#1: Your blog is your piece of real estate on the web

If you only publish content on social networks like Facebook and YouTube, guess what? You are completely at the mