growth hacking

Case Study: How To Read 30 Books In 30 Days

September 19, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

After my first year of college, I decided to do something different over the summer—read a lot of books.

I used a portion of my Monthly Performance Reports to put my reading lists on full display. While I normally read 5-10 books in a given month, the summer days allowed that reading list to morph into 30 books every month.

I didn’t take time off from my business during this time. In fact, I dramatically increased the amount of books I read while preparing to lead a Content Marketing Success Summit, one of the biggest projects of my life up to that point.

In this blog post, I’ll share my story so you can reap the benefits of reading 30 books every month without feeling overwhelmed by work, your personal life, or anything else.

#1: Have The Books On Hand

Before I began my 30-book per month reading journey, I knew I needed to have all of the books readily accessible. So, to put it bluntly, I went on a bargain buying spree.

I knew that by the time I finished reading any given book it would be filled with notes and underlines, so I didn’t mind buying used books (as long as they didn’t have any underlining or highlighting included).

My adventure began on eBay where some people are desperate to part ways with their books. Because the bulk lots included anywhere from 10-20 books per order, I bought books at a rate from $1 to $4 per book depending on who was selling them.

And all of these books were LEGIT, not aged books that are no longer relevant. In fact, I published several books before social media taught me the marketing tactics that work today (often overlooked in the new age of digital marketing).

If you prefer to read books on a device, you’re all set. You can buy all of your books in a few clicks. I prefer reading paperback editions, which is why I decided to purchase books in bulk on eBay.

Buy in bulk

The only problem with book lots is that you don’t get to choose the books on offer; I have multiple copies of the same books because they were a part of a bulk order.

But eventually I learned about Thrift Books, which help you avoid that problem as well as enjoy a wider range of choices and ridiculous bargains.

You may think it’s not worth going through the trouble to find book bargains, but if you want to read 30 books per month, that’s 360 books every year.

In a worst case scenario, saving an average of $10 per book (very possible with book lots and Thrift Books) results in a savings of $3,600 every year!

Don’t Read Word-For-Word

Once you have assembled all of your books, it’s time to read them. But don’t read them in the traditional word-for-word style. Sure, you’ll absorb all of the material if you do, but it will take a longer period of time before you move onto the next book.

When I read books, I skim through them for the most pertinent information. If there’s a section that explains how to create a Twitter account, for example, I skip it because I already have a Twitter account. There’s no need to waste time reading things that you already know.

Similarly, when I buy a productivity book I skip through familiar tips like setting deadlines, 3-Year Plans, and how to set SMART goals. Unless the author shares these common tactics with a very different flavor, I skip to the next part of the book.

Skip Entire Chapters

Not only should you skip over things you already know, you should also get into the habit of skipping portions, or even chapters, of books containing information you don’t want to learn. For instance, I don’t want to learn much about Vine because Vine is a dead social network.

And yet, many of these books have entire chapters dedicated to Vine. Some books are dedicated entirely to the social network. Just remember that information that was once relevant may be outdated today.

You can also skip chapters outlining tasks you don’t want to perform. For instance, I’ll skip a chapter in a podcasting book about editing episodes because I already have a trustworthy freelancer who edits my podcast episodes.

Skipping that chapter allows me to move to the next chapter sooner and, ultimately, to a new book.

Write In Your Book

For a long time I resisted writing in my books, especially signed copies. While I rarely write in books, I often underline with a pencil.

Underlining important points in each of your books makes the re-reading process easier. After all, you have a plan to re-read the best books, right?

At the beginning of each month, I go through my favorite books from the previous month. I skim through what I underlined, and brainstorm ideas. I commit a few hours of one day to this task.

Underlining important text makes this process much faster as I can literally skip hundreds of pages of content. I only focus on what I’d underlined previously because my past self regarded only those points as important.

A Technicality On Book Length

One thing to remember when reading 30 books in 30 days is that book length matters. It’s much easier to read 30 books that average 200 pages than to read 30 books that average 600 pages.

When dozens of books are delivered to me in one day, I start by reading the shorter books first. It’s likely a good thing that I read Tools Of Titans before I began taking my reading goal seriously.

I like reading the shorter books first because finishing a shorter book gives me the dopamine rush to start reading (and finishing) another book.

Get a string of small wins, and it won’t be long before you can read the occasional 400-600 page book with ease.

It It’s Not Scheduled, It Won’t Happen

If you want reading to become a habit, you must schedule it into your day. I schedule at least one hour of reading time every day.

You should also choose one day a week to dedicate entirely to reading books, no professional work. I designate Fridays as my reading days. And even though I spend several hours reading books on Fridays, it doesn’t feel rigorous. Why? Because Fridays feel like a day off from work.

It’s important to find what works for you, but don’t forget that if it’s not scheduled, it won’t happen.

Turn Your TV And Surfing Time Into Reading Time

Professional work can take up hours of your day, but so can TV and internet surfing. You need to eliminate digital surfing from your life because you’re simply watching life happen instead of making life happen. Spectators watch, superstars perform.

The average American watches 32 hours of television every week. If we all switched from digital surfing to reading self-development books, the world would truly be a better place.

The next time you want to watch a marathon, the last episode of a series, or reruns, crack open a book instead. Repeat the process with other bad habits, and with greater intensity, and you’ll have no problem reading 30 books in 30 days.

In Conclusion

Reading 30 books every 30 days will dramatically expand your knowledge and open the door to a variety of possibilities. Reading all of these books requires a mindset shift and the elimination of bad habits. And, of course, the 30+ books you’ll need on hand before you get started.

What are your thoughts on reading 30 books every day? Have any good book recommendations for us? Please share how you plan to implement this habit into your own life. Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

July 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Content Creation Gives You Marketing Ammo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influencer Outreach

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

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

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

Talk about an unfair advantage!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incorporate Internal And External Links

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

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

How To Freelance Without Losing Control Of Your Blog

July 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Freelancing presents a golden opportunity to make money to finance your blogging efforts. After all, blogging itself is a big investment of both time and money — you have to invest in various tools, platforms, and even freelancers.

Still, many people who try to juggle freelancing and blogging end up losing control over one or the other. Balance is the key to keeping both moving forward in tandem, and this post offer tips to help you get there.

Hire Freelancers

When you start earning money as a freelancer, it’s perfectly acceptable to use some of those earnings to hire a freelancer.

Do the math:

Let’s assume it takes you an hour to schedule your daily social media posts. And as a freelancer, you’re hired to write content at $20/hr.

If you hire a freelancer to schedule your social media posts at $10/hr, and both of you work the same amount of hours each week, you’ll have a net gain of $10/hr.

Sure, $10/hr may not sound life altering, but this example gives you an idea of how you can freelance to lighten your workload and make a profit. And the principle can be applied to higher amounts of money.

If you’re paid $50/hr as a freelancer, for example, you’ll have a bit more wiggle room and more money to spend on outsourcing content creation, outreach efforts, or any other business activity that’s important to you.

For content creation specifically, you can hire writers that can imitate your style and complete your projects. For instance, if you’re paid $100 to write an article, you can pay a ghostwriter $50 to write it for you in your voice.

If you work with a good writer, you’ll only need to proofread the article and/or make minor adjustments before submitting it.

Using these simple calculations, it’s easy to see how you can make extra income without making additional time commitments. You are simply shifting attention from one task to another (i.e. from scheduling social media posts to writing content for someone else).

Stick to a Schedule

Part of making the freelancer-blogger journey work for you is sticking to a schedule. You need to delegate certain times of day in which you focus on your freelance work or blog.

That means time stamping when you’ll begin a task, and when you’ll finish it. My own schedule includes running, content creation, summit preparation, showering, eating, and a wide range of other activities – all of which are written into my daily schedule.

Schedule your day down to the minute, but be sure to give yourself some free time because you’ll need short recovery periods to remain energized and motivated.

Connect the Dots

The best freelancing opportunities are high paying jobs that perfectly align with the work you’re already doing for your blog. If you like to write about social media, for example, look for freelancing opportunities that require knowledge of social media.

When your blogging and freelancing efforts work in synergy, you’ll naturally be more efficient since there isn’t as much of a learning curve.

Simply managing a social media account connects with blogging about social media. You can write content based on what you’ve learned (just make sure not to mention a client by name unless you have permission).

Efficiency is Everything

And everything you do should be done as efficiently as possible.

We are either efficient or inefficient at any given moment. Inefficient time represents failure, while efficient time represents success. Strive to become as efficient as possible in carrying out your freelancing and blogging tasks.

And don’t forget to carry it over into every other thing you do. Rather than write emails of several paragraphs, for example, write a few sentences that get your point across. And when appropriate, copy and paste responses that you’ve written ahead of time.

Every second you save adds up. Get into the habit of saving a few seconds here and there, and soon those seconds will turn into minutes and hours.

Identify the tasks that take up the majority of your time. If you’re not sure, simply begin tracking your daily activity over the next month. Once you have these tasks in mind, ask yourself how you can cut 20% of the time needed to complete them and still get the same results.

Here are two critical ways to boost your efficiency:

Have a strong desire to boost your efficiency.
Create systems that allow you to become more efficient.

Your desire will increase as you work towards becoming more efficient each day.

The winning system is dependent on the task and how you work. We all have different philosophies; the key to building better systems is understanding the methods that work best for you, not others.

Some people prefer to spend 2-3 days a month on their content creation efforts; others work on their content a little each day. Some people spend time outlining their blog posts; others let the writing itself guide direction.

I happen to think that if you aren’t using outlines, you’re making an efficiency blunder. But again, the trick is understanding what works for you.

Concentrate on Long-Term Clients

Freelancers spend a lot of their time looking for work and writing proposals.

While there’s nothing wrong with a one-time job, once it’s finished the freelancer must seek out another job, and write another proposal.

If you’re serious about pursuing freelancing, always be on the look out for long-term work and spend time writing winning proposals for those clients.

Not only will you work more efficiently, you’ll have a steady income and won’t always be stressed out about finding the next job.

In Conclusion

Freelancing provides a certain sense of security (you can’t fire yourself) and independence (like working in pajamas?).

Not only that, many jobs have a payout ceiling; more effort and results don’t necessarily translate to more pay. But other jobs pay by performance, and the idea of being paid for what you’re truly worth makes the entrepreneurial journey very appealing.

As a freelancer, you set your own rates. Start small, and as you work your way up, raise them! Use the money to pay for some of your business expenses now with the goal of being completely free to run your business in the long-term.

While it’s harder to get out of the gate initially as a teen (you have to do a lot more to demonstrate your credibility), a huge benefit of starting early is experience.

Freelancing will help you with expenses as you charge forward on your blogging journey. I was able to completely offset my living expenses!

What are your thoughts on freelancing and blogging? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

Update

I joined together with some other experts on a project with the Tommy John team. venThere’s e more tactics in this infographic for freelancing without losing control of your blog or any of your other big projects.

Marc_Freelancers

5 Easy Hacks That Will Double Your Sales

June 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the past several weeks planning and orchestrating a virtual summit, so it’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post.

In the near future, I will offer a training course that goes deeper into the parts and process. But for now I want to share what I’ve learned about how to increase revenues, which was one of the questions I asked myself continuously as I organized the summit.

After all, a virtual summit is a huge undertaking, so its success was foremost in my mind. By asking myself several key questions throughout the process, particularly how to double my sales, I discovered several hacks that I’d never utilized for my business.

I realized early on that I’d been missing out on some great opportunities: if I had used these sales hacks earlier, I could have made thousands of extra dollars!

#1: One-Click Add-Ons

I’ve seen several marketers use this strategy. Basically you offer a main product and entice customers to pay a little extra for added value.

This is similar to the upselling model at fast-food restaurants when the cashier says, “Hey, you’ve already bought the hamburger. Wouldn’t you like a side of fries to go with it?”

That’s what the one-click add-on does (minus the body fat).

Now, if you’ve been to a virtual summit, or know the marketing behind it, you know that the All-Access Pass is a popular product choice.

Here’s how I incorporated the one-click add-on strategy into my virtual summit – in addition to the All-Access Pass, notice what else I offer on my sales page:

The Blog Post Promotion Blueprint is a mini training course I created for summit attendees who are looking for added value. Not everyone will opt in to the add-on, but just one click takes the order from $97 to $124.

