video every week. Always look for ways to increase the frequency that you can push out content. By increasing the frequency in which you push out content, you will be seen by a larger percentage of your audience. As you get seen more, some people in your social media audience may decide to subscribe to your blog and buy your products. When you push out more content, never sacrifice value. It is better to publish one high value YouTube video every month than four poorly done YouTube videos every month.

 

#4: Social Media Success Does Not Mean Success

Many people want to believe that having a certain number of followers guarantees success and money. However, social media success is different from success based on a revenue making standpoint. Social media is a tool you can use to make more revenue, but social media is not the place where you can promote a product and expect it to pick up a life changing amount of sales.

Social media is a place to get more indirect sales. You simply use social media to promote your blog and landing pages. Then, your blog and landing pages will lead to more subscribers and visitors. Getting more subscribers and visitors will lead to more long-term sales for your products. Social media gets used to amplify the power of those indirect methods of making more revenue.

 

#5: One At A Time

Many people have a strong desire to master multiple social networks. This desire is critical towards mastering multiple social network and achieving social media domination. It is this same desire that can spell doom for your entire social media strategy.

You read those last two sentences right. Something so important for social media success is also a big downfall that many people face. You need to master one social network at a time just like you would master one new language at a time. Each time you master one social network, it will become easier for you to master other social networks (you will have a larger audience and more knowledge).

You need to learn one social network at a time instead of trying to master them at once. Would you only focus on learning Spanish or try to learn Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese at the same time? Do you only focus on Twitter (or your preferred choice), or do you try to focus on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Flickr at the same time?

 

In Conclusion

Sometimes, the best information we need is the information that was previously forgotten. People wouldn’t work at nine different 9-to-5 jobs at once, but now people are willing to learn and focus on that many social networks at once before mastering them. Social media success has confused the real meaning of financial success. We already know to push out content, but we need to push out more of it. We must provide value instead of posting about anything we can think of because people like to follow people who provide value. Interaction with your friends in real life is important, but so is interaction with your social media audience.

What were your thoughts on these forgotten tips? Do you have any other tip that you believe gets forgotten too often? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Reasons Why Having Multiple Blogs Is Beneficial

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Managing Multiple Blogs

I envision more people creating more blogs. I’m not just talking about more bloggers creating their first blogs. I am talking about a growing group of bloggers who manage multiple blogs, write the content for those blogs, and have guest contributors. Some people will have two blogs, others will have three blogs, and other people may even have dozens of different blogs.

When most people think of having multiple blogs, they often think of the extra workload. Imagine managing five blogs and making sure they all get updated on a regular basis while managing all of the other things that you do. That is in part why many bloggers who follow this strategy have guest contributors. Neil Patel runs multiple blogs. He writes everything on the QuickSprout blog, but he often has contributors write the content for his KISSMetrics and Crazy Egg blogs.

Why would a blogger want to give himself more work? Why would a blogger want to take time away from creating products and services? Behind every action is a reason, and there is definitely a good reason to have multiple blogs. In fact, I will discuss five of those reasons in this article.

 

#1: Your Blogs Can Promote Each Other

Are you looking for more backlinks? Create multiple blogs and have them backlink to each other. You can reference articles from one blog in the articles of another blog. In some of the blog posts on QuickSprout, Neil Patel promotes articles from KISSMetrics and Crazy Egg. He does the same on KISSMetrics and Crazy Egg for QuickSprout. This is one of the easiest ways to get more backlinks. If you use this method to get more backlinks, then you must build up all of the blogs you create. You don’t want to create dozens of blogs and have most of them look spammy. Having spammy backlinks will hurt your blog’s SEO.

 

#2: You Can Offer A Greater Range Of Products

By offering a greater range of products on various blogs, you could potentially bring in more revenue. The self-published author Steve Scott has one blog about habits and another blog about making money on the web. Having two blogs based on different niches allows Steve to publish books in both of those areas. He has one Amazon author page for his habits books and another Amazon author page for his books about making money on the web.

The only objection I could think of is that since there are so many product options (training courses, membership sites, books, eBooks, coaching, etc), it is possible to stick with one niche and just create products for that one niche. Some of the blogs you create can be blogs that only promote affiliate blogs. Although I don’t update them as much as I used to, I still have blogs about Legos and Yugioh Cards that still bring in some revenue. I have built a decent passive income for myself from these blogs by promoting other people’s products.

If you don’t want to promote other people’s products but still find yourself in a time crunch, you can outsource for your products. I know of several successful self-published authors who outsource for their content. Some self-published authors get outsourced content that they wouldn’t be able to write themselves. Some authors who don’t have enough knowledge about health to turn their knowledge into a book hire someone else to write the book. With this outsourced book written and published, this type of self-published author now has another book in another niche that can bring in revenue.

 

#3: More Passive Revenue

Having more blogs and offering a greater range of products on your blogs has the potential to result in more revenue, especially if all of your blogs promote each other. You can make affiliate sales and create your own products. Although I don’t like running ads, it wouldn’t hurt to run ads on one of your blogs that promotes low-priced affiliate products if you have already created a couple of blogs.

You can’t expect to update dozens of blogs every day and still find a way to create new products and make more revenue. What you can do is create short blogs that explain basic information and promote your main blog. You can also have contributors write content for your blog just like Jeff Bullas does for his blog. The Huffington Post does this as well. I, along with many other contributors, write guest posts for Business2Community. If your blog has an authority on the web, many contributors will write content for you for free. These contributors will only ask for a backlink to your blog. Some blog owners almost never update their blogs anymore. They have contributors update the blog instead. All of the income that blog generates is now passive income.

 

#4: You Become A Better Writer

Contributors are not going to rush over to your blog the moment you create it. Before your blog becomes an authority, you will have to write most of the content (unless you hire writers to write the content). The more content you write on a daily basis, the more your writing skills will improve. Becoming a better writer will make it easier for you to write valuable blog posts and books.

 

#5: You Get To Reach Out To Different Audiences

If you have numerous blogs, you will reach out to a larger audience. Some of the people within that audience will see that you write other blogs, and those blogs will get more visibility. If you have read Neil Patel’s content, then you could have first seen his content on QuickSprout, KISSMetrics, CrazyEgg, or a guest post he wrote. With more blogs, there are more chances to be seen.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1ES2WDX”]Creating multiple #blogs allows you to tap into different audiences.[/tweetthis]

 

In Conclusion

Having multiple blogs serves as a big advantage, but the advantage you get from managing multiple blogs depends on what those blogs are about. Chances are few people would know me for having a blog about Legos. Legos have nothing to do with digital marketing. However, I have multiple Lego blogs that promote each other and get a decent sized audience. I also have smaller blogs about digital marketing, and those blogs tend to do better than the ones about Legos (people know me for digital marketing, so the transition is easy to make from one of my blogs to the other). QuickSprout, KISSMetrics, and Crazy Egg all have content that serves bloggers. That’s why the transition from one of those blogs to the next is so easy for readers to make. Both of Steve Scott’s blogs show us how we can become more successful in various areas of our lives which leads to the perfect segue.

If you want to branch out into an entirely new, unrelated niche with no easy transition from one blog to the next, then you need to create multiple blogs about that new topic. It is possible, and it can also be very rewarding. You can create smaller, condensed blog posts on some of your blogs and have contributors write the content for your other blogs.

The key to making all of this work is having a large audience on social media and your email list. With large audiences in those two areas, you will have the potential to make any blog on the web become popular. All of your blogs can start off with a big pinch in traffic that continuously builds momentum. Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you think the work of managing multiple blogs is worth it? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How To Go From Zero Blog Traffic To A Global Audience

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How To Get More Blog Traffic

Every blogger started with no traffic. Some bloggers are at that point right now and are looking for ways to get more traffic. This is the learning process, and it is a necessary process to go through if you want to have a successful blog. Some of these bloggers now generate full-time incomes from their blogs, and some of these people get hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. Those are the crazy numbers that everyone aspires to achieve for themselves.

So the question people ask when they are not getting many visitors is, “How do I go from zero blog traffic to a global audience?” Having a global audience requires the combination of multiple factors working together.

The first thing you must do is grow your social media audience. Having a large social media audience serves the following benefits:

  1. Social proof. People will take you more seriously if they see you have a large social media audience. If one person with 10,000 Facebook fans came out with a book containing Facebook tips and another person with 1 million Facebook fans came out with a book containing Facebook tips, and both books were sold at the same price and had the same number of pages, which book would you buy? Many people would go with the book written by the person with 1 million Facebook fans.
  2. Better SEO. Search engines take social media very seriously in their ranking algorithms. By growing your social media audience and getting more traffic from your social networks, you will also get more search engine traffic. For this blog, increases in my social media traffic almost always result in more SEO traffic. Having a big audience on social media means more social shares which is an area of social media that search engines take into strong consideration when ranking blogs for certain keywords.
  3. Visibility. Social media is the most valuable free platform on the web. Many people on social media have gone from no audiences to audiences of thousands for the affordable price of $0. Social media makes it easy for you to interact with your audience. Interacting with the people in your audience will allow you to strengthen the relationships between you and various people following you on your social networks. Some of these people may become your future customers.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1zS7uU5″]Having a large #SocialMedia audience boosts your social proof, #SEO, and visibility.[/tweetthis]

You have the ability to use social media to promote your blog to an ever-growing audience. Twitter is where most of my social media audience is, and I typically send 100 tweets of various blog posts on my blog every day. I get over 100,000 blog visitors from Twitter alone every year, and that number continues to grow. I also get thousands of blog visitors from Pinterest every month, and that also improves my blog’s SEO.

If you want to reach a global audience faster, then you need to implement multiple things at the same time. While you grow your social media audience, build your email list. I wrote a free eBook about getting more subscribers which you can download here. You must use an emailing service such as iContact or Aweber to grow your email list. These two services and others make it easy to do the following:

  1. Communicate with your audience through email about your latest blog posts, products, etc.
  2. Create custom list and autoresponders for each of your free prize giveaways
  3. Fix problems. iContact has superior customer service, and from what I have heard, Weber’s customer service is top-notch as well.

The money is in the list. Don’t make the mistake of waiting until your blog starts to get hundreds of daily visitors before using an emailing service. My blog got over 150,000 visitors before I started taking my email list seriously. It was a mistake that cost me thousands of blog subscribers. Don’t make the same mistake.

Finally, there’s SEO which at times can be a mystery. However, SEO works. Not only does it work, but it can be very effective. Neil Patel, who regularly gets hundreds of thousands of monthly blog visitors, reported that 40.51% of his blog’s traffic came from Google. His email list and social media were also big contributors to his blog traffic.

SEO works if you know how to use it. I created an entire infographic that goes into detail about how you can improve your blog’s SEO. The Yoast SEO plugin is the best WordPress plugin to have for boosting SEO. Blog speed and backlinks are two other SEO-boosting factors, and both get discussed in detail in the infographic. One method discussed in the infographic is using your new content to link back to your old content, but you can also use your old content to link back to your new content.

 

In Conclusion

Social media success, a big email list, and SEO success are the three critical components that you must achieve in order to go from zero blog traffic to a global audience. Going from no audience to a global audience does take time, even if you have the necessary knowledge to get there. You must take social media, an email list, and SEO seriously for more than one day. If you want a global audience, you must take those three things seriously for months and years to come.

Even the most successful bloggers are trying to reach more people. They are looking towards social media, their email lists, and SEO among other things. A blog’s success is not just about the blog. It is about the rallying forces that support one another. Those rallying forces acting together are what result in successful blogs.

What were your thoughts on the methods discussed in this article? Do you have any other tips to grow an audience? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Actionable Tips To Get Over 100 YouTube Views In Under 24 Hours

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Get More YouTube Views

Wouldn’t it be awesome if every YouTube video you publish from here on got over 100 views on the day you published them? For most YouTubers, this would be a dream come true. After crossing this hurdle, it would be easier for YouTubers to cross the 200 views/day hurdle, and other hurdles as well. Getting 100 views on the day of a YouTube video’s publication seems to be the big number that many people go after.

As new YouTubers quickly realize, putting a video up on YouTube does not ensure that a video will get hundreds of views, let alone a single view. It your YouTube videos can get over 100 views right when they get published, that would give you good social proof, and in some cases, it only takes a few hundred views to set off a chain reaction of views. If you want your YouTube videos to get over 100 views on the day they are published, follow these tips:

 

#1: Build An Email List

Building your own email list gives you the power to send emails to a group of people who would love to view and share your content. Promoting my YouTube videos to my email list alone ensures me over 100 views on the day the video gets published. Growing an email list takes a long period of time, but it’s well worth the time. A large email list provides other benefits such as more blog traffic and successful product launches.

 

#2: Get More YouTube Subscribers 

Out of all of the viewers your YouTube videos get directly from YouTube, most of those views will come from your subscribers. That is why the channels with 100,000 subscribers do better than the channels with a few hundred subscribers. You can get more YouTube subscribers through a variety of methods such as including an annotation in one of your videos that asks people to subscribe, asking people to subscribe in your video’s description, and posting valuable videos. You can read this article to learn more methods to get more YouTube subscribers.

 

#3: Make Your Videos Longer

Video length is one of the most under appreciated methods of getting more YouTube subscribers. Although YouTube is the third most popular search engine on the web, few people think of YouTube as a search engine. Just as you do on Google, you find what you want by typing keywords into the search bar. Then, the search engine brings up results. The only difference is that YouTube exclusively brings up videos in its search results.

What does this have to do with making videos longer? The answer is SEO. In YouTube’s SEO algorithm, they use minutes watched as a critical component to determine your video’s placement for its keywords. If you search keywords like social media tips and self-publishing tips, you’ll see that most of the videos are over five minutes long. Some of these videos are over an hour long.

Most of the long videos are watched for a longer period of time than the short videos. You can skim through an hour long video and only watch five minutes of it. However, that’s more minutes watched than any four minute video on the web (unless you watch that same four minute video multiple times).

With that said, the value that your videos provide is still important. You can’t produce a subpar 30 minute video and expect people to stick around for all 30 minutes. You won’t get any returning viewers that way either. Most of the views people get from their new YouTube videos are from the returning viewers (and most of those returning viewers are your subscribers). The only way your viewers will become returning viewers is if they like the first video they see from your channel.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1E5GsAi”]If you want people to spend more time on your #YouTube videos, make them longer.[/tweetthis]

#4: Promote Your YouTube Video On Social Media

Let your Facebook friends and Twitter followers know about your YouTube video. In fact, tell all of your social media audiences about the new video. One way YouTube videos spread is when people share them on their social networks. Some of your social media followers may decide to tweet your video or share it on Facebook. All of this sharing results in more exposure for your YouTube videos, and as a result, more traffic.

If you get 10 people who each have 1,000 followers to share your YouTube video, then your potential reach is 10,000 people. Then, some of those people’s followers may decide to share the content on their social networks, and it starts a chain reaction of social sharing.

 

#5: Submit Your YouTube Videos To StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit

Sometimes, the content posted on these three sites can suddenly go viral. One of my blog posts I submitted to StumbleUpon routinely got a dozen or so daily visitors. A day after I submitted that blog post to StumbleUpon, it got over 4,000 visitors in just 48 hours. I used Reddit to promote a free coupon to one of my training courses (it was new, so I needed to have the social proof), and the course got over 500 sign-ups in two days. All of those sign-ups came without an email list, promotion on my blog, or a social media campaign involving my other social networks.

Your YouTube videos have a chance to pick up a lot of views. Although the amount of minutes these videos get watched is just as important, a video with 10,000 views looks more attractive to the average YouTube viewer than a video with 50 views. Submitting your YouTube videos to these three websites is typically a hit or a miss. The YouTube videos will either go viral or only get a few viewers from this method, but getting a few viewers is always better than getting no viewers.

 

In Conclusion

YouTube, with the help of its users, has made more videos available on the web than any other website. With countless videos uploaded to YouTube, an algorithm is needed to determine which videos get the most attention. Although knowing the algorithm is helpful towards getting more views and subscribers, you cannot rely on the algorithm because they constantly change. What’s stopping YouTube from launching a Penguin or Panda of its own? YouTube’s algorithm updates don’t cause as much panic as the Google updates (the sky is falling, the sky is falling), but its algorithm does have updates. At one point, the success of a YouTube video was measured by its views. Currently, that success is measured by minutes watched.

You need to grow an audience outside of YouTube and promote your YouTube videos to that audience. Some of the most successful YouTubers also have large audiences on their other social networks and giant email lists. Many of these YouTubers get thousands of views on the days they publish new videos.

