Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Congratulations! You have a brilliant idea that will change the lives of millions. All you need now is the proper funding.

That should be easy right? All you need to do is start a Kickstarter campaign!

WRONG!

Kickstarter is one of the most daunting platforms you can take on. The process for creating a successful Kickstarter campaign is elaborate and vast. It can be hard to know who to trust or follow to ensure your Kickstarter is an actual success.

Don’t worry though, I’m here to give you a no-nonsense briefing that will ensure your Kickstarter gets you where you want to be.

Here are the first things you should know

  • You should have at least 20 people you personally know that would buy your product. If you don’t, you can’t say you have a product the majority will want. The only exception to this is if you somehow have a huge following and people will buy from you purely due to your influence.
  • You need to pick a date and stick with it! This will force you to work your ass off and increase your likelihood of success. If you have no pressure to perform and you keep pushing deadlines back, you will set yourself up to fail.
  • You don’t want a failed Kickstarter! A failed Kickstarter is a big stain on your reputation. Inviting somebody to support a failed Kickstarter looks really bad, and you can’t delete a Kickstarter once it’s made.

Here are the three fundamentals to a successful Kickstarter campaign

  • A solid product
  • A landing page that converts well
  • Good web traffic

Now let’s break those down.

First, a solid product!

So how do you figure out if you have a solid product? Well…

  • Read ‘The Mom Test’. People will always tell you what you want to hear, not whether the product is actually viable. Read this book and you will know how to tell if there is a real demand for your product or if it needs improvement.
  • Create a pre sign-up form. If nobody signs up or shares the form, that’s a bad sign.
  • Look for a social reaction when you announce your product. If nobody cares, that’s a red flag.
  • See if you can identify at least 20 people (actual people!) who would definitely buy your product.

Next, a landing page that converts well!

How do you create a landing page that converts well, you ask? Well…

  • Try Unbounce, Leadpages, or Clickfunnels, to create your landing pages. Each product will allow you build, publish, and A/B test landing pages. Any of them will work, so just choose the one that appeals to you most.
  • Keep your site clean and simple – you want it to do one thing. So wherever possible, avoid extra sections/offsite links e.g. Twitter, Facebook. Just create a sign-up page with as few fields to fill in as possible.
  • Your site should be fast, easy to use, and mobile-friendly. It should include as many payment options as possible. Your product must be simple to buy.

You will also need a killer video. Hire a good team to create a video for you. You can look into Raw Shorts for explainer video software and Premium Beat for high-quality royalty-free music.

Last, good web traffic!

Your internet community should be jumping with excitement when your Kickstarter is about to start. You will need to do a big pre-launch campaign and everybody should be acting like it’s Christmas.

So track your links!

  1. Setup Google Analytics on your website
  2. Read this resource. You want it to be easy to see which vendor is sending you the good traffic.

Next, send your Kickstarter viral by utilizing a contest. You can use the platform Queue to create a contest. Users get ranked by how much they share and spread your content. Create enticing prizes for your top three to make your content well-known pre-launch.

For example, if you offer an underwear subscription box: first prize could be free underwear for life; second prize could be free underwear for one year; and third prize could be two pairs of underwear delivered in a gift basket.

Or, if you were launching an online coaching program: first prize could be free coaching for a year; second prize could be one month of power coaching; and third prize could be a one-hour ‘deep dive’ coaching session.

Remember, you need to go all out or walk away

You can’t just send out a single tweet and expect your campaign to take off. You need to constantly message, tweet, set talks, meetups, connect with influencers and reach out to magazines while working on a Kickstarter. You can’t be meek or sit on your ass. If you’re not ready to work yourself to death, it’s better to stop now.

Take some time and figure out what activities will get you the biggest returns on traffic.

  • Build relationships, seek mentorship, give and seek advice and grow value.
  • Seek press coverage or offer guest posts to publications.
  • Build relationships with journalists/get contributor accounts.
  • Create your own Facebook group and email marketing list, and set growth goals. How big do you want to be in one month, two months, and more? How do you plan to engage and expand that community?

You want things to be as predictable as possible. No ‘silver bullets’, just lots of consistent shots. Have your dream shots (e.g., P.R/Influencers). They will get you more immediate traffic than your own networks, but you can’t rely on them.

Wrapping up

Now that you know the three fundamentals of running a successful Kickstarter campaign, you have all the basic building blocks you need to get going. You will be working long and hard, but if you put the time in, you can become a big success.

All good things in life come to those who invest time and sweat. Good luck!

Guest Author: Vin Clancy is the Author of “Secret Sauce: A step-by-step guide to growth hacking”. Founder of Magnific, Planet Ivy, Screen Robot.

The post The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.


Read Full Article: http://bathseoexpert.tumblr.com/post/168045834006

How to Adopt a Customer-Centric Strategy for Your Content

adopt-customer-centric-strategy-content

Does your company look at content through customers’ eyes? Here’s one way to tell: Look at your marketing content. For starters, riffle through some titles. Do the words typically convey customers’ concerns? Or do they mostly call attention to the things you sell?

If products hog the spotlight, you’re missing opportunities to build customer relationships and, ultimately, revenue. You’re also missing opportunities to streamline your content efforts throughout the organization, including distribution, management, and reuse.


If products hog spotlight, opportunities are missed to build customer relationships & ROI. @marciarjohnston
Click To Tweet


The content team at Red Hat found this out first hand. A few years ago, the team took a hard look at the company’s content and found that it was heavily oriented toward what Red Hat sells (IaaS solutions, PaaS solutions, Linux solutions, and so on). The team discovered loads of diverse content that was hard to find, disorganized, difficult to reuse, and, most importantly, not customer-centric, says Red Hat’s marketing content curator and librarian Anna McHugh.

After the team looked at the content through the customers’ eyes, the path became clear. They created a framework around the audience’s challenges, reorganizing and tagging the content accordingly. They then decided which content to retire, which to refashion, which to create, and which not to create.

The content now better serves people inside and outside the company.