While I am still in the early stages of the summit process (no partners have promoted it yet), the one-click add-on has already increased my summit revenue by 17%!

So even after the Content Marketing Success Summit (CMSS) has ended, I will continue incorporating one-click add-ons into future initiatives.

#2: Thank You Sales Page

I turned my Thank You Page into a Sales Page, and something magical happened – I got more sales! Here’s the background:

Most Thank You pages say something like, “Thank you for subscribing. The free gift will arrive in your inbox soon.” Some Thank You pages suggest a few blog posts to read while you wait for your free gift.

But I decided to go straight for the sale. After thanking people for joining the summit, I lead them to a video and a link to my sales page.

Here’s what the confirmation looks like:

I transition from “Thank You” to “Here’s my product” with “but first…”

You can use the “but first…” transition regardless of what business you are in. “Let me ask you a question” is also a universal transition into a sales pitch.

#3: The Evergreen Deadline

The evergreen deadline is critical to the success of a Thank You Sales Page. It combines a stacked offer with a sense of urgency.

The evergreen deadline creates a stronger sense of urgency than the “Cart Closes at Midnight” email. Here’s why…

When you reach my Thank You Sales Page, you’ll see the previous image in the confirmation I sent, but you’ll also see THIS:

I set a 15-minute timer for the $47 special. If you buy the All-Access Pass within the next 15 minutes, you get it for $47. If you wait, the All-Access Pass price jumps to $97.

This is a great way to increase sales even before your summit begins.

And to further increase the likelihood of action, I include the following for All-Access Pass customers:

Twitter Marketing Domination Course ($197 value)
My Productivity Cheatsheet ($47 value)
Boost Your Productivity NOW Course ($147 value)
A video tutorial on the prep work for this summit ($97 value)
Outsourcing Mastery Course ($97 value)

The total value adds up to $585, not including the All-Access Pass itself, which now seems like a steal.

But why stop there? This next piece is extremely important for the evergreen deadline. If anyone buys the All-Access Pass for just $47, I also throw in a personal audit of their website, which usually costs hundreds of dollars.

This offer doesn’t apply to the $97 All-Access Pass customers, so if you want it, you have to buy the All-Access Pass on the spot.

See how much urgency that creates?

#4: Host A Webinar

I believe that ‘not hosting a webinar earlier’ is Biggest Mistake #2 for most people, which comes right behind ‘not starting an email list earlier.’

I’m hosting webinars for CMSS. Not only because I want to, but also because I told every speaker and affiliate that I’d be hosting one. That’s one way to make yourself accountable 🙂

While this post doesn’t explain how to host a webinar, I’ll point you to two valuable resources:

First, I got to interview Jon Schumacher in Episode 39 of my Breakthrough Success Podcast. He shared a vast amount of knowledge about generating massive profit from webinars.

Second, I recommend Russel Brunson’s Expert Secrets for crafting the perfect webinar. The title of the book suggests a deep dive into becoming an expert (and it definitely delivers), plus he literally provides the PERFECT blueprint for creating a highly profitable webinar.

Right now, you can get Russel’s book for free if you just pay for the shipping.

#5: Get Sponsors

This is more of a double-your-revenue tip, but if you double your sales, you theoretically double your revenues.

I wish I’d spent more time pursuing sponsors for CMSS. I contacted a few sponsors later in the game than I should have, but I still generated a fair amount of revenue.

In my opinion, pursuing sponsors is a very underrated way to make revenue.

With that said, my general method for pursuing sponsors is different from writing sponsored posts or using sketchy tactics. You can and should pursue sponsors for a virtual summit or podcast as well.

Want to see the true potential of getting sponsors? Check out this case study in which Brian Appleton explains how he made over $20,000 from his summit with sponsorships alone.

In Conclusion

We all want to double our sales. And once we do, we want to double our sales again (or triple them).

These five hacks will allow you to double your sales and revenue with your existing audience. Once you get these hacks down, you can then focus on generating more traffic.

I got all five of these sales hacks down before I asked anyone to promote my summit. Now that I’ve got the system in place, I’m looking for affiliates to promote my summit. You can become an affiliate for my summit here.

What are your thoughts on these sales hacks? Have any others for us? Sound off with questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

Until next time –

Marc

6 Instagram Hacks to Grow Business in a Month

June 6, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Lale Byquist

One of the fastest growing social networks is Instagram. Everyone knows about it and almost everyone uses it.

But: Do we truly know the power of it?

While most people believe that Instagram is a website for sharing private photos only, proficient marketers use it as an effective tool for growing business.

Source

Although most brands know reasons for using Instagram, there are some stats to prove that this social media platform is in a high demand for modern businesses:

700 million monthly active users
Around 1/3 of Instagram users have purchased a product online
By 2017, 70.7% of US brands will use Instagram for business

In other words, if you want to grow a business, you’re in the right place.

Creating an effective marketing strategy that includes running Instagram account takes a lot of work. However, if you know and follow recent trends, you can achieve success faster without wasting time or effort.

Here comes a list of tips that will help you grow a business in a month:

1. Create Business Profiles

Instagram takes care of its users and its team has announced a new tool that allows brands to understand their followers better. Now brands can create business profiles that give an opportunity to analyze insights: impressions, reach, profile views, website and email clicks. It also helps to understand what works best for your audience.

Source

Switch your account to business as it allows you to analyze statistics which means understanding your subscribers’ needs better so that you can get more followers on Instagram by suiting their expectations.

2. Fulfill Contact Info

If you want to increase the number of subscribers, give them reasons for doing it! Obviously, people pay attention to eye-catchy content, but they want to know who you are as well, so fulfilling your contact info is a must: add a description, website, phone number, address, and any other information that can help people learn more about your company.

Moreover, you can increase blog traffic from Instagram which helps to turn followers into customers and, therefore, grow your revenue. The only one thing you need to do is to help followers understand more about your company, its values, and how they can make the most out of using your products/services.

3. Use Paid Ads

When it comes to business promotion, get ready to spend money. You want to deliver your message to the target audience, right? If so, you need to use Instagram to target your posts, and it costs money. Using paid ads has become an important element of any social media marketing, and Instagram rolled out this service to help brands grow their business faster.

Three main benefits of using paid advertising on Instagram:

It has great targeting: choose your audience to reach the right people with your ads.

It grabs fans’ attention: people spend an average 192 seconds on the site after watching Instagram ads.

It pays off: Michael Kors posted one of the first paid ads and it earned 16 times more followers than their unsponsored posts.

Any other proof needed? 75% of Instagram users take action after seeing an advertised post.

Invest in Instagram ads to attract high-quality followers and, therefore, succeed with running your brand profile.

4. Share Up-to-Date Content

Having an Instagram profile isn’t enough to grow your audience. You need to post interesting and unique content daily that gives something valuable to your followers. If you want to expand your audience and cause a buzz with your publications, posting up-to-date content is the biggest helper.

Post Instagram stories: a type of disappearing content that is available for 24 hours and doesn’t appear on a profile. It’s aimed at showing current events that are not so important to be on the main newsfeed.
Share breaking news: modern people crave for urgent information. When you share up-to-date content, you earn trust and loyalty which means attracting new fans to your brand profile as you help to follow the recent trends.

If you post current news, you earn followers’ trust and loyalty. Plus, you attract new people who want to stay up-to-date.

5. Backstage Photos are Booming

Instagram is a social network that puts visual content first. MDG Advertising found out that 67% of online buyers rated high-quality images as an important element to their purchase decision. It means that good visuals matter.

As most brands promote themselves online, and they know the importance of high-quality images, it’s a normal practice to buy stock photos.

It’s harsh, but true: Internet users are sick and tired of artificial content. Stock photos don’t look realistic to cause emotions and, therefore, you can’t convey.

What’s left? If you want to use visuals, create them! Unless you have a great content creation staff, take photos with your gadget! In fact, backstage photos are booming! If people choose your brand, they are interested in your staff and working process that shows them more about your company, its values, and a lifestyle.
Backstage content is exclusive, so sharing it with your followers has an impact on their loyalty as they become a part of a private community.