Which of these methods was your favorite? Do you have any other method for increasing views? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

The Five Most Vital Parts Of Any Blog’s Success

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Blogging Tips For Success

When it comes to success as a blogger, the short lists work the best. Some people will insist that there are dozens of metrics and tasks that measure a blog’s success. However, all of the metrics and tasks all go back to five vital parts of a blog’s success. You can call these five vital parts the Furious Five of success as a blogger:

 

#1: Social Media Audience

Having a social media audience allows you to boost your social proof and get more blog traffic. Twitter is still a major source of this blog’s traffic, and having my large Twitter audience also boosts my credibility. It is on Twitter where I grow strong relationships with my readers. I have had dozens of conversations with some of the same readers.

Having a strong social media audience gives you a platform to promote your content on the web and good SEO at the same time. SEO is an important part of a blog’s success, but if you focus on being successful on social media, then you will have successful SEO (that’s why SEO did not make this list).

My advice for mastering social networks is to master one social network at a time. If you try to master all of the major social networks at once, you will get confused by information overload. Approaching one social network at a time will make the information easier to obtain and remember. It is better to be effective on one social network than it is to be mediocre on 10 social networks.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1EXbKGh”]It is better to be effective on one social network than it is to be mediocre on 10 social networks.[/tweetthis]

#2: Email List

Your email list is another powerful source of blog traffic. It is on your email list where you can generate a large income by promoting your products and building relationships with your readers. Most of the emails you send to your subscribers should promote your latest articles.

You should only do a product pitch to your subscribers once every six weeks. However, it is also important to avoid doing a product pitch just for the sake of doing a product pitch. If you have nothing new to sell or don’t have a special deal for the old stuff, then there is no reason to promote a product to your email list. Remember that promoting your blog posts and engaging with your email subscribers builds the relationships, not product pitch after product pitch.

 

#3: Traffic

Traffic is primarily generated through social media, an email list, and SEO. You can achieve good SEO by growing your social media audience and getting the people on your email list to visit and share your blog posts. Directory sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg are great places to get additional traffic, but you should primarily focus on your social media audience, email list, and SEO.

 

#4: Products

Your products are your primary sources of income. Advertisements are not worth the time and effort (they lead people away from your blog), and in affiliate marketing, you are dependent on good commissions and other marketers/brands. By creating your own products, you will have a more stable income. If the person you are affiliated with decides to go down from a 10% commission per affiliate sale to a 5% commission per affiliate sale, then you’ll get half the initial commission per sale.

When you create your own products, you have more control over the commission you get, and the commissions tend to be higher. When I write a $2.99 Kindle book, I make 70% of the commission. However, if I was not the author and promoted the book as an Amazon Associate, I would only get a 4% commission. It would take 18 sales as an Amazon Associate to make the same revenue as the author who generates one sale for the same book. The numbers support creating your own products.

 

#5: Content

The content you provide on your blog can either attract loyal readers or scare people away. No matter how much social proof you have, that social proof can only take you so far. The restaurant with a packed parking lot has more social proof than the restaurant with no visitors. However, if the food at the popular restaurant tastes awful, customers won’t come back. Then, that social proof will gradually disappear and the restaurant will become irrelevant.

The content you provide on your blog must give your readers a reason to stick around and come back. There are numerous blogs on the web that provide valuable content. My blog is not the only digital marketing blog on the web, and your blog is not the only blog of its kind on the web either. Providing valuable content will allow you to stand out from the crowd, and as a result, get more returning visitors. The returning visitors are the ones who promote your content, join your email list, and buy your products.

 

In Conclusion

The main reason most people are not successful is because they make success more complicated than it has to be. A blog’s success is not a combination of dozens of methods working together. Instead, a blog’s success is a combination of those five vital parts. By focusing on these five methods instead of the dozens of methods that are available, you will move closer to successful blogging.

Which of these methods was your favorite? Do you have any tips on amplifying these five methods? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

Social Media Is Dead

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Technology continues to exceed our expectations and lead to new breakthroughs. A little more than a decade ago, Facebook was created, and then came the other social networks. Twitter then came into the scene, and Twitter was a big part of my growth. I then expanded my social media reach by using Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook to grow my audience even more.

It was a great run, but social media is now dead. There is a new wave of technology that is far superior to social media or SEO. It took me an entire year to learn how social media works, and it will probably take me an entire year to discover how the new big thing works.

How strong is the suspense right now? To be quite honest, I can’t write blog posts about it yet since I’m no expert at it. A writer for the New York Times already wrote about it.