The results? “Promising,” Anna says. Although it’s impossible to tie the content overhaul directly to the company’s financial performance, she believes that the new focus on customer-oriented content contributed to Red Hat’s highest first-quarter revenue growth in four years. Revenue specific to emerging technology (including app development) ­– an area related to the top customer challenges that Anna’s team helped identify and address­ ­­– grew year over year by 41% in the first quarter and 44% in the second quarter.

You don’t have to work for a technology company to adopt the Red Hat approach. What has worked for it could work for any company in any industry. Here’s what the team did:

  1. Identified the business challenges that keep its customers up at night
  2. Adjusted the content framework to reflect those challenges
  3. Tied the metrics to the adjusted framework
  4. Audited the content for gaps and filled those gaps

Drawing from emails with Anna and from her Content Marketing World talk, Beyond Traffic Reports: Using Data, Organizational Messaging, and Passion to Reinvigorate Your Content Strategy, this post sums up how the Red Hat content team did all this and how you can, too.

1. Identify the business challenges that keep your customers up at night

Before you can organize your content in customer-centric ways, you must identify your customers’ top challenges. For starters, Anna says, learn what you can from your sales team: “Sit down with them and say, ‘OK, what are you consistently seeing and getting questions about?’ That input helped us flesh out our customers’ business challenges and the use cases that fall under them.”


Identify customers’ top challenges before organizing #content in customer-centric ways. @amchughredhat
Click To Tweet


Based on conversations with Red Hat salespeople, customers, and partners, a cross-functional team (including the content team) evaluated the company’s buyer personas and came up with the top four challenges facing their customers and prospects. As Anna explains: 

The evaluation was all about getting real-life feedback from potential Red Hat customers rather than relying on the formal personas to decide what to create and distribute. Our research also helped Red Hat refine and deepen its understanding of the personas and flesh them out.

Today, the four challenges inform not only the way the content teams plan and organize the content but also the way Red Hat’s sales and marketing teams talk with customers.

When people visit the Red Hat website and click “Technology,” they can quickly find content that will help them because they can navigate based on the challenge they’re facing.

red-hat-website

If you wonder how a company can narrow its customers’ top challenges to four, keep in mind these are high-level challenges. Each contains a range of use cases. For example, within the challenge “build more modern applications,” the use cases vary. Startups and multinational enterprises, for instance, have separate issues related to building apps. “We create different content for each use case,” Anna says. 


Organize your #content by customers’ challenges AND by product categories, says @amchughredhat.
Click To Tweet


Anna isn’t suggesting marketers abandon product-oriented content. Every company needs to inform people about its products and services. Her point, she says, is:

For your sales and marketing to succeed, demonstrate empathy and understanding of your customer’s problems, and then kick off conversations with them about how you can help.

2. Adjust your content framework to reflect customers’ top challenges

After you determine your customers’ top challenges, align your content framework accordingly. By “content framework,” I mean the way your team thinks about your whole collection of content at the highest level, including the metadata used to categorize and otherwise tag content.

I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes way your team sees your content hanging together, the buckets it falls into. Before this initiative, Anna says, Red Hat had no metadata strategy to help people find useful, customer-relevant content:

It became clear that it was not just the content itself that needed to become more customer-focused but also the mechanisms and structure for creating, sharing, and reusing that content.

Anna emphasizes the importance of labeling content such that it helps employees, customers, and prospects find or analyze the content they care about. Whether she uses the term “taxonomy,” “tagging,” or “labeling,” her main takeaway is: Identify topics with metadata that enables everyone to easily discover groupings and relationships between pieces of content.

Give your metadata as much attention as your content. Otherwise, your company doesn’t get full value from its content as a business asset.


Give your metadata as much attention as your content, says @amchughredhat via @marciarjohnston.
Click To Tweet


CMI’s recent content management and strategy research confirms that while 92% of respondents say their brands view content as a business asset, few marketers have the processes and tools to make this a reality. Key to those processes and tools is strategic use of metadata, including taxonomy.

Anna’s experience supports this observation:

Sometimes when I talk about taxonomy, people’s eyes glaze over. Sometimes they understand – aha – it’s about how we label all those pieces and how we find the ones we want and link them together.

A thoughtfully designed, well-executed taxonomy (here’s one example) forms the backbone of all the analytical work Anna does. It enables her to say, “OK, I want to see all the content related to this product and this topic and this persona and see how it’s been doing and see what we need to improve.”


To use and analyze your #content profitably, tag it thoughtfully, says @amchughredhat.
Click To Tweet


While Anna avoids adding to the Red Hat taxonomy whenever possible – taxonomies can get unwieldy quickly – she decided that the top four customer challenges merited new tags. And each piece of content needed one or more of those tags to indicate which of the four main customer challenges it addresses. As Anna explains:

Adding the new tags to all our existing content meant tagging a lot of pages and a lot of collateral. I drank gallons of coffee and knocked out the job in a couple of days.

Thanks to Anna’s caffeine-aided dedication to applying metadata to thousands of pieces of content, people can now browse the Red Hat site under the subject of “technology” by clicking around in four categories that reflect the highest level of the taxonomy: product line, topic, industry, and customer challenge.

red-hat-technology-categories

Red Hat has other categories for internal use, but these are the ones it exposes on its website today.

Anna’s team took time to roll out the new framework across the company and the investment paid off. Sales and marketing, for example, now know where to find content that addresses customers’ pain points. When the team puts together email campaigns, for example, they know when to reuse what they have and when to create content from scratch.

As your content framework takes shape, look for ways to apply it to every type of content decision you make: what content to create, what content to repurpose or update, how to present that content, and so on.

3. Tie your metrics to your adjusted content framework

The adjusted content framework, with its rigorous approach to tagging, enables the content team to glean new insights through the measurement tools across all platforms. These tools include Adobe Analytics (not all that different from Google) and internal tools used by Red Hat’s salespeople to pitch content and collateral.

The content team can now look beyond web traffic and downloads to see how their own salespeople use the content. As Anna says,

We have a slick tool, Highspot, that shows us who is pitching the content to which accounts within Salesforce. We call our instance of this tool the Red Hat Content Hub. It enables us to merge all that data and look at a report that says, ‘OK, this is how we use this content internally, and this is how people use it outside of our organization.’

A shared understanding of the top customer challenges can help “slice and dice your content performance data to get a fuller picture of a prospect’s needs, which helps your sales representatives create a unique relationship with them,” Anna says. For instance, if a customer researches more than one challenge or investigates several related use cases, sales reps get a better idea of that person’s needs.

This shared understanding of people’s challenges also helps teams align organization-wide messaging and optimization. At Red Hat, marketing focuses on quarterly editorial themes, most of which are derived from or directly related to the customer challenges. “By watching engagement data for specific themes during a set period,” Anna says, “we’ve gained additional insight into the customer challenges, and we’ve built on that by optimizing assets that did well when featured.”

4. Audit your content for gaps and fill those gaps

After you identify your customers’ top challenges, you want to know how much content you have that addresses them. You also want to know what content gaps you need to fill. To learn these things, inventory and audit your content.

Now that Red Hat’s content team knows what they have and how to find it, they spend a lot of time repurposing and curating content. “When you come up with a new framework like this, it’s tempting to create a bunch of new content related to it,” Anna says. Red Hat didn’t have to do this. The team found it had hundreds of pieces of content that already addressed the challenges.

For example, if someone asked the team to create new content on customer challenges related to using containers, they could point to their 55 articles on that topic.

Red Hat’s new framework ­– based on its top customer challenges – has helped the team see what content they needed to weed out and what new content they needed to create, including pieces like this:

  • Vendor-agnostic guides
  • Conversation guides
  • Sales presentations
  • Marketing collateral

Here are three examples of marketing collateral developed by Red Hat to directly support the customers’ challenges.

red-hat-marketing-collateral

Look closely at these three titles, and you’ll see parallels in the phrasing of the top four customer challenges.

  • “Integrating Modern Infrastructure and Services” addresses the second challenge (integration).
  • “Answer Digital Demand With Cloud Infrastructure” addresses the third challenge (cloud infrastructure).
  • “Optimize IT to Help Your Organization Grow” addresses the first challenge (optimizing what you have).

red-hat-by-challenge

These new pieces of collateral have proven especially helpful to salespeople and to the marketing and events teams, Anna says.

Conclusion

For all the time and coordination it takes to pivot from a product-centric to a customer-centric focus, the benefits are worth it:

  • Stronger empathy for and alignment with the customer, which transforms transactional relationships into holistic relationships and leads to more sales
  • A clearer sense of purpose for the organization, which feeds innovation and collaboration
  • Purposeful, transparent content creation, distribution, and reuse

Is your company taking steps to make its own pivot? How’s that effort going? Tell us in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by the sources, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Make plans today to learn in person to boost your knowledge about how to implement a customer-centric content framework. Register to attend Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Adopt a Customer-Centric Strategy for Your Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

6 Tips to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn

6 Ways to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn

In February last year, LinkedIn gave every member in the U.S. the ability to publish posts on LinkedIn – and the response was swift and enthusiastic. In fact just recently, LinkedIn reached more than one million posts.

Now since LinkedIn wants each one of more than 330 million members to be able to share their insights with other professionals across the globe, they’ve taken another big step toward that goal as they expand the ability to publish on LinkedIn to all members in English-speaking countries.

That’s 230 million users around the globe who can now tell their stories, show their expertise, and express their ideas on LinkedIn.

In the USA the statistics are compelling.

  • 212 million business leads generated
  • 8 out of 10 LinkedIn members drive business decisions
  • LinkedIn member’s average income is $86,000 (which is 23% higher than the US general population)

LinkedIn publishing

Infographic source: Designinfographics.com

Becoming a publisher on LinkedIn can be a powerful way to reach your target market and generate new leads. The new platform promises to match the blog’s topic with users who share an interest in that particular vertical.

It also gives you greater exposure to your current network given every blog you post is distributed to their news feed and displayed within their notification settings located at the very top of their LinkedIn profile.

If your contacts like the article and decide to share that on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, this will not only create greater exposure but those who aren’t connected with you; may like your work that much that they end up “FOLLOWING” you to receive future posts helping you create a following of raving fans for years to come!!

My blog post results so far:

  • Appeared on the homepage of LinkedIn 4 times now
  • Reached over 128,000 blog views and 1000 comments
  • Shared more than 20,193 times
  • Generated over 430 leads
  • Increased my following by an extra 2,300

Here’s a screenshot of a few articles I’ve written:

LinkedIn articles

How to know if you’ve been approved to publish

To know whether or not you’ve been approved to start publishing content, simply go into your LinkedIn account. If you’ve been approved there will be a grey pencil icon on the status box at the top of your home page as illustrated within the image to your right.

pencil icon on linkedin

If this pencil icon is not displayed, it means that they have not rolled out the publishing feature to your account. Not to worry, simply email their customer service team and request an upgrade to your profile so you can start publishing on LinkedIn.

Publishing your blog is real easy

Simply go to the home page of your account, hover over the pencil icon I showed you earlier. When you do this it will reveal the text “create a post”.

Once you’ve clicked on the link, it will then direct you to a page where you will see a blank blog post ready for you to populate with your headline and main copy.

Start by thinking about your headline! Make sure it’s short, sharp and compelling. Once you have your headline figured out, go ahead and write your copy. I find generally anywhere between 500-700 words is a good length.

LinkedIn publishing platform

Given that any content you publish on LinkedIn is going to be associated with your profile (and be visible to your network), you will want to ensure that the content you publish on LinkedIn is of the highest quality. Your LinkedIn profile, after all, is your professional online identity. That means your reputation is at stake. Don’t publish anything that could jeopardize or harm your reputation.

Plus the better the content and the more compelling your headline, LinkedIn may end up featuring your article on one of the categories within the “Pulse” network or better yet feature it on the home page giving you visibility to over 300 million members worldwide.

6 tips to implement before publishing

Here are the top tips to create and publish a killer article on LinkedIn.

1. Best dates and times: Generally I have found Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning between 8am-9am is the best times to post. I should note that these times are based on AEST, you may want to test out your own time zone to see what works well for you.

2. Importance of quality content: I touched on this briefly before but the better and more valuable your content the greater impact you will make on your existing and new followers.

