Here's how to create and manage content that will turn browsers into buyers.
As a content marketer who works for a venture capital firm, one of the most interesting aspects of my job is helping our more than 20 portfolio companies develop and refine their content strategies and build their own in-house content factories.
Content marketing is the best way to go to market, and you can be successful at it if you follow these basic guidelines.
1. Get focused Zero in on just one customer segment to start. Then do everything you can to understand your target buyers in that segment and the buyer journey they are on. Doing so will give you a framework for designing the content your buyers need to help them through that journey.
2. Hire a managing editor Every content factory needs its own CEO. That role is typically filled by a managing editor with the skills and experience to develop your strategy and manage your content creation and delivery. Content marketing cannot be an add-on responsibility to someone’s existing role.
3. Build a content creation community Your content factory should extend far beyond the marketing team. Create a real-life community of freelancers, industry influencers, and co-workers to support your efforts, as well as a virtual community of fans, followers, and subscribers.
4. Create high-impact content Every piece of content you create presents an opportunity to make meaningful contact with your target buyers and to get them to move through their buying journey. Take full advantage of that opportunity by creating high-impact content that is optimized for search, reflects a deep understanding of your buyers, demonstrates your brand aspirations, drives conversions, and promotes engagement and virality.
5. Repurpose, repackage, and recycle Find ways to re-use every piece of content you create so that you are maximizing your return on investment. Make sure that smaller pieces of content (such as blog posts, podcasts, and articles) get recycled into larger assets (think eBooks, webinars, and reports). Conversely, make sure any large assets are broken down into smaller pieces of content.
6. Focus on conversions Make sure that every piece of content you create has a clear call to action that directs your target audience to take an action designed to help move them through the sales funnel. Remember that each sale will be the result of many much smaller conversions throughout the buying process.
7. Amplify your content through multiple points of contact Create a plan for delivering your content to your buyers through all of the best distribution channels available. This includes your website and other sites that you can control, as well as social media, direct marketing, influencer marketing, campaigns, and more.
8. Establish a rhythm Get into a regular and consistent publication schedule. That will help you create momentum, build a community, and ensure that your content factory drives real business results.
9. Institutionalize your content factory Experiment to find the best processes for creating and delivering your content, refining them over time. Document best practices so that they can easily be replicated and transferred to others, and to help ensure consistency.
10. Measure what you do The only way to understand what’s working and what isn’t is to track and analyze key metrics. If your content factory isn’t underpinned by a robust analytics dashboard, it will be impossible to glean the insights you need to make improvements.
11. Hold frequent retrospectives Your content team needs to meet on a daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual basis to set strategic goals and priorities, assess progress, and to analyze results. Then you can adjust your strategy as needed for each piece of content.
While there’s no magic formula for success when it comes to content marketing, following the guidelines above will help ensure that you build a focused program that yields meaningful results.
In 2013 content marketing has finally progressed from a buzzword to a legitimate mainstream marketing strategy, and we can expect more such validation in 2014. If you're a brand thinking about investing in content marketing, don't fall for any of these content marketing misconceptions.
Myth 1: Content Marketing is Easy (Compared to Other Forms of Promotion)
Content marketing relies on the Know-Like-Trust factor, and as anyone who's ever been in any kind of relationship will attest, building trust is never easy. It takes a lifetime to build and a moment's carelessness to destroy.
While consumer relationships with brands may not always be this intense, building trust is usually an incremental process. Each piece of content you create adds another layer to the KLT pyramid.
In fact, advertising is much easier in the sense that campaigns are created, run their duration, and results are measured. In content marketing, though, you're essentially creating a lifetime campaign for however long your business will function and as such there's no end date, although there are plenty of milestones for measurement.
Trust, once lost, is much harder and painstaking to regain. Just ask British Petroleum.
On the flip side, content marketing proves again and again that companies who provide transparency and authenticity, both crucial factors for trust-building, may find a more forgiving consumer base when things go awry. Just ask Buffer.
No, content marketing isn't easy, but it is ever-so-rewarding!
Myth 2: Content Marketing Doesn't Take Much Time
"Lack of time" is cited as the top challenge facing B2B marketers, according to the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends report. And it's true. Let's briefly go through some of the processes involved in content marketing.
Content strategy development: This could include keyword analysis, market research, SEO, website audit, content audit, resources audit, and more.
Constant content creation: This is time-intensive, thought-intensive and labor-intensive.
Content distribution and promotion: This includes heavyweight time investments such as social media marketing, email marketing, and search marketing.
Content performance measurement: This includes analyzing content marketing output against success metrics.
I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing how content marketing fits into a brand's shortcut strategy.
Myth 3: Content Marketing can be Automated – Set it and Forget it
Arising from the "we didn't realize content marketing would take so much time" myth is the sister myth "let's put this process on cruise control, yay!" Sure, there's plenty within content marketing that can be automated to a degree (repeat processes such as auto-responders, social monitoring and alerts, curation, and distribution), but many companies try to automate too much, too soon and in my opinion, the wrong stuff.
Some content marketing tasks which shouldn't be automated include:
Content strategy.
Social media strategy.
Community management.
Content creation.
As Jayson DeMers predicts about content marketing trends for 2014, "businesses will look for ways to automate their content marketing, and these efforts will fail."
But my all-time favorite automation rant is from Scott Stratten, who regularly posts a variation of this update on Twitter: "Automating your social media is like sending a mannequin to a networking event."
Myth 4: Content Marketing is Inexpensive
Jay Baer phrased it well when he wrote: "Social media and content marketing isn't inexpensive, it's just different expensive."
While expense is relative, many brand managers assume that content marketing will always be the cheaper alternative to other promotional methods, such as advertising or PR. While in general, a 30-second TV commercial during the Super Bowl could rack up millions compared to a hashtag promo contest on Twitter which could be done for free, comparing such promotional activities is weird. And wrong.
While technology has leveled the playing field in that both big and small brands can achieve results with content marketing, brands are investing widely different amounts depending on perceived value. For example, Orabrush surprisingly achieved great content marketing results with a $500 YouTube video while Neil Patel famously invests five-figure sums for QuickSprout's free educational video content.
Barring unexpected viral hits, most content marketing success will be realized over years of consistent brand building activities and should be budgeted for as such.
"B2B marketers allocate 30% of their budgets to content marketing, and 58% of marketers plan to increase content market spend over the next 12 months," according to the 2014 B2B Content Marketing study.
Myth 5: Content Marketing can be Handled by the Intern
When social media was still a thrill-seeker's term, there were a plethora of articles begging companies not to hand over social media marketing activities based on age. The same holds true of content marketing today. Companies believing that young and inexperienced hired hands can come in and "handle" content strategy and marketing have got another thing coming.
Content marketing is a discipline in its own right. It's got its sea legs and is here to stay. And it's attracting top talent from across industries: from journalists and reporters to create content, to analytics specialists to make sense of the data, to digital strategists to concoct tactical plans. In 2014, content marketing is expected to bring forth more specialized job descriptions and be taken seriously by companies still waiting at the shoreline.
Would you like to improve your social media marketing?
Are you wondering what social media marketing tactics the pros like to use?
We asked top social media pros to share their hottest social media marketing tactics.
In this article, you’ll discover strategies the pros use to boost their social media marketing.
#1: Stay Top of Mind Using LinkedIn Tags
Viveka Von Rosen
On LinkedIn, you shouldn’t send an email blast to every one of your connections. However, you can create lists of “tagged” groupings so you can send relevant and helpful information to your contacts at strategic times.
When you tag your connections on LinkedIn, you can sort/filter them by Tags and—wait for it—send a message to up to 25 people at a time.
The message subject line might be something like: “As a medical marketing consultant, are you frustrated with LinkedIn’s new visibility limitations?” Use the body of the message to resolve their particular pain point. You don’t have to be the creator of the content, you just need to share it.
While you can use a different subject line to share the same tip with any number of tagged groups, I recommend creating an editorial calendar to keep track of what you sent to whom.
Use these targeted messages to create a feeling of trust and top-of-mind awareness, so that when your connections need you (or hear of someone who does) they will think of you! Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert.”
#2: Post in ‘Micro-Opportunity’ Windows
Jay Baer
Here’s my social marketing tip, ideal for B2B. For me, the people I want to reach with my social media marketing are other businesspeople, and which activity are businesspeople engaged in all day? Meetings. And when are meetings scheduled? Almost entirely on the hour or half-hour.
Based on the way meetings are scheduled and conducted, I believe many businesspeople are checking their social media accounts just before and after the top of the hour or the bottom of the hour. It works like this:
Meeting is scheduled from 1-2 pm. Meeting lets out slightly early at 1:57 pm, and attendees check Twitter on the way back to their desk. Meeting goes a little long, and that dip into social media occurs at 2:03 pm. You get the idea.
Schedule your social media marketing at opportune moments; for example, at times before meetings are due to start and end. Image source: iStockphoto
Because of this sequencing, I use Buffer to set my social media marketing to deploy most frequently in these micro-opportunity windows. I also try to pay attention to when people might be at lunch/dinner; although of course that’s a bit of a toss-up due to time zone differences. I haven’t been able to prove that this works (yet), but it makes so much sense to me intuitively that I’m going to keep doing it. Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert.
#3: Research Popular Content From Your Competitors
Ian Cleary
If a type of content is popular with the audience of your competitors and colleagues, it stands to reason that a similar post will be popular with your audience.
This isn’t about copying content, it’s about crafting content around a similar topic, but with a different slant.
For example, Jeff Bullas wrote a blog post on 7 Marketing Trends You Shouldn’t Ignore, which was very popular. I used his post as inspiration to write a post titled 7 Social Media Tool Trends You Shouldn’t Ignore that was also very popular.
There are a few tools that will help with research: Social Crawlytics does an analysis of your competitor’s content and shows you how often each post is shared across each of the social networks. SEMRush shows you what keywords bring your competitor the most traffic so you can target the same keywords in your own content.
Use SEMRush to gain insights into what keywords your competitors get the most traffic from.
#4: Increase Views on YouTube Using These Thumbnail Creation Tips
Gideon Shalwick
It’s no secret that getting more views on YouTube can greatly help grow your business online.
But with the vast majority of videos on YouTube getting mediocre results, everyone wants to know how to get more legitimate views!
One of the easiest ways to get more views is to create compelling, attention-grabbing thumbnails for your videos. The Secret to Creating Powerful YouTube Thumbnails
You need to get three things right for creating powerful YouTube thumbnails. Graphics: Start with a good headshot or closeup of your face to create a personal touch with your thumbnail, then add a colorful background—like a starburst—to grab viewers’ attention.
Use attention-grabbing backgrounds.
Text: Use compelling text inside your thumbnail design to tell your viewers instantly what your video is about and why they should watch it—maybe use your video title. Make sure your text is easy to read, even at the smallest display size of your thumbnail on YouTube, and that the image is on the left and text is on the right.
Make sure the image is on the left and the text on the right of the thumbnail.
X-Factor: Think about how you can inject emotion into your thumbnails. For example, the expression on the face of the person you’re using can be that of shock, amazement, disgust, enjoyment… choose an emotion that will create intrigue and get people to click on the image.
The expression on a person's face can be enough for someone to click through.
To learn more about thumbnails and how to use them correctly on YouTube, check out the YouTube Playbook. Gideon Shalwick, founder of Splasheo and author of Rapid Video Blogging.
#5: Limit Your Social Media Platforms
John Lee Dumas
My social media marketing tip for businesses today is to find three or four social media platforms where you can build the strongest presence that will be most beneficial for your business.
With countless social media platforms available today, it’s impossible to grow a strong presence on every one. Having a mediocre presence on six or seven social media platforms is far inferior to a strong presence on three or four when it comes to your social media marketing goals.
Build a strong presence on three or four platforms. Image source: iStockPhoto.
Why spend time on social media platforms where your audience might be hanging out when you could be spending that time on social media platforms where you know your audience will be hanging out?
To find out if your target audience spends most of their time on one platform over another, join online groups within those platforms that focus on your industry or niche. If you find that the members are really active and engage on the topics you’re focused on in your business, there’s a good chance that a presence on that platform will benefit your business. John Lee Dumas, founder and host of EntrepreneurOnFire.
#6: Find Work With Twitter’s Advanced Search
Kim Garst
One of the great challenges for business owners is being “top of mind” exactly when prospects either want the product or service you offer, or have a problem that your product or service can solve for them.
Think about the billions of dollars spent on billboards, television and radio commercials, print advertising, etc., just to be in the right place with the right solution at the right time. There has to be a better way, right?
What if I told you there was a tool that could put you personally in touch with a new prospect at the exact time they desperately needed you for FREE! Interested?
I’m talking about the Advanced Search function on Twitter.
Let’s say you are a handyman in New York City and you need paying customers today. Simply log into your Twitter account, go to Advanced Search and type in the word or phrase that somebody might use when looking for what you have to offer in the geographic area where you work.
In the example below, we are going to see who is “looking for a handyman” in “New York City.”
There’s your next customer. Imagine how shocked Regan is going to be when you send her a tweet telling her that you’re a great handyman and you just happen to be working in her area today.
So all the people who say you can’t do anything meaningful in 140 characters—certainly not anything business-related—need to rethink that position.
Twitter search is the mother lode for live leads that can create sales for you and your business! Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social.
#7: Grow By Giving Away Your Best Stuff
Melonie Dodaro
Forrester Research found that over 90% of purchasing decisions begin online. Having quality and relevant content allows your prospects to learn about you and the products/services you offer.
Many people are worried about giving away their best content for free. They are concerned it may prevent people from taking the next step and investing in their products/services. I understand this fear, but it is truly unfounded.
When your prospects see the high quality of your free content, they will be much more confident in paying for your services because they already know the great value you deliver.
Give away your best content for free. Image source: iStockphoto
When you create content, you want to think about the problems your ideal clients have and solve them with blog posts, articles, infographics, free reports, webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, etc. Additional benefits you’ll receive include:
A strong reputation as a trusted authority and expert on your topic/niche
Additional opportunities such as speaking engagements and interview requests from the media
Improved SEO rankings of your website with quality content
Giving away great content opens up an opportunity for you to really educate your potential prospects and build trust, positioning you as the solution to their problem. Content marketing allows you to begin a relationship before ever speaking with a prospective client. Melonie Dodaro, founder of Top Dog Social Media.
#8: Connect With Twitter’s Mobile Users
Jamie Turner
There are two easy things you can do to improve the impact of your efforts on Twitter. The first is to do a promoted post that targets people only on smartphones. A lot of people don’t realize that you can target promoted posts just for smartphones (or just for iPhones, or Android devices, etc.).
By targeting people while they’re on their mobile devices, you catch them while they’re out and about and, hopefully, near your business. It’s a great tactic that takes context (where people are located) into consideration when you connect with them via Twitter.
If you’re not ready to spend money on a promoted post, that’s okay, because you can try another technique. My estimates are that about 30% of the people using Twitter are self-promoters, which is a no-no. About 60% are simply retweeters, which is not the most efficient way to use Twitter. And about 10% are conversationalists, which is the best way to use Twitter. Shift to a conversationalist strategy and have a dialogue with your followers to keep prospects and customers engaged with your brand. This deepens your relationship with them, which, over time, turns into customer loyalty. Customer loyalty = more revenue for your business.
Have conversations with your followers to keep them engaged with your brand.
Long story short, if you’re not going to do promoted posts targeting smartphones, then try being more conversational and watch your results change overnight. Jamie Turner, founder of 60 Second Marketer.
#9: Find Prospects Online With Twitter
Tom Martin
To truly prospect with social media, you need to understand where you’re most likely to find prospects online—what I call your Propinquity Points. Twitter is an excellent resource for this.
First, create a private Twitter list called Prospects. Then search for relevant keywords for your company or competitors. Find tweets where folks are obviously talking about your company, product category or competitor in a way that convinces you they are true prospects. Next, add each person to the Prospect Twitter list. Do this every day.
Create a Prospect Twitter list.
Now, create a column in HootSuite or whatever Twitter client you use and populate that column with the Prospect list tweets. Lastly, filter the column so that you see only tweets with links. Create a spreadsheet to track all of the links you find, and note when multiple folks share content from the same site.
Over the course of a few months, you’ll have a pretty solid list of online destinations frequented by your target prospects. This shows you where to make comments on existing content—or better, where to contribute your own content. Tom Martin, author of The Invisible Sale.
#10: Easily Connect With Your Email Subscribers on LinkedIn and Facebook
Stan Smith
Email is critical for notifying subscribers of new posts and generating repeat visits to your blog. However, the latest Gmail Promotional tab addition by Google means that most of your notification emails are routed to the promotional folder where they can be overlooked by your readers.
Tackle this problem by connecting with your blog update subscribers on LinkedIn and Facebook. Simply download and install Rapportive, a social CRM tool that displays social network connections in your Gmail sidebar.
Next, export a list of your blog update email subscribers. Compose a new email in Gmail, and paste 10 addresses from your list of subscribers into the To: Box.
Mouse over one of the addresses and you will see Rapportive offer a Connect button for LinkedIn or Facebook (if the subscriber has an account). Click on the Connect button and customize the invitation to connect with you on the selected platform. Repeat the process for all of your contacts.
Rapportive offers a Connect button for LinkedIn or Facebook.
When you publish a new post, update your LinkedIn or Facebook to increase the chance that your Gmail subscribers will see your updates on LinkedIn or Facebook. Stan Smith, founder of Pushing Social.
#11: Find Content to Share Using Platform Searches
Cynthia Sanchez
When business owners or marketers begin to use social media as a part of their marketing strategy, they often focus on getting the right profile image, when the best time of day is to post or what scheduling tool is best. While it’s important to consider these things, there is something very valuable within each platform that is often overlooked.
Networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest each offer a search feature.
The search feature available on each of these networks can help businesses better serve their customers or clients by providing insight into what the users of each platform are interested in. Search can reveal if there is even a place for their business there.
For example, at a recent conference where I was speaking, I was asked to provide an example of an investment banking business using Pinterest.
After a quick search, we discovered that there were only two investment banking accounts on Pinterest. However, when we switched from searching for pinners (accounts) to searching for boards about investment banking, we found several.
This discovery shows that there is an interest in investment banking among the Pinterest audience and the two accounts currently on Pinterest with investment banking in their name were not active. This presents a big opportunity for an investment banking business to become the go-to source for information on Pinterest.
Earlier this year, Facebook introduced Graph Search. In Graph Search, you can refine your results down to pages, groups and events. Inspiration for future blog posts or even new products or services could emerge from the search.
Graph Search can be very useful for a business.
Twitter offers an Advanced Search feature where you can perform a very specific search, but the option to search for tweets with questions is most helpful. How better to serve potential clients or customers than by answering their questions?
The option to search for tweets with questions is extremely valuable.
Cynthia Sanchez, writes and podcasts about all things Pinterest at Oh So Pinteresting.
#12: Make Your Podcast Easily Consumable on Mobile
Paul Colligan
Smartphones have changed social media in some amazing ways. Perhaps most exciting (for me, at least) is how they’ve helped podcast consumption explode. More and more people are listening to podcasts on their smartphones—and they (and the podcasters) are better for it.
When someone clicks on a podcast from a blog, most smartphones open a new window and start playing the content. It just works. A simple link to an MP3 will “work” on most blogs for a media player and a number of podcasters are fine with that. Install a simple HTML5 audio player on your blog that doesn’t open a new window, but does, in fact, give a similar (in-screen) experience to what listeners see on the desktop. This lets the listener read your content while listening to your podcast.
Which experience below do you want your audience to have when they’re listening to your podcast, the first or the second?
Let the listener read your content while listening to your podcast on mobile.
Paul Colligan, director of content marketing at Instant Customer.
#13: Think of Social Media as a Publicity Engine and Distribution Channel
Brian Clark
The best social media marketing strategy I’ve found (and have used for years) is to think of social media as a publicity engine and distribution channel for content. Even back before Facebook and Twitter, content was the fuel for traffic back to our web properties from social media news sites like Delicious and Digg.
Now there’s content, and then there’s content that functions as marketing. After all, no amount of traffic from social networks means anything unless a portion of that traffic converts into customers and clients.
The content you create must attract your ideal prospect, not random traffic. To do that, you discover the problems and desires your ideal prospect has, and then create content that addresses those problems and desires at an introductory level. Once these prospects visit your site, you must entice them to follow your content over time by email, which is still the highest-converting online sales channel (by far).
The reason content works as a social media marketing strategy is that people not only want valuable information, they like to share it as well. This results in an amazing word-of-mouth effect where new people are exposed to you and your brand each and every day via those in their own networks.
Attract your ideal prospects, then encourage them to share with their own networks. Image source: iStockphoto
People don’t want to be pitched directly via social media. They do seek out and share content though, and if that content is fine-tuned to appeal to your perfect prospect, you’ll develop a social media marketing strategy that works for you night and day. Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger.
#14: Include an Original Photo in Your New Piece of Content
Gini Dietrich
The best social media marketing network most businesses still ignore is Pinterest. Too often, we hear, “Oh I don’t have anything visual to show” so they ignore the fastest-growing network. But here’s the deal: Sixty-five percent of human beings are visual learners. That means they’d rather look at pictures or watch videos than read text, yet most of us still use text as our main method of communication.
Let’s say you run a professional services firm or a manufacturing company or a software-as-a-service business. If you are creating content for your business, include an original photo and you have something to pin to Pinterest.
First, create a board for your content. For instance, I have one on my personal page called Spin Sucks.
A best practice for a new piece of content is to include an original photo. When you publish the content, you’ll want to pin it to the board you’ve created specifically for the business. Click the “pin it” button and get it saved.
Include an original photo in a new piece of content.
Do this every time you publish content for a month. Then go into your Google Analytics and see what kind of traffic it’s driving.
Even if you don’t have anything to sell online, it’s a quick and easy (incredibly easy) way to bring new visitors to your site. And now you have a huge opportunity to capitalize on that new traffic! Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich.
#15: Allow Employees to Advocate for Your Business
Neal Schaffer
One of my best social media marketing tips, and probably the one that is most underutilized by businesses, is employee advocacy.
You’re a business engaging in social media and creating content, but you’re only sharing that content from your company’s account. Wouldn’t it be great if all of your sales and marketing people also shared your content? It would help your company reach more people and help your sales and marketing folks better brand your company in social media.
The recent Edelman Trust Barometer reported that 41% of people believe company employees rank higher in public trust than a firm’s PR department or CEO. With the advent of social business, every employee can and should play a role in your social media efforts, and there are now a handful of platforms like GaggleAMP (you can join my own Gaggle here to see what an employee would see), Addvocate, PeopleLinx, Dynamic Signal, Expion and SocialChorus that make it easy for you to both facilitate and measure your employee advocacy program.
My Gaggle makes it easy for me to facilitate and measure my employee advocacy program.
Your social selling can also be helped by employee advocacy. Prudential Financial embarked on an employee advocacy program, which encouraged their employees to get connected. Now each of their 15,000 employees has an average of 160 connections, meaning that as a company, their message—through their employees—can potentially reach 2.4 million LinkedIn users! It’s time for companies to wake up and unleash the power of some of your most passionate, but often forgotten, brand advocates: Your employees! Neal Schaffer, president of Windmills Marketing, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: Understanding, Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn.
#16: Attend Live Events
Jeff Korhan
Live events are where you experience firsthand the energy and enthusiasm of other like-minded people who share your interests and business objectives.
In addition to building meaningful relationships, you walk away with abundant ideas for invigorating your social media marketing. I’m still mining ideas from my experience at Content Marketing World a couple months ago, not to mention being better connected with industry colleagues.
Jeff Korhan and Joe Pulizzi reconnecting at the Green Industry Conference shortly after Content Marketing World.
One of the challenges of social media is translating our weak connections into stronger relationships that can potentially lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. The solution is to literally get out of the office to meet the people with whom you’re connected online, and make new connections that you can bring to your social networks. When you integrate the two, you enhance the effectiveness of both.
A few years ago, it was predicted that webinars and other digital events would eventually replace live events, thereby putting professional speakers and trainers like me out of business as we know it. It turns out we are now experiencing a resurgence of live events, and the reason is somewhat surprising.
Now we are more connected than ever as a result of social media and people want to meet their connections in person to further develop their relationships. The community and energy of live events adds richness and depth to your social media relationships, and makes a positive impact on that illusive metric—your social media ROI. Jeff Korhan is a small business marketing expert and the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business.
#17: Build Authority Relationships With Google+ Reverse Image Lookup
John Jantsch
Networking for link relationships has taken on a bit of a popularity feel due to Google’s emphasis on authority when it comes to content.
Links from sites that Google ranks highly have always been important, but now individuals inside of Google+ carry a great deal of weight as well.
It’s important to build relationships in your industry with those authors whom Google already thinks highly of. I’m not talking about stalking, I’m talking about discovering the most valuable relationships and finding ways to build value within them. Find those authors in your industry who appear with an author box in common searches with your industry and do a Google reverse image search to find where they contribute content currently.
Find an author whose image shows next to highly indexed content
Navigate to their Google+ profile, right-click their profile image and copy the image URL
Paste the image URL into a Google Search by Image box
Scan the results to find a great deal about their contributed content landscape
Create a plan to build relationships based on value
Reverse Google image lookup reveals a list of places where this author contributes.
You’ll turn up some great guest post opportunity possibilities for yourself, as well as gain some insight into ways you can connect with authors of authority. John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Commitment Engine and The Referral Engine and the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.
#18: Actively Use SlideShare Pro to Acquire Subscribers
Joe Pulizzi
A subscription strategy is critical to any social media and content marketing professional. I’m astounded that more marketers aren’t actively using SlideShare to acquire subscribers. If you’re not familiar, SlideShare was purchased by LinkedIn and sees about 100 million visitors per month. Simply put, SlideShare is the YouTube for PowerPoint presentations (and so much more).
A SlideShare Pro account starts at $16 per month and lets you collect leads and/or subscribers. Also, SlideShare can be integrated with most marketing automation systems.
At Content Marketing Institute, we’ve been using SlideShare Pro for two years now, and it’s our number-two overall source for new subscribers. We’ve done nothing different with deploying content on SlideShare, but now we actively drive new leads.
The images below show one of our presentations on SlideShare.
Use SlideShare to acquire subscribers to your content.
The second screenshot shows the SlideShare Pro subscription popover that appears near slide 10 of a presentation. The popover can easily be skipped so viewers can access the full content, but on this presentation alone, we’ve collected over 500 subscribers with no additional work. Need help with Managing YOUR Internet Marketing? Contact us and visit:http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/internet_marketing.html
Introducing Buffer for Google+: The easiest way to post to your Google+ Business Page
An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next.
It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone.
Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+ Page up to date.
Of course, you can easily schedule any update that you would be able to post to the other social networks Buffer supports (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and App.net).
To make this all super straight forward to get setup, let’s dig in and see how you can get setup:
How to setup your Google+ page with Buffer
If you’re signed up for a free, awesome or one of our business plans won’t matter and all you have to do is hit the “connect account” button. From there, simply hit the G+ page:
Once you hit connect, simply accept all of Google’s terms to start publishing to your Google+ page through Buffer with one click:
And that’s it, you’re now all set to start using Buffer to schedule and publish to Google+. Simply untick or tick the avatar to choose posting with it:
Of course this works seamlessly through our browser extension and app integrations. Any article you come across now can be scheduled through Buffer for your Google+ page:
But wait, there is more! We collected some of the best tips to make publishing to maximize posting to your Google+ page with Buffer.
2 tips for publishing great content on Google+ with Buffer
1. Improve the Formatting of your posts through Buffer
Google+ has a very powerful posting editor that let’s you format your text in a variety of ways. Of course, all of these also work through Buffer, here are the most important ones you need to know:
The most important ones are below. Left is the formatting to get the right handside once you hit publish:
*Word* = Word
_Word_ = Word
-Word- = Word
Bonus: You can use those same formatting options from:
So when it hits Google+ it will appear fully formatted as specified in your comment (bold in the above case).
2. Super easy image posts for the #1 picture social network
Similar to how we’ve already show-cased for Custom scheduling your social media posts you can do the same thing with Google+ posts.
A quick glance over at Google+ will show you that it’s an incredibly picture focused social networks. Anything that gets exposure in our stream is an image.
With Buffer, all you have to do is install our browser extension. Now any image you come across on the web, simply right click on it and you can add it to your Google+ queue:
This way you’ll be able get all the attention your posts deserve as they will show up bright and shiny in your followers news stream:
You can try image posting of any of the images above by simply right clicking it right now if you have our browser extension. Sign up for Buffer and check out the brand new Google+ pages integration:
