Showing posts with label Audience Building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Audience Building. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Drive Traffic And Grow YOUR Blog?


How to use social media to drive traffic and grow your blog on the side..
It's easy to become enamored with stories of people who manage to make a successful living through blogging revenue. After all, what could be better than creating content about something you love and earning money while you do it?



Of course, not many bloggers are going to become an overnight success. Many blogs struggle to gain an audience, even when they put out high-quality content.

The problem? Well, most new bloggers don’t fully understand how to drive a meaningful amount of traffic to their blogs.

Fortunately, I recently had the chance to interview Selena and Jacob Taylor, the husband and wife duo behind Find Us Lost, their wildly successful travel blog and Instagram account that's accrued over 157,000 followers to date.




During our conversation, I learned how social media has played a significant role in helping them achieve their incredible success.

With that in mind, here’s a closer look at some of the ways you can use social media to drive traffic to your own blog.



Find Your Unique Selling Proposition

As with your blog itself, being able to find a unique voice on the right social media channels for the type of audience you want to build, is essential for driving growth.

“Ask yourself, how soon can I figure out exactly who I am and who I want to portray with this brand?” Selena recommends. “Then once you’ve established that and paved your way, people will start to see it. Whether they have 1,000 followers, 100,000 or 1 million, they’ll still honestly be interested in you and the aesthetic you're conveying.”

Identifying the needs, challenges and desires of your target audience—which often align with your own interests—should play a central role in fine-tuning your unique voice. Selena and Jacob aren't the only ones who've identified the importance of this, either.



According to fellow podcast guest Nazim Agabekov, the founder of Lead Gen Black Belt , asking questions like, “What keeps your customers up at night? What’s their number one struggle in life and business?

What would make their lives easier? What are their biggest aspirations and dreams in life?” are key to defining this strategy.

Using these types of questions to guide your social media presence (and blog content) will help you craft posts that don’t just look nice—they’ll also be relevant to your audience's interests, ensuring that they’ll actually drive engagement.



Don’t Ignore The Hashtags

Great content is key, but it must be paired with the right strategy for blog growth—and on social media, this means using hashtags. “When we were in Venice I posted a photo in the Venice canals, and I hadn’t been using hashtags at the time—which if you're big on Instagram, you know that was probably silly,” Selena recalls.

“I wasn’t really leveraging people who could see the posts. That was the first time I thought, 'Oh, I need to start using hashtags.’ That post happened to be reposted within two minutes by an account that was really large at the time… and right away started bringing us a couple hundred new followers.”

This experience led Selena to begin researching the analytics and latest trends related to hashtag usage, which then fueled a more strategic approach to how they developed future posts. For those just starting a blog, Selena notes that large Instagram accounts tend to look for smaller accounts when curating content—and consistently using the right hashtags will put you in the perfect place to get discovered.



The Power Of Partnerships

It can be tempting to approach blogging as a completely solo endeavor, but it’s called social media for a reason. “It’s a very collaborative space,” Jacob advises new bloggers. He continues, "Develop relationships early on. Don’t assume someone’s not going to give you time, input or help you out just because they’ve been doing it for longer. Most people are very friendly and welcoming.”

New bloggers shouldn’t be afraid of reaching out to other bloggers for advice. But keep in mind, you should focus on investing time building relationships with those in your niche.

As Tamar Weinberg explains, “You can ask and ask and ask, but unless you research the writer and know exactly what it is that they cover, you’re wasting your time. For example, if you’re marketing a healthy food product, don’t just reach out to food bloggers in general, but find those that focus on healthy food, home cooking, cooking healthy for kids, and such.”

Organically reaching out to others and building these relationships has helped Selena and Jacob get their content shared on other bloggers’ Instagram Stories, resulting in new traffic. Whether you want to ask for advice or share your thoughts on another blogger’s latest social media post, reaching out can quickly lead to organic growth for your own blog.



Achieving Social Success

Now that Selena and Jacob have built a sizable community around their blog, whenever they release a new city guide, sponsored post, or other project, they already have a massive, dependable source of traffic to rely on. That's the real power of building an engaged social following.