3. Preview your content: Before publishing your post always make sure to preview your work. This will allow you to see whether or not your text are aligned with any pictures or videos you have inserted, if heading are properly spaced out, and if your article is properly laid out, etc.

4. Include videos & images: Break up your text with images and videos so that people don’t get information overwhelm when they first visit your blog. Always make it a habit of listing a few tips or provide a how to guide within a section of the blog. Most people will skim through your article, so this is a great way to provide quick rich content.

5. Ask questions: Doing this demonstrates your genuine interest in feedback. It also makes it an interactive opportunity that encourages participation. Simple questions like “do you agree?” or “how have you seen this done?” are a call to action that can start the ball rolling.

6. Check the analytics: LinkedIn gives you great analytics to show you the success of your articles. This gives you a great opportunity to pay attention to which types of articles are getting the most views, comments, and social shares.

Following the same suggestions listed above, below is a screenshot of a blog I wrote on LinkedIn. Within 1 hour, it was featured on the home page and stayed as the top story within the “Entrepreneurship & Small Business” category of LinkedIn’s Pulse network for an entire day helping me reach over 9,000 views and over 100 comments.

LinkedIn article that made it on the homepage

Now that you know what steps are required to start blogging on LinkedIn, hopefully its inspired you to get your next article out there for the whole world to read.

You never know, you’re post may start that conversation with your next investor or business partner; it may get you noticed by others in your company or industry and help enhance your reputation as a thought leader. But most of all, it may simply help others.

Whether you’ve just written your first post or have a few under your belt. I’d be interested to know what strategies you’ve implemented on LinkedIn to grow your following and engagement with that audience.

Author: Alex is an entrepreneur and founder of Linkfluencer, the world’s leading online community for LinkedIn training. He loves playing basketball, travelling and covering the latest stories on entrepreneurship. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Facebook

“FREE” Webinar – Discover the 3 Steps To LinkedIn Mastery

Over the past couple of months I’ve received a ton of emails from readers asking me to share more insight in and around LinkedIn so I’ve decided to hold another webinar with Alex Pirouz, founder of Linkfluencer.

The first one I held a few months back was well received with over 3000 people registering for the session. Click here to register

Free Webinar On LinkedIn

The post 6 Tips to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.


Read Full Article: http://bathseoexpert.tumblr.com/post/168022026401

6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics

6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable resource. It offers a wealth of information that content marketers can use to build and refine their strategies. Whether it is detailed visitor demographic information or deep insights into campaign performance, it can get seriously granular regarding user behavior.

The only problem is, it doesn’t do this automatically – you have to know how to set it up right to get the most out of its capabilities. The default settings don’t support the activities listed above and the tool unfortunately isn’t that intuitive.

If you find the Google Analytics interface slightly overwhelming or are concerned that you are not getting the most value when analyzing reports, you may need to take a step back and make sure you have your system set up properly.

Here are six steps to set up Google Analytics in a way that enables accurate, data-driven decision-making.

1. Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Before you connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console, most keywords show in Google Analytics as ‘not provided’.

If part of your job as a content marketer is to optimize content for SEO using keywords and evaluating how those keywords are performing, this might mean you’re stuck using two separate systems for reports, gathering traffic data from Analytics and keyword data from Search Console.

But by connecting Search Console and Analytics, you can access keyword data directly in Analytics alongside all of your other reports.

To connect the two systems:

  1. From your site’s Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Admin’ tab.
  2. Next, click ‘Property Settings’, which is located in the ‘Property’ column.
  3. Scroll down the page until you find the ‘Search Console’ header. Click the ‘Adjust Search Console’ button.
  4. Scroll up the page slightly, looking for the ‘Search Console Settings’ section. Click the ‘Edit’ link below the descriptive text.
  5. Click the radio button next to the Search Console property that’s associated with the Analytics account and click ‘Save’.

You can now access all keyword data directly in Analytics!

From your Google Analytics Dashboard, click ‘Acquisition’, and then expand the ‘Search Console’ section. The ‘Queries’ report displays all of the data you’re used to pulling from Search Console, such as keywords, clicks, impressions, and average rankings.

You can also use this functionality to connect keywords to landing pages. From the dashboard, click ‘Acquisition’, expand ‘Search Console’ and select ‘Landing Pages’. Then, click the URL for any landing page to see a report of organic search keywords that led to clicks and/or impressions for that page.

2. Enable Audience Tracking

The default Google Analytics dashboard makes it simple to find some data about your audience – what devices they’re using and where they’re located – but those details are only a very small percentage of the detailed demographic information Analytics can provide.

Google Analytics allows you to collect details like average visitor ages, genders, lifestyle and purchase interests – however, to access these details, you have to enable audience tracking:

  1. From the Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Audience’ tab, expand ‘Demographics’ and click ‘Overview’.
  2. Click the ‘Enable’ button to activate audience tracking.

The data may take some time to propagate, but after a week or so, you can return to this report to uncover unique demographic information about your site visitors.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Audience’ and expand ‘Demographics’ to pull reports that show the average ages of your site visitors and see a breakdown of male versus female visitors.

Next, expand the ‘Interests’ tab to view lifestyle and purchase interests of site visitors. The ‘Affinity Category’ report shows lifestyle interests, and the ‘In-Market Segment’ report shows purchase interests.

Using this information, you can make sure you’re creating content for the right audience. Additionally, you can also use the interest information to brainstorm new content ideas that cater to the varied interests of the audience that is already engaging with you online!

3. Block spam bots

Spammers love to find new ways to drive traffic to sites, and one of the more common tactics they use is Google Analytics spam. They send fake data to Google Analytics that appears in your report as keywords or referral traffic. The problem is, none of that data represents real traffic or website visits.

The goal of Google Analytics spam is usually to get curious webmasters to visit these referring sites, thereby increasing their web traffic and advertising revenue.

Spam bots can riddle your reports with inaccurate data, causing you to make decisions based on faulty information. To ensure accuracy in your reporting, it’s crucial that you take steps to prevent spam bot hits from appearing in your reports.

The simplest way to do this is to let Google take care of it for you, but again, this doesn’t happen automatically. You have to enable automatic spam bot filtering.

From your Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Admin’.

  1. Click ‘View Settings’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  2. Scroll down the page until you see the ‘Bot Filtering’ header. Click the checkbox next to ‘Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders’. Save your changes.

This won’t prevent 100% of spam bot data because it does take Google some time to recognize and block new spammers, but it will prevent the majority of it from hitting your site, allowing you to make decisions based on more accurate data.

4. Set up goals

Site traffic and social shares are important metrics in content marketing, but what senior leaders really want to know is how their investment in content marketing is helping the company meet its goals.

An easy way to collect and provide that information is by setting up goals in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics goals can track many different types of visitor behaviors, but the simplest place to get started with goals is for actions that lead to a specific destination page.

Destination goals are triggered when a user lands on a specific page, such as a ‘thank you’ page that appears after a purchase is completed.

To track and report on these actions, you must first define and set up your goals:

  1. From the Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Admin’ tab.
  2. Click ‘Goals’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  3. Click the ‘+ New Goal’ button.
  4. Select the ‘Custom’ radio button and click ‘Continue’.
  5. Give your goal a descriptive name, select the ‘Destination’ goal type, and click ‘Continue’.
  6. Enter the destination URL of the specific ‘thank you’ or other page you wish to track, and click ‘Save’.

This is the most basic goal you can create, but it will track every single instance of a visitor landing on a page that only appears after the user completes the desired action.

Once you get the hang of Google Analytic goals, you can refine them to track much more detail:

  • For purchase-based goals, you can assign a monetary value to the goal completion, allowing you to populate a specific amount of revenue generated by content marketing.
  • You can also specify a funnel – aka a specific sequence of pages a user must follow – in order for an action to trigger a goal completion.

Other available goals track interactions like playing a video, engaging with a chatbot, viewing a specific number of pages per session, or spending a specific amount of time on a single piece of content.

If, after trying out a simple destination goal, you want to explore the functionality further, Google provides very detailed documentation on all of the different options and capabilities.

5. Create custom dashboards

Navigating through Google Analytics can be time-consuming and confusing. Reports take time to load, and you need data from multiple reports to gather all of the information you need for decision-making.

Instead of following a series of steps every time you want to collect data in Google Analytics, set up custom dashboards to access everything you need on a single page.

  1. From your Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Customization’, and then select ‘Dashboards’.
  2. Click the ‘Create’ button.
  3. Select ‘Starter Dashboard’, give your dashboard a title, and click ‘Create Dashboard’

By default, the starter dashboard will contain important reports that you’ll likely want to keep, such as the user report, new user report, revenue report and goal completions report.

If there are reports displaying that aren’t useful to you, you can delete them by clicking the X in the top righthand corner of the report.

You can also change the layout of your dashboard by clicking the ‘Customize Dashboard’ link at the top right of the dashboard, and you can move items around by dragging and dropping them into the desired containers.

Once you’ve deleted the default reports that you don’t want to see and updated the layout to match your preferences, you can add other important reports you use regularly by clicking the ‘Add Widget’ button at the top left of the dashboard.

Next, you need to select how you want the data to display on your dashboard: as a basic metric, timeline, map, table, pie chart, or bar graph. For this example, select table.

Now, select which data sets should appear in the table, and how many rows should display.

If you want to display your highest-traffic pages, the amount of traffic they receive, and the average time on page, you would select the following values for your columns: ‘Page’, ‘Unique Pageviews’, and ‘Avg. Time on Page’.

Once you’re ready to see the report, click the ‘Save’ button, and you’ll be able to view the report on your dashboard. If it isn’t exactly what you wanted, you can click the pencil icon in the top right corner of the widget to edit the report.

There is nearly an unlimited number of ways to customize your dashboard, so the best thing to do is spend some time playing with the options to discover what works best for your processes and needs.

It takes time to set up, but once you have all of the data you need on a single page, you can access that data with just a few clicks instead of navigating through multiple reports to collect needed information.

6. Filter your IP addresses from reports

Another way to preserve the accuracy of Google Analytics data is to filter your own IP address from your reports. This ensures that the dozens of times you view a specific piece of content isn’t reflected in your metrics.

To filter your IP address from Google Analytics reports:

  1. Collect your IP address by googling ‘What is my IP address?’ The result will populate directly in the search results.
  2. Open a new tab and navigate to Google Analytics. From the dashboard, click ‘Admin’.
  3. Click ‘Filters’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  4. Click the ‘+ Add Filter’ button.
  5. Select the ‘Create New Filter’ radio button, give your filter a descriptive name, click ‘Predefined’, and select the following sub-options: ‘Exclude,’ ‘traffic from the IP addresses’, and ‘that are equal to’.
  6. Return to the tab with your IP address and copy it. Paste it into the ‘IP Address’ field in Google Analytics and click the ‘Save’ button.

Once this filter is in place, you can view your site pages and content as much as you need to without worrying that your views and visits are distorting your overall traffic and visitor reports.

In conclusion

Google Analytics should be a content marketer’s best friend. By taking these steps to set up your Google Analytics account, you will gain greater value from it. To recap, it will allow you to:

  • Use audience tracking to refine your buyer personas and formulate new content ideas.
  • Use custom dashboards to track which content and pages are – and aren’t – engaging visitors.
  • Export goal completion reports that prove exactly how your team is supporting company goals.

While the platform may seem overwhelming at first glance, if you’re willing to set aside some time to get it set up properly, it will soon become one of your most valued content strategy tools.

Good luck!

Guest Author: Jessica Greene is a freelance marketing and business writer. A former writing instructor and corporate marketer, she uses her subject matter expertise and passion for educating others as motivation for developing actionable, in-depth, user-focused content.

The post 6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.


Read Full Article: http://bathseoexpert.tumblr.com/post/168011652006

5 Tips for Crafting Higher Converting Long-Form Content

Any blogger or business owner can pump out a 500-word blog post and call it a day. And while there’s some immediate benefit in a short, compelling post, there isn’t a ton of long-term value. Long-form content is what you should really be investing your resources into.

What’s the Secret to High Converting Long-From Content?

Marketers are always arguing about which type of content they should invest in and which formats yield the best returns, but at the end of the day, nothing beats long-form content. It’s the answer to just about every need or marketing goal.

“Ultimately, you should create long-form content because it will get you more of what you want: more online visibility (social shares, links), more proof of your authority and industry expertise, and more material for altruistic community building and engagement,” content marketing specialist Emma Siemasko explains.

The challenge lies in creating high converting long-form content that’s engaging, not boring. In pursuit of this goal, here are a few suggestions you may find helpful:

1. Choose the Right Topic

It all starts with topic selection. If you choose a topic that’s boring or irrelevant to your audience, you’ll find it difficult to engage your readers, regardless of how you structure the post.

In order to choose the right topic, you have to know what your audience wants. Thankfully, social listening tools give marketers the ability to observe what audiences are searching for and discussing. Pay attention and they’ll point you in the right direction.

2. Craft a Compelling Intro

You’ve probably run across the statistic that says the average person now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. While sobering, this reveals just how important it is to hook people from the very start of a piece of content.

In addition to a magnetic headline, long-form content needs a compelling introduction. You don’t have enough margin for error to start off slow. Get the reader hooked within the first couple of sentences and your conversion rate will be much healthier.

3. Provide a Table of Contents

If you have a piece of content that’s 3,000, 5,000, or 7,000-plus words, you need to consider the searchability of your article. Very few of your readers are going to start at the beginning and read all the way to completion. Most are going to skim and search for the parts that they find interesting or relevant.

Recognizing that your readers are skimmers, it’s helpful to give them some guidance. One effective technique is to implement a “table of contents” at the beginning of the article. (You can see an example in this Nutrisystem review from Training in the Bay.)

4. Use Plenty of Visuals

In today’s day and age, it’s almost impossible to produce an effective piece of long-form content without including compelling visuals. In fact, the highest converting pieces of long-form content feature a variety of different content mediums. (This article from the New York Times is a great example.)

5. Maintain a Consistent and Engaging Voice

Because most marketing teams produce long-form content in multiple sessions – as opposed to a single writing session – the end product often feels choppy. Make sure you’re prioritizing consistency in your voice and focus on seamless transitions in the copyediting process.

6. Move Past Shallow Content

Short-form content has value – in fact, social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have made it relevant again – but from a larger digital marketing perspective, you have to move past “shallow” content and invest in long-form, information-rich content that generates leads and drives revenue.

Hopefully the tips featured in this article will help you make progress in this area.

Original post: 5 Tips for Crafting Higher Converting Long-Form Content


This post is courtesy of: https://www.dailyblogtips.com

Looking for Content Strategy Buy-In? Don’t Rely on the Same Old Arguments

looking-content-strategy-buy-in

There have been more posts than I can count about how to make a compelling case for a content marketing strategy. I’ve written some of them and read any number of them on this site and others. If you search on Google for “business case for content marketing strategy” (yes, in quotes), you’ll get more than 10 million results.

Examining the business case for strategic content marketing brings up value-focused terms such as “optimized brand engagement,” “better leads,” “higher shopping cart value,” “lower churn,” or even “direct revenue.” In other words, in prioritizing marketing activities, we make the case that content marketing has the potential for more value.

But what about content strategy? Google “business case content strategy” and you’ll get only 72,000 results.

Now, when I say, “content strategy,” I mean the holistic approach to using content as an asset to the business. Why should the business care about careful governance, management, adaptation, optimization, and scale of the way it uses content? What is the business case for organizing a centralized strategic approach around content as an overall business asset?

Unlike the case of a content marketing strategy, here we have no real comparison. We can’t make the case that content strategy is more effective or efficient than doing something else. It’s not an alternative strategy. Rather, the comparison is to do nothing about organizing an activity – creating content – that the business isn’t already doing.

3 inadequate reasons for content strategy

After looking up and reading through recommendations for making the business case for content strategy, I found that they tend to fall into one of three arguments.

  • It’s already hurting your business. Not having a centralized method of creating, managing, and distributing content costs more, hurts revenue, impedes sales, or challenges your ability to effectively service customers. But, this argument is almost never universally true. And it’s also not mutually exclusive. The lack of a centralized approach could be costing the business, but a centralized process could slow things to a point where it hurts sales and revenue, and teams would move more slowly.
  • It’s necessary for the future of customer experience. Scaling your content is necessary to feed all the digital channels that the enterprise is managing. Is it any wonder that this is the common argument from enterprise technology providers? It argues that to create better, more consistent experiences for your customers, you need a centralized content management strategy. But, the argument is self-defeating. It makes the case that all content and all customer experiences should be managed from one “brain.” It doesn’t address the real world of global differences, skill sets, talent, and technology prowess. Anyone who has had to create a nimble and agile approach to using an enterprise-class content management system to launch a simple blog will know how this argument can fall apart quickly.
  • Organized is better than disorganized. Content is important (we all know that, right?) and thus having some form of organized approach for it (rather than chaos) is simply common sense. This might be the most common and certainly the simplest business case for a content strategy. But, you again run into the except-when-it’s-not cases. I worked with an organization earlier this year to implement an organized approach to its global digital content. The brand would create and manage all the content centrally and hand down “modules” of well-structured content to the regions. It mandated that the regions use these modules for everything they were creating. What the organization found was that for the content to be used by all the regions, accounting for local tastes, regulations, and brand maturity, it had to be extraordinarily vanilla. By the time the content was customized for local channels, translated, and localized into the regional languages, the content simply had no relation to any of the modules created.

Now, to be clear, all three arguments can be sufficient in the right situation. And I’m the first to admit that each of them has more nuance than I’m giving here. But they all have weaknesses that I’ve personally seen fail in the real-world politics of the business.

What is a more foundational argument for content strategy? How can you make the case to the C-suite and mollify skeptical colleagues in other departments? Why does a centralized content strategy make sense?

It turns out we are trying to answer the wrong question. We are trying to solve for a centralized means of creating and managing content. So, we start from the premise that we need to move the creation and production of content to the limited few who can actually govern that process effectively. Instead, we need to ask, how we can create a process that moves the creation of content as close to each and every customer experience as possible.

A great content strategy enables a balance between the need for enterprise consistency, efficiency, and scale, while enabling the creation of content to be as close to the customer experience as possible.

Moving content closer to the customer

To better shape the argument for content strategy first look at how we got where we are. Creating business content has always been something mostly performed at the individual level. Even the lowliest job in the information age has the requirement “must write/communicate well.”

From a marketing and communications perspective, we built strategies around the creation of content for whatever part of the product life cycle we were in charge of. Product marketing/management created the packaging content for the product. Integrated marketing teams developed the positioning content of the product. The advertising and promotion teams created the promotional content for the product. Sales often created the pitches and other materials needed to sell the product. And, finally, customer service often created content to help customers learn how to better use the product.

Because each segment had its own methods and ideas for how to create content for its output or purpose, this approach worked well. Now, enter all the complexities of digital disruption and the arguments made earlier:

  • Yes, now the customer experience is integrated across channels, and must be made wholly consistent from the customer’s point of view. But don’t we need the ability to customize and personalize content for new markets and personas across product segments?
  • Yes, now the content must scale to the new and disparate digital channels that emerge daily, and we must be reactive to the new expectations of customers who expect instant access to consistent experiences. But aren’t we concerned a centralized approach can encourage the brand to become vanilla and undifferentiated when content is created from a common source?
  • Yes, now we must be more organized and considered with the huge amount of content we are creating. But what about all those exceptions where it would be better to create one-off content?

In my experience, we are trying to centralize the wrong thing. Most enterprises believe creating a content strategy is about centralizing the creation of content for use as a reusable widget across the enterprise. That view looks at content as a factory output – and seeks to argue for a business case to create a scalable, automated, and consistent moving assembly line.


Don’t view #contentstrategy as a formula for a content assembly line, says @Robert_Rose.
Click To Tweet


That thinking is where the case for centralization trips up.

Instead, the question should be: How can the business create a strategy to ensure that content – independent of where it is created, managed, and promoted – serves the enterprise as a strategic asset?


Ask HOW to move #content creation closer to the customer, while balancing need for consistency. @robert_rose
Click To Tweet


The better argument for content strategy should be that it creates a process that can move the creation of content as close to the customer as possible. It’s the only way to balance enterprise scalability, and a consistency in brand, customer experience, and effectiveness, while moving the creation of content as close to the customer as possible.

A great content strategy doesn’t limit where content creation happens. It seeks to ensure that wherever content creation happens it is as close to the customer experience as possible.

Strategizing around the customer requires creating foundational education, governance, workflows, measurement, and, yes, technology, to create multiple wellsprings of content. It should be created centrally, where applicable; locally, where needed; and it should use separate technology, when warranted. Great content strategies aren’t occupying militaries, they are well-oiled governments allowing local economies to flourish.


Great #content strategies are well-oiled governments allowing local economies to flourish. @Robert_Rose
Click To Tweet


The next time you think about building that business case for enterprise content strategy, look to enabling these economies. This is what inspires our constituents to follow our lead.

Learn more about how to create a customer-focused content strategy at this year’s Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Looking for Content Strategy Buy-In? Don’t Rely on the Same Old Arguments appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

How to Turn Your Obsession Into a Profitable Social Media Business

How to Turn Your Social Media Obsession Into a Profitable Business

“Follow your passion” is probably one of the oldest-known pieces of advice for business success. Sure, if you genuinely love what you’re doing, then you’re less likely to run out of drive in the long run. You’ll also be naturally inclined to take opportunities that will help you grow.

But what if your passion is spending hours scrolling through your news feed – reacting to posts from people you don’t even know personally?

What if your passion is social media?

To some people, building a social media network with thousands of connections is nothing more than an act of vanity. While it makes sense for businesses, there’s no real reason for individuals to have thousands of friends on Facebook – right? Well, if you can shrug off the privacy and security concerns of being connected to people you don’t know, you can actually leverage your social media reach to generate some profits.

Here, let me drop you a quick list of the monetization strategies you can use on social media:

  • Build yourself as an influencer and promote products or content related to your niche.
  • Sell products from marketplaces like Amazon and earn a commission per sale.
  • Get paid to create reviews or post mentions of other brands.
  • Sell products directly on social media networks.
  • Leverage your social media presence for a full-on eCommerce site.

These may all look intimidating at first. But with the right approach, you can actually accomplish these without large capital or a team of experts by your side.

Got your attention? Then let’s get started.

Step 1 – Define your niche

If your friends’ list grew naturally without your active effort, other users probably saw something valuable from your personal brand. Your physical appearance, of course, could be a small factor. But it most likely has something to do with the content you share.

This depends on the platform you’re using. For example, if you have an established network on Instagram and you mostly post photos of food, then your follower base is probably interested in seeing more of them in the future.

In most cases, the niche you’re recognized in should be glaringly obvious. You can also define it further by inspecting which of your posts garnered the most engagement.

Some networks have built-in analytics to help you determine your most popular posts. For example, if you’ve already built an official Facebook page, then you should have access to the “Insights” tab.

In any case, embracing a niche that already resonates with your existing follower base will prove to be beneficial for your would-be business. For one, your audience should be more receptive when you share curated posts, branded content, or product promotions in the future. This leads us to the next step…

Step 2 – Build your social media presence

As an aspiring social media entrepreneur, your reach and authority are your biggest assets. They directly impact your brand’s discoverability, follower growth, and your conversion rate. And with that being said, the next steps involve improving both with the help of tools.

First of all, you can’t build authority without a little bit of content marketing. Remember, the social community will judge your brand’s image by the content you publish. If you share authoritative content, then they’ll have a more positive perception of your brand.

But rather than tediously looking for popular content to share, a more efficient strategy is to automate content curation with the help of three tools: Feedly, Buffer, and IFTTT.

In a nutshell, Feedly lets you curate content ideas, Buffer can be used to schedule social media posts, and IFTTT can link both services together via applets.

A quick word about using Buffer: make sure you create a posting schedule based on the most active times of your audience. Whenever you add new content to your queue, it will automatically be assigned in the next upcoming slot.

For the automation part, here’s what the specific IFTTT applet you need looks like:

Don’t worry – all three tools can be used for free. Once you have created accounts on each and activated the IFTTT applet, then your content curation activities on social media should be like clockwork.

Another way to use automation to boost your social media presence is through Narrow.io. It works by automatically following users on Twitter who post about specific keywords, which could indicate a purchase intent. In turn, this will encourage them to follow you back or, at the very least, give your account a quick glance.

If all goes well, you may start receiving messages from other brands that request you to do reviews or simply upload posts about one of their products. Just be sure to embrace your niche and keep up your content curation game.

Step 3 – Look for products to sell

Now that you’ve already identified your niche and established your social media presence, it should be a lot easier to look for products you can sell. If you’re already running a brick-and-mortar, small business, then feel free to skip this step. But if not, or if you’re open to branching out to more product types, then a cost-effective strategy you can consider would be affiliate marketing.

Here is a quick rundown of its benefits:

  • Little to No Overhead – Unlike traditional businesses or fully-fledged online stores, selling an affiliate product requires very little overhead costs.
  • Easy to Do – Being an affiliate marketer can be as easy as sharing an affiliate link on Instagram. There’s no need to worry about technical things like logistics, inventory management, and shipping.
  • Scalable – Once you’ve found a profitable product opportunity, you can focus on scaling your online presence by building a blog, launching ad campaigns, and so on.
  • Easy to Monitor – Every affiliate marketing platform provides their sellers with adequate tracking capabilities, allowing them to monitor metrics such as click-throughs, conversion rates, and so on.

The Amazon Associates program is a popular starting point for social media users who aspire to be affiliate marketers. Not only does it cover practically every niche thinkable, it also offers tools and learning resources to help you get started.

After finding an affiliate product to sell, it’s time to start doing what you do best – publishing social media content. There’s no specific rule for this, but using images would definitely get attention from your audience. When it comes to your affiliate links, the most straightforward approach is to include them in the description:

When sharing promotional content, don’t forget to comply with the platform’s regulations, if any. For instance, while Facebook allows affiliate links to be shared or embedded inside posts, you need to make sure it doesn’t violate one of their advertising policies and community guidelines.

Another way to sell products on social media is via drop shipping, which is an order fulfillment strategy where you don’t have to be in possession of your products to receive orders and payments. It doesn’t require a huge investment, eliminates the complexity of inventory management, and allows you to enter just about any market you’re interested in.

A good first step is to scan yellow pages or online directories for drop-ship suppliers near you. You can start with a website like SalesHoo, which is a trusted directory with over 8,000 suppliers and 2.5 million products.

Once you find your drop-shippable products, you can enlist them in marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Bonanza. Of course, you can also sell them on a self-hosted eCommerce site, which will be discussed in the latter parts of this guide.

To avoid any complications with customers, make sure you disclose the details of your supplier, especially their location. Doing so will give customers realistic expectations when it comes to delivery times.

Just remember that as simple as drop shipping sounds, it can be quite tedious. Products can get mixed up, customer service can be too taxing, and profit margins can be insignificant. Returned items will also be considerably more complicated than if you have total control of your operations.

Step 4 – Allow purchases within networks

As your brand’s social media presence proliferates, it only makes sense for you to prioritize the convenience and experience of your loyal followers. That’s why the next step involves making purchases possible within the social network itself.

In recent years, major social networks have integrated online shopping capabilities in their platforms. Facebook, for example, allows business pages to feature “Shop Now” buttons, which may contain affiliate links, a link to a drop-shipped product, or a URL to an external eCommerce store.

At this point, you should now be capable of creating a profitable business that runs entirely on social media. But you still have a long way to go before you get to the big leagues.

Step 5 – Create an official online store

If you truly want to attain online success, then creating a self-sustaining selling channel on social media should not be your end goal. You need to officially instate your brand as an eCommerce company that the online community recognizes and trusts.

The good news is, setting up a professional-looking online store is now easy – thanks to platforms like BigCommerce that smoothen out the learning curve of site development.

BigCommerce allows you to build an eCommerce store from scratch using templates, a visual theme editor, and a WYSIWYG or “what you see is what you get” page builder.

Eventually, you’ll want to leverage your social media presence to maximize the exposure of your eCommerce storefront. As far as social media goes, BigCommerce makes it easy to use networks as selling channels. Simply head to the “Channel Manager” section, pick a platform, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Delving into eCommerce for a social media entrepreneur might be a big leap. It is a new frontier that comes with a number of challenges you must overcome. But since you’ve already developed a brand on social media, then you should have an easier time amassing an audience for your newfound business.

Step 6 – Engage your social media audience

When it comes to social media promotions for new eCommerce businesses, one of the most accessible solutions is to launch PPC ad campaigns. By rolling out ads that are targeted at a specific type of user, you can instantly boost your brand’s visibility while staying within a set budget.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution in social media advertising. Your approach depends on a few variables, such as your industry, budget, and platform of choice.

Finally, you can try offering coupon codes to your social media followers to spike up sales. With a platform like BigCommerce, you can easily create coupon codes that provide benefits such as free shipping or discounts to prospective buyers.

After creating your coupon code, you can freely promote it to your social media followers via a regular post. If you’re on Facebook, you can also utilize the “Create an Offer” feature, which can be found on your business page:

Conclusion

All in all, a social media presence is indeed a valuable asset to have in the online-driven world. Apart from staying in touch with your peers and the people in your life, it can also lead to feasible business opportunities.

Hopefully, the ideas above have helped you gain a more profitable direction for your social media hobby.

Guest Author: Vikas Agrawal is a start-up Investor & co-founder of the Infographic design agency Infobrandz that offers creative and premium visual content solutions to medium to large companies. Content created by Infobrandz are loved, shared & can be found all over the internet on high authority platforms like HuffingtonPost, Businessinsider, Forbes , Tech.co & EliteDaily. 

The post How to Turn Your Obsession Into a Profitable Social Media Business appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.


Read Full Article: http://bathseoexpert.tumblr.com/post/167977210176