6. Get Influencers to Promote Your Business

While most marketers try to deliver their messages to the masses, targeting opinion leaders is a key to success.

To begin with, let’s find out who these people are. An opinion leader, or an influencer, is a socially active person who keeps up with the recent trends and news, and this person has won trust and, therefore, he or she gets asked for advice a lot. All in all, it’s a person who has an effect on the decision-making of other people. If influencers speak well of your brand, you’re about to win: a consumer to consumer communication is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.

Influencer marketing has become an actionable tactic when it comes to business promotion.

Although it has many benefits, get ready for some pitfalls. For instance, collaboration with opinion leaders is a time-consuming task as you need to pick up credible people who have earned trust and loyalty from their followers who might be your target audience.

Once you’ve established good contact with an opinion leader who can promote your business, you’re one step closer to success.

How to collaborate with influencers? Tell them more about your product or service and name reasons for using it (how it can solve someone’s problems).

Give them a sample. To promote your product, they need to be sure that it works well.

Be beneficial to them: you need to pay for this recommendation or give your product for free.

For example, if you run a fashion business, send your item to an influencer and ask to tag your company so that other people can contact you fast.

Source

Every opinion leader has an already existing audience that pays much attention to things, products, and services he or she promotes. Thus, it’s your chance to reach potential followers fast. Give it a try to measure the effectiveness of the results.

The Sum Up

Whatever happens, always put your customers first. Let’s draw an analogy: running a business profile on Instagram is like delivering a speech as you have to do your audience’s analysis to suits their needs. If you show what your product can do for them and how they can make the most out of using it, it’s more likely they will stay with you.

Every business owner dreams of making a business profitable. If you’ve decided to use Instagram as a marketing tool, try to use all tips and hacks to grow your business. All the above-mentioned hacks can help to achieve better results in a month only.

Bonus Takeaways

Interact with your followers and potential fans: like and comment on their content

Include a CTA in your posts: make your followers discuss the topic and involve other people

Use popular hashtags and geolocation to attract potential followers

Run contests to boost followers’ engagement

Add links to Instagram account on other networks

Although running an Instagram business profile is a long-term marketing strategy for growing your business, there are some tips for skyrocketing results in a month. Do you know other hacks that help to grow the business fast?

About the Author

Lale Byquist is a media communications student who runs PrsentationSkills.me website. She is fond of the digital marketing, so Lale studies a lot about it, and social media marketing especially. Feel free to contact her on Twitter or Facebook.

How To Surge Your Blog Traffic

March 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Every blogger wants more blog traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you currently enjoy. What does matter is that you want more of it.

A surge in my blog traffic has made the difference between being relatively unknown to having a successful content brand. Here’s the surge that I’m talking about:

I achieved this by changing the kind of effort I was putting into my blog. Anyone can get these results, and even better, with the right kind of effort.

If you want to surge your blog traffic, here’s what you need to do:

Publish More Content, More Often

The consistency and frequency of your content publishing schedule plays a big role in your blog’s success. To grow my own blog, I wrote as many as two blog posts per day. While these blog posts were much shorter than the ones I currently write, I still published two every day.

I then changed my strategy to write one long-form blog post per week. Apparently, Google likes long-form content, but ironically, that’s when my traffic started to dip. So I increased my frequency to two blog posts, and one podcast episode, each week.

And I’m beginning to see traffic gains now that I’m posting content more consistently and frequently. Eventually, with the help of guest posts, I plan on publishing one blog post per day on this blog.

Getting into the groove requires the formation of daily habits. Daily habits make it much easier for you to get into the flow. My daily habit is to write at least 1,500 words per day. This daily habit earns me a total of 10,500 words each week. That’s anywhere from 2-3 blog posts per week.

Some days I write more than 1,500 words, but I never write less than 1,500 words in a given day. This habit allows me to stay consistent with my blog while writing additional content for my Kindle books.

Another thing that works for me is to set a time and day each week to publish my blog posts. This way, I end up writing the posts well in advance so there’s no last-second cramming.

The less time you have to write a blog post within your deadline, the less value it will provide to readers.

Writing all of this content will help you rank better on search engines and give your readers a better experience. However, you can 1-up your efforts by optimizing your content for success.

On the SEO side, the Yoast plugin is the most valuable plugin in your arsenal. This plugin makes it easy to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

But you also need to optimize your blog posts with internal and external links. Internal links are links to your own blog posts. External links are links to blog posts and articles from outside sources.

Internal links help your SEO efforts by doing the following:

Decreasing your bounce rate
Increasing the average time a reader spends on your site

Both of those outcomes are great for SEO.

External links (to high authority sites) let search engines know that, because you’re linking out to authority sites, you must be an authority site, too.

That’s why I add at least three internal links and at least three external links to each of my posts. Setting small goals like these makes them easier to meet, or even surpass.

Assess Your Marketing Strategy

It’s great practice to assess your marketing strategy once every 1-3 months. By looking at your overall strategy, you’ll see what’s working and what missed the mark.

Look at which blog posts earned you the most visibility. These blog posts have high demand, and your audience will want to read more posts like them. The general rule of thumb is to write content of interest to your audience.

Writing more blog posts based on your high-performing posts will result in even more demand for your content. Assessing your marketing strategy allows you to discover what your audience wants and plan more ways to give it to them.

This also applies to writing books and creating training courses. You want to create a product on a proven topic that is in high demand among your audience. That’s why my first training course was about Twitter.

When I created that course, my audience’s demand for Twitter knowledge was higher than their demand for any other knowledge that I was providing.

The best place to analyze your marketing strategy is the WordPress stats dashboard. While Google Analytics offers more, it can become overwhelming. So I prefer to stick with WordPress stats, which clearly communicate everything I need to know.

One important feature I recently utilized is one that let me discover when most people are visiting your blog. I noticed that most people visit my blog on Wednesdays at 10 am.

Based on this information, I began publishing my podcast episodes on Wednesdays at 9 am. The episodes have just enough time to sit on my blog until 10 am when it’s populated with the bulk of my readers.

The week before, the same insights told me that Tuesday at 10 am is the best time to publish new blog posts based on my traffic stats. That’s why I always publish fresh content on Tuesdays at 10 am, in addition to my Saturday blog posts.

Always apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing assessment in order to leverage influencer marketing. These two methodologies can completely transform your brand’s presence.

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has never been as easy as it is now. Not only does the web connect people from all over the world, but the influencers in the digital marketing niche are generally nice people.

I like to mention at least three influencers in my blog posts. The more influencers you mention, the better it is for your influencer marketing efforts. Here’s the idea:

Promote several influencers in your blog posts
Contact each one
Some will share your blog post

In some cases, getting a single influencer to share your content can yield great results. But more often, several influencers join forces to dramatically expand your reach. There are several great case studies about influencer marketing.

You may feel excited about the idea, but not sure how to implement it. What’s the best way to contact an influencer?

Anytime you approach an influencer, NEVER explicitly ask him or her to share your content. The more influential someone is, the more emails they’re receive of this nature. I can see a share request coming a mile away, and they’re annoying.

Share requests can make you feel like your audience is the only thing this blogger cares about, so it doesn’t feel like the blogger is genuine. On the other hand, if you don’t ask for a share, the outreach email feels more genuine.

When you don’t ask for a share and show your appreciation, you usually get the share! At the end of my podcast interviews, I never ask for a share; I simply say that I’ll provide the link.

And I honestly don’t care if guests share it or not. The knowledge I get from each podcast episode is far more valuable than a social share. Show your appreciation, not your desire to get more reach.

Here’s an email I recently received:

Hey Marc,

My Name is Daniel from The Experiment (www.iaexperiment.com).

I know you’re a fan of creating and growing an amazing blog and website. At least that’s the impression I got from this post:How To Build A Successful Blog From Scratch.

When I published this combination case study and guide about generating a consistent stream of traffic from Quora, I thought you’d appreciate it.

You can pop on over to check it out here:

http://www.iaexperiment.com/blog/quora-traffic

Stay Awesome,

Daniel

This is exactly how you should communicate with influencers.

I know this was influencer marketing in action, but emails like these feel so genuine. Here’s why:

He introduced himself in the first line
He’d done some research on me to illustrate that he actually reads my blog
He wrote content and thought I would appreciate it
Then he provides a link to his post

You can tell from the email that he knew a little about me. In influencer marketing, some people just discover someone with a big number of social media followers and act as if they were a big fan all along.

This was respectful and enjoyable to read as compared to some of the other influencer emails.

My best tip for influencers is to talk to them as if they are people, friends, not as if they are influencers. Influencers are people too, but we forget that far too often.

Get More Subscribers With Your Blog Posts

Out of all of your marketing assets, your email list is the most valuable. The email list is the main reason why many bloggers can make a full-time income by writing content.

It’s no wonder that getting more subscribers is critical. Time and time again, people continue talking about why the email list is your most valuable asset and how their biggest mistake was not starting an email list sooner.

Once people realize that their email list is their most valuable asset, they want to grow that email list as much as possible. There are plenty of methods to choose from. In fact, I compiled a list of 50 tactics that you can use to grow your email list.

My favorite approach is to promote my landing pages to my social media audience and optimize my blog to increase my site-wide conversion rate. I promote my landing page on Twitter at least once every hour and have a pinned tweet which also promotes my landing page.

That pinned tweet has stayed there for a while which allowed it to generate some strong social proof over the years.

On my blog, I provide a variety of options for people to sign up:

Welcome mat
Sidebar picture
Pop-up on the side (HelloBar)
Opt-in form at the bottom of every blog post
Occasional promotion within a blog post

To me, this is a great start, but by no means a finishing point. Buffer released an extensive list on different places to promote your free offer, and there’s no reason to halt your expansion efforts.

Increasing the number of opportunities people have to subscribe (without being spammy) will result in a higher site-wide conversion rate.

ThriveLeads and Optimize Press give me a variety of ways to promote my free offers. These are my two preferred tools for lead generation. Both of these tools respectively feel like 100-tools-in-one type of deals.

Follow The 80/20 Rule

With the 80/20 Rule, you focus most of your time on your top priority, such as your branding efforts. The rest of your time goes towards a secondary priority. In a successful blogging strategy, the two main ingredients for success are content creation and content marketing.

Most people spend 80% of their time creating content (or more) and 20% of their time marketing the content (or less). While it takes time to create your content, marketing is how you get your content seen by more people.

You’ll soon discover that it’s better to spend 80% of your time marketing your content. This idea is repeated by people like Neil Patel, who said that in the beginning he’d individually contact 400-500 unique people about every new post he wrote.

Brand marketing is an integral part of blog growth.

You need marketing to achieve the traffic surge you’re looking for. Finding a few hours to commit to your marketing each week seems like a daunting challenge, but there are some ways to make it work.

You can start by boosting your productivity. The smarter you work, the more time you will have to market your business. You can also outsource some of the marketing to someone else. Why do it all yourself when someone else can help you?

I personally prefer a mix of outsourced marketing and doing some of it on my own. That way, I don’t get overwhelmed by the workload but I’m still in the game. I use Upwork to find freelancers, and outsourcing has worked wonders for my business.

I truly believe that without outsourcing, I couldn’t do most of the things that I’m currently doing.

In Conclusion

Any blog can experience a traffic surge. That traffic surge and its impact on your brand are both dependent on how much effort you exert towards content creation and content marketing. Out of the two, more of your attention should go towards content marketing.

Make the connections now that will expand your reach in the future. Don’t be fearful of sending hundreds of emails to people you don’t know. It’s all part of content marketing.

The easiest way to make any type of change is to approach it gradually. For content creation, Jeff Goins recommends writing at least 500 words per day. While I write at least 1,500 words per day, the 500 word per day goal is much easier to attain for a blogger who wants to become more consistent.

The easiest way to get started is by getting your feet wet. You can’t get the traffic surge without even starting. And you must always start what you finish.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What tips do you have for acquiring a surge of blog traffic? What’s working for your blog? What isn’t working?

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

And if you know anyone who may appreciate these tips, please be sure to pass this on.

[Tweet “How To Surge Your #Blog Traffic.”]

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-marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com