Yes, you should always emphasize the creation of beautiful, high-quality content when promoting your blog through social media. But as these tips make abundantly clear, it’s far from the only thing you should be doing.

Guest Authored By Ryan Robinson. Ryan is an entrepreneur and content marketing consultant to the world's top experts and growing startups. He works with NY Times Bestselling authors, CEO's, startup founders, and has grown his business to over $160,000 in less than one year while keeping a full-time job. He reach over 150,000 monthly readers with his blog, ryrob.com and online courses designed to teach you how to start a profitable business while keeping your day job. Follow Ryan on Twitter.





"While fully leveraging the power of social media will require a fair amount of work, it’s well worth your time and energy.

As you use these tips to generate traffic for your blog, you’ll be better positioned to turn it into a revenue-generating machine and create the lifestyle you desire. -RyanRobinson

  • Post Crafted By:
    Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

Sunday, April 29, 2018

YOUR Customer Aquisition Social Media?


Customer acquisition on social media -- with your own data..

At a time when the use of third-party data is under increased scrutiny, Brian Handly touts the benefits of using your own.



In the battle for customer acquisition, data plays an important role in marketing strategy, along with a desired product and excellent creative.

There’s also the challenge of reaching a target audience where they spend most of their time, which today is within mobile apps and browsing social media.
When we look at Google, Facebook and Amazon from the perspective of an advertiser, we see that they utilize much more data for their own benefit than they make available for audience segmentation.

Amazon’s data has always been a walled garden. Their incredibly deep historical data on buying behaviors and patterns gives them a sizable advantage, leading to what many argue are cutthroat product decisions and incredibly targeted product recommendations.



I expect Facebook will increasingly become a walled garden after overexposing and ineffectively monitoring third-party data use. By shutting down their Partner Categories program, they’re reinforcing to their advertisers that Facebook audience data is the primary source for campaign segmentation.

How to cope in such an environment?

While numerous data sources are available for targeting across most digital properties, one of the most effective ways brands can target is by bringing their existing opted-in datasets to social media.

This frequently provides a competitive advantage over the “walled gardens” of the major technology players, as your own data is typically much more relevant to your marketing efforts.
The four major sites -- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat -- all provide advertisers the ability to create custom audiences using their own data, and in some cases to use third-party data sets.



The workflow is similar across all sites:

 --Prepare your data.
--Upload it.
--The social media sites hash and de-identify the data.
--Your data is then matched to the social media site’s user base.
--Your custom audience is created.
--And your original data file is deleted.

Typically, the most utilized datasets to match against are email addresses, identifiers/tags provided by the social media sites themselves and mobile advertising IDs. Most sites require a minimum of 1,000 records in order to create a custom audience. This is for privacy reasons (to ensure data is aggregated and no individual could be identified), and to ensure that the segment is large enough to deliver appropriately.



The perks of using your own data

The ability to create custom audiences on social media allows advertisers to reframe many of their existing marketing tactics. They can encourage repeat visits, whether in-store or online, from existing customers, or try to win shoppers from competitive locations.

Brands without physical locations that seek to go directly to the consumer can use custom audiences to reach their market on social media as well. Most sites also allow advertisers to create “lookalike” audiences to help increase the scale of the campaign. They look for common characteristics from the audience you’ve uploaded and find similar consumers for your campaign to reach.

One final example of how you can use your own data is to drive mobile app acquisition. Building a custom audience from existing customers creates a segment with a much higher propensity to download and use a mobile app, especially when paired with appropriate incentives.



A key component of such strategies has always been, and will continue to be, ensuring that the datasets you’re using have opted in to marketing communication and advertising. Expect to see more transparency required on behalf of the end user, especially as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect next month.

Aside from being able to reach a relevant audience, bringing your own data to a social media site can also result in performance improvements and cost savings. The cost savings stem from being more relevant -- in Facebook parlance, this is having a higher relevance score -- which can result in lower cost-per-click fees because you can potentially win the auction for a given impression at a lower price.

