content marketing

How To Find More Time For Content Marketing

February 2, 2018 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Many content creators have no problem with creating new content. They create blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, and other forms of content. The problems for these individuals lie within content marketing.

It’s common for content creators to see marketing as a necessary but mundane task to perform in order to keep their content brands afloat. Even though content creators understand how important it is to market their content, few find the time to promote their content. Most content creators are just too busy creating.

There is a difference between being busy and being productive. Creating content is a productive activity because all content brands need content to survive. However, excessive content creation can turn into busy work.

A content brand is successful when it has a constant flow of content that is constantly getting promoted. In this blog post, you’ll discover how to find the time for content marketing.

Change Your Mindset

Before we talk about finding more time in your day to promote your content, we need to talk about the mindset. Many content creators view marketing as a necessary evil. These same people view content marketing as something that takes them away from creating new content.

Instead of viewing content marketing as something that takes you away from creating new content, view content marketing as a way of increasing the impact of your existing content. View content marketing as the avenue for spreading your message.

Changing your mindset to make content marketing enjoyable and fun will allow you to more easily implement the tactics I’ll discuss now.

Make Sacrifices

During Episode 77 of the Breakthrough Success Podcast, Dave Jackson talked about making sacrifices to maintain and grow his podcast while spending more time with his family. His solution was to make sacrifices in his existing schedule so he could repurpose some of the time in his day.

As the Cleveland Browns weren’t doing very well at the time of the interview (and at this blog post’s publication), he stopped watching football on Sundays. This was normally a Sunday tradition, but now he had an extra three hours in his day.

Sacrifices like these add up. I recommend looking at your current media consumption (TV and the web) and reducing the amount of time you spend consuming other people’s content. You can use this time to promote your content instead.

Establish A Routine

Content marketing is vast and filled with options. You can promote your content using social media, and that subset of content marketing also contains many options. Even when you pick a single social network, there are still plenty of tactics to choose from. For instance, Facebook presents its users with paid advertising, groups, organic reach, messenger, and more.

And that doesn’t even include things like influencer outreach, getting on podcasts, writing guest posts, collaborations, and growing your email list.

You need to choose which content marketing tactics you’ll implement. Then you need to establish a routine that allows you to habitually perform the tactics you choose to focus on.

Here are some ways you can establish a routine:

Choose a time each day to perform individual content marketing tasks.

Stack a bunch of tasks together and always do them in the same order.

Batch the entire work in 2-3 days of the week so you have the other days free.

Integrate content marketing into your content creation (i.e. reach out to influencers and ask them for opinions/resources that you can then include in your content).

Maintain A High Level Of Energy

Your energy determines how effective and efficient you are with promoting your content (and performing any task in general). If you stay seated too long, you’ll get tired, and the energy lag will hurt your ability to promote your content and pursue more challenging tasks.

Every 25 minutes, I get up and walk around for five minutes. I don’t look at any screens during this time. After the five minutes, I’m back to content marketing. This timeframe is based on the Pomodoro technique which provides a five minute break for every 25 minutes of deep, concentrated work.

I prefer to walk around during these breaks as this allows me to refresh and have energy when I sit back down.

Some of the simpler ways to maintain a high energy level are to eat the right foods and get enough sleep. If you feel tired, take a 10-15 minute nap. Naps help you feel more refreshed which will make it easier for you to tackle bigger challenges.

In the end, you’ll have the most energy if you’re doing work that you love doing. However, you need to keep your bodily needs in check to ensure you’re not burning yourself out, and as a result, not performing at your best.

Delegate More Tasks In Your Business

Chances are you perform a variety of mundane tasks. Even if they are necessary for your business to grow, they are mundane nevertheless.

Some people would fit content marketing into that category, and if you do, then delegate it by all means. However, there are certain parts of content marketing (i.e. relationship building) that should not be delegated to others.

To determine what you need to delegate, write a list of all of the things you want to do for your business. After you write that list, write a list of all of the things that you actually do for your business. Delegate all of the task that aren’t on both lists. If you have a tight budget, delegate the one task that takes the most time and is the easiest for you to explain to a freelancer.

In Conclusion

Content marketing is critical for the success of any content brand. We all know it, but our actions speak differently. Some content creators enjoy creating the content but see marketing as a necessary evil.

By finding more time in your day to promote your content, you’ll reap the rewards of added exposure and traffic to your content.

What were your thoughts on these tactics for finding more time to engage in content marketing? Do you have any time saving tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Choose The Best Blog Post Topics

October 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Each blog post you write involves a time investment. And as you continue along your journey, the time investment you put towards each blog post will most likely grow. To make your time worthwhile, you must choose the best blog post topics.

That way, your visitors love your blog and you love writing the content. To discover the best blog post topics, we’ll start with the basics and then expand upon that concept.

The Basics

First and foremost, choosing the best blog post topics come down to asking yourself this question:

“What do I enjoy?”

I have a strong passion for digital marketing which is why I can effortlessly write about the topic. I once allocated 15 minutes to write about digital marketing for the day but then 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 to do so.

Obviously, we have a range of answers for that question, “What do I enjoy?” 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 I can provide massive value for given my experience (years of experience means nothing to me. Results determine the quality of those years and if I should care. This is just a teen’s rant 🙂 ).

To determine if your content will thrive, you must finally 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 gives me some ideas, I’m more than happy to write about those topics as well.

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 (I copy and paste some comments together to form the skeleton of blog posts). 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 a blog post 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 from it.

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.

5 Hacks For Connecting With Influencers

October 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Relationships with influencers are critical to your content brand’s success: they help you expand your knowledge as well as open doors to new opportunities.

Some of my biggest successes are directly tied to the relationships I’ve built and fostered along my journey. However, reaching out to influencers and building relationships with new contacts can feel overwhelming.

You may feel uncertain about how to go about it, and even question whether you’ll get a response to your initial efforts.

I’ve been there, believe me.

That’s why I want to share five powerful hacks that helped me build relationships with some of the most influential content marketers and productivity experts on the planet.

#1: Interview Influencers On Your Podcast

Both my Breakthrough Success Podcast and virtual summits have allowed me to interact with some of my niche’s top influencers. Interviews are a brilliant excuse for asking for an influencer’s time 🙂

Not only do you get to ask questions and interact with top influencers, you also get to provide your audience with valuable content.

Combine that with the fact that podcasting is a growing and less-tapped-into industry than blogging, and you’ll begin to wonder why more people aren’t doing it.

I currently publish an interview every week, but I am formulating a plan for daily episodes. And my knowledge stores will only grow as I interview more and more influencers – it’s amazing what you can learn from a single interview with a top influencer.

#2: Collaborate With Influencers

As I plan my blog content, I consider which influencers can provide relevant advice, resources or opinions, and contact them well before the publication dates.

I often work on the copy first, and then copy and paste submissions into the post to craft a more engaging article. Once the post is published, many of the influencers I mentioned will end up sharing the blog post to their own audiences, expanding my reach.

If you’re pressed for time, you can simply mention the influencers by name while you’re writing the post, and then let them know you’ve included them in the post once you publish it (and be sure to provide a link).

Some will share it and others won’t, but having at least some influencers share your content is a thousand times better than having no influencers share your content.

#3: Do The Influencer A Favor

The more you give someone, the more willing he or she will be to return the favor. But keep in mind these small favors will change according the influencer.

Some influencers (like me) would love a positive review for their podcasts (here’s mine). Other influencers would prefer you leave a 5-star review for their latest book. Writing a guest posts for the influencer’s site is also a viable option.

Determine which favor holds the most value for a particular influencer, then offer it without expecting anything in return.

If you approach relationships in this manner, it won’t be long before an influencer voluntarily provides you with something in return (if you have to ask, start with something small).

#4: Ask Meaningful Questions

Top influencers love shepherding other people through the path they once traveled.

Gary Vaynerchuk has an entire podcast dedicated to helping others. Want to get on Gary’s radar? Ask him a really good question.

Nearly all influencers recall a time in which they spent countless hours trying to figure things out. When they see other people in a similar situation, they naturally want to lend a helping hand.

Influencers enjoy steering people in the right direction and providing that little nudge to keep them moving forward. And they like it even more when people act their advice.

This is the starting point for repeat interviews and a much greater relationship.

#5: Be Everywhere To Them

You can’t be everywhere for everyone, but you can be everywhere for someone. What’s everywhere for someone mean?

Simply focus on the places where your special someone spends the majority of his/her time. This is why television ads used to work (and why now they are less effective).

Today, people spend more time on Facebook than they do watching tv, which is why social media ad spend has greatly increased over the years.

But that doesn’t mean you should try reaching an influencer with an ad. Rather, you should seek out the places they’re engaging with their readers.

Do they reply to tweets? Do they respond to blog comments? Are they posting a lot on LinkedIn?

These are the places where you need to be. Like, share, and comment on everything they post. Mention their social media handle when you share their content and eventually they’ll notice you.

For example, I notice the people who repeatedly share my content on Twitter more than anyone else in my audience. While I write with my entire audience in mind, I can match names and faces with the people who consistently share my content on Twitter.

Find the platforms most frequented by top influencers who share your mindset.

In Conclusion

Connecting with influencers is as easy or as difficult as you make it. The beginning stage may feel difficult, but as you continue, you’ll have a much easier time connecting with influencers and building relationships.

The ultimate hack not mentioned above is that once you build all of these relationships, you can ask for referrals.

Once I have over 30 speakers for my virtual summits, I ask them if they know anyone else who would also be a great speaker for the summit. They usually make intros and that alone makes relationship building much easier.

What are your thoughts about these hacks for building relationships? Have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

6 Indispensable Factors For Attractive And Strong Content Marketing In 2017

August 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

This is a guest contribution from Junaid Ali Qureshi

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

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

#1: Increased dependence on visual content

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

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

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

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

#2: Is your content interactive?

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

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

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

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

#3: Quality of the existing and new content

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

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

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

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

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

#4: Promotion of the content to the right audience

Image source: http://bootcampdigital.com

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

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

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

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

#5: Influencer Marketing

Image source: http://visual.ly

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

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

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

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

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

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

#6: Consistency in delivering the content

Image source: http://blogpros.com

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author:

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

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

July 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Content Creation Gives You Marketing Ammo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influencer Outreach

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

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

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

Talk about an unfair advantage!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incorporate Internal And External Links

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

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

Decoded: Make Thousands From Your First Virtual Summit

July 4, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Marc-Guberti-Content-Marketing-Success-Summit-2017

One virtual summit can change your life. The rising trend has seen new experts emerge from a single project that took a few months of work instead of many projects that span over many years.

Virtual summits require a lot of work, but they position you as an expert and have the potential to generate life-changing revenue.

Back in February, I wrote a post detailing how to host a successful virtual summit. That blog post was a research project in which I learned what it took to host a successful virtual summit.

This blog post will detail what I learned after hosting the Content Marketing Success Summit which showcased over 50 speakers and attracted thousands of attendees.

CMSS Success Story

CMSS was easily one of the biggest projects I pursued in my life. With the exception of editing videos, and towards the end, video uploads, I did all of the work.

At the end of the summit, I made close to 100 total sales from the All-Access Pass, Blog Post Promotion Blueprint, Training Course Creation Blueprint, Virtual Summit Blueprint, and Content Marketing Plaza.

One thing I enjoyed about hosting the summit was getting the privilege to chat with some of the most successful content creators and marketers on the planet. I learned far more than I knew before, and I am implementing a lot of insights I learned from the sessions.

Some of the CMSS speakers will be guests on my podcast very soon. Other CMSS speakers are speaking at my next summit. If you organize a summit but don’t leverage the relationships you have built, you are making a big mistake.

Now that I’ve provided a brief overview of how CMSS worked out, let’s take a deep dive into the process.

The Beginning

Your first task as a virtual summit organizer is to find the speakers. Without the speakers, you can’t provide your attendees with a legendary experience.

There are several places you can go to find speakers. I’ll list them all here:

Other virtual summits–this is my go-to place for finding speakers for my virtual summits. Virtual summit speakers know how the process is supposed to work. They’ll ask critical questions (I.e. Skype or Zoom?) that will help you with organizing a successful virtual summit.
Podcasts–For my Productivity Virtual Summit set for September 18-25, I found most of my speakers from entrepreneurial podcasts. I committed a day to contact 50-100 potential speakers, and with the success of CMSS, it was easier for me to get yeses.
Guest blogs–An underrated way to find speakers for your summit is to contact contributors for popular guest blogs in your niche. You can easily skim through the guest post to get an idea for the contributor’s expertise, and if that person is the right fit, contact that contributor.

After finding speakers, the next step is to get the site ready. You want the site ready before you contact potential affiliates because a well-designed site will showcase all of the speakers and get more yeses from potential affiliates.

I used Optimize Press to create the CMSS site. If you use Optimize Press for your summit’s site, I will offer a plug-and-play template very soon. You can send an email to marc@marcguberti.com if you want to stay in the loop.

If you prefer to do it on your own, make sure you have at least three buttons on your site. One of those buttons must be above the fold of your site (when your Summit site loads, it should show the CTA button without someone having to scroll down). You must also prominently display all of the speakers.

The next step in the beginning stage is to create an affiliate program. The affiliate program gives people an incentive to promote your summit to their audiences. Leveraging affiliate marketing for your summit will result in a floodgate of traffic that you couldn’t get on your own.

The two premier options for creating an affiliate program are SamCart and ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels offers more functionality but at a higher price. I opted for SamCart for CMSS because I wanted a robust, inexpensive affiliate program.

For your first virtual summit, you want to keep costs as low as possible. You don’t want to find yourself spending thousands of dollars on tools and services and then finding yourself in the red.

Mind Map Your Virtual Summit Sales Funnel

This is where you plan out revenue generation. When someone subscribes, where do they go? Where do you intend on sending people after they buy the All-Access Pass? What’s your email sequence for people who don’t buy right away?

You answer those questions with a piece of paper. You draw out your ideal funnel sequence that leads people from your All-Access Pass to Upsell #1 to Upsell #2 and so on.

When a visitor became an attendee, they got redirected to a Thank You Sales Page. After seeing the Thank You, attendees then see a video and CTAs for the All-Access Pass.

Screen Shot 2017-05-20 at 3.20.39 PM

After people buy the All-Access Pass, they get sent over to a similarly designed Thank You Sales Page for my Virtual Summit Blueprint.

Here’s one final tip for boosting sales: Use order bumps.

Here’s what the All-Access Pass sales page looks like with the 1-click order bump

Screen Shot 2017-05-20 at 3.13.49 PM

Screen Shot 2017-05-20 at 3.16.00 PM

One click turns a $97 order into a $124 order. If 38 All-Access Pass holders click that one check mark, you made over $1000 in extra sales.

For the Virtual Summit Blueprint, I offered a $47 order bump. The order bump is one of the easiest ways to earn extra revenue. One click. That’s all it takes.

Even if you don’t have any upsells or order bumps to offer, offer them. You can start creating the courses and order bumps as soon as you offer them

The Middle

After addressing the beginning stages of your virtual summit, you can then advance to the middle part. Similarly to how we focus on speakers in the beginning of your preparation, you must also focus on speakers during the middle of the process.

Once you get speakers for your virtual summit, you must then interview them. Before you can interview speakers for your virtual summit, you must prepare for the interview. Preparation for the interview requires the following

Research–During the research phrase, you learn as much as you can about the speaker. Learning a lot about the speaker will help you determine a good topic and…
Write a great introduction–The introduction is the make or break point for an interview. It’s amazing how 1-2 minutes will determine the amount of engagement for 30-60 minutes.
Come Up With Great Questions–After the introduction, the engagement you get from your sessions will depend on the questions you ask. When I come up with questions, I think of myself as the client and the speaker as my coach. I’ll ask myself this question, “What do I desperately want to know from this speaker that my audience also desperately wants to know?” Asking myself this question allows me to think of the questions that few people ask. If I want clarification or expansion on an answer, I don’t hesitate to ask for it as I view myself as the client.

Upon completing the interviews, send them off to your video editor or edit them yourself. Getting the videos on Vimeo early is critical to avoiding stress later on. I prefer Vimeo over other options because their privacy settings are unmatched. Plus, you can create a business account and have your video editors upload the videos to Vimeo without giving your password.

The final piece in the middle of the process is to recruit affiliates. Recruiting affiliates is critical to the success of your virtual summit.

Not recruiting affiliates early enough was, without question, the biggest mistake I made. I started recruiting affiliates two weeks before my summit began. Many top affiliates said no because many of them plan their promotional schedules months in advance. You should start recruiting affiliates for your virtual summit at least 2 months in advance.

The best way to find affiliates for your virtual summit is to use Google to find people who have promoted similar products and virtual summits. I interviewed Matt McWilliams on recruiting affiliates on Episode 42 of the Breakthrough Success Podcast. You can access that interview by clicking here.

The Pre-Launch

The pre-launch begins two weeks before your virtual summit is available to your public. During the two week mark, you do two things:

Email your list about your virtual summits to get attendees. You will also see if any of the technology isn’t working. It’s important to learn about any problems before your affiliates start to promote your virtual summit.
Start communicating with your speakers and affiliates. You want to motivate them and make sure everyone knows when to promote the summit. A rule of thumb is to have affiliates promote the summit a week before it launches.

The Launch

After spending months preparing for a successful virtual summit, the day has finally come.

To some people, this day is stressful. If you remember to have fun and how much you accomplished to reach this stage, you’ll enjoy the launch more and make it rock.

The first part of the launch is telling your affiliates that today is the day to start promoting. Provide them with email and social media swipe copy so it is as easy as possible for them to promote your summit. You should also email each affiliate their unique affiliate link so they don’t have to log into a portal to access their link. You can also put all of the links into a Google Doc to make them more accessible for you.

Yes, you have been emailing and using the Facebook Group every day to tell your affiliates what they have to do when the day comes. However, many affiliates will need that gentle reminder, and no CTA is as great as one that must be completed by the end of the day.

On the launch day and the days after, be prepared for a flurry of emails. Your affiliates and attendees will have questions, suggestions, and kind words to offer. You must respond to your affiliates in a timely matter so they can continue promoting your summit without any sense of confusion. You must respond to attendees because that’s your duty as the organizer (unless you outsource questions and suggestions to a support team).

You’ll be sending emails to your attendees every day to keep them engaged as they transition from new subscribers to new customers. You must also email your affiliates every day to motivate them and make it as easy as possible for them to promote your virtual summit.

In the background, you are preparing for the webinar. That’s where the real revenue from a summit is made.