Guest Authored By Brian Handly. Brian is CEO of Reveal Mobile, possesses more than 20 years of technical, operational and executive management experience, with 18 years of that in advertising technology. Brian was co-founder and CEO of Accipiter, which was acquired by Atlas in December of 2006 followed by the $6.1 billion acquisition of Atlas by Microsoft in 2007. Before their recent acquisition, Handly served on the Board of Directors for WebAssign, and currently serves as an Operating Partner for Frontier Capital. Brian also has extensive experience as an angel investor and is an active advisor for several North Carolina technology companies. Follow Brian on Twitter.





"Brands, advertisers and the agencies they work with have been hungry for the right data to help them reach the holy trinity of right time, right place, right person.

Using their own opted-in data sets will become an increasingly important tactic for the marketer’s overall customer acquisition strategy to achieve that goal.." -BrianHandly


    • Post Crafted By:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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    Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

    Tuesday, August 8, 2017

    Money YOU Left Behind on Social Media?


    Here's the thing that all the social media gurus always leave out of their pitch: building an audience is tedious, time-consuming, long term and definitely not free..



    The same marketers who say, "You can't build it and hope they'll come" in a business context seem to contradict themselves when they endorse opening up a bunch of social accounts and blasting out content.

    Don't get me wrong, social definitely has its place in today's world. For businesses, it has become a way to market products, increase sales and handle customer service. But if you don't yet have an audience, that's a lot of man-hours with precious little return on investment.

    So what if you used your Twitter account (that has barely any followers) to build an audience in a totally unexpected way? What if your social media page can land you a news column or a TV interview? What if you used it to pitch journalists and influencers, thereby "borrowing" their audience while you slowly build your own?

    These days, most media professionals are out there building their own personal brands on social. Which means they're now accessible in a way that was unheard of a decade ago.



    Check For an Email on Their Social Media Accounts

    Most of the time, the best way to send a pitch is still the good old fashioned way -- sending an email. Many influencers will put an email address right into their Twitter or Instagram profiles. You can even checked Linked-in since it's technically social media for business professionals.

    If you don't see an email, don't just leave a comment like, "How can I reach you?" or "What's your contact info?" Not only is your message going to be buried beneath other people's pitches but you're also wasting their time. Instead write an amazing headline to catch their attention, and chances are they'll direct message (DM) you asking for more.

    Don't Pitch Directly on Facebook

    For many, Facebook is reserved for their family and friends. Even if they have a public profile, they may not appreciate it if you use it for self-promotion. On top of that, unless you're already friends, your message may just wind up on their "other" inbox where it's not visible.



    So what can you do? If you already follow them, build rapport by finding out what their interests are and comment intelligently on their posts.

    Perhaps share related articles and keep an eye out for a "why now" that's relevant to your topic. That way, you can build rapport when you reach out to them.

    If you're promoting an event, make a banner for your own Facebook page with the details, so anyone who lands on your page or checks out your profile knows about it. Then when you email the journalist, you can link them back to your social media account to give them more information.

    Send Them a Tweet

    Twitter, by nature, is more geared towards news. For a journalist, it sits halfway between work and play. Just because it's more casual than email, doesn't mean you can type whatever you want. Remember tweets can be public, and even if you think it's not, you never know who might read it. You don't want the wrong thing to go viral.



    Before making any pitch, do some research. Dig up what kind of articles the journalist covers. What do they specialize in? What kind of stories do they need?

    Whatever you do, don't send the exact same pitch to several people. Journalists tend to know each other, and if they see you're just pitching aimlessly, they'll know they don't have exclusivity (a highly prized attribute in the press world) and might start to tune you out.

    The Bottom Line

    Think about a typical journalist. They're basically someone who has found a way to monetize their curiosity. So make sure you're playing to their strengths by hooking them with a fabulous headline or question and next thing you know, you might get your story in front of millions of new readers (and followers) without ever having to build the audience from scratch.

    Guest Authored By Geeta Nadkami. Geeta is an International speaker, award-winning journalist, thoughtful parent and audiobook addict. Founder of Baby Got Booked, a DIY PR course aimed teaching entrepreneurs how to tell their stories in a way that gets them on journalists' speed dial. Follow Geeta on Twitter.





    “Social media definitely has its place in today's world.

    For businesses, it has become a way to market products, increase sales and handle customer service.

    But if you don't yet have an audience, that's a lot of man-hours with precious little return on investment.."


      • Authored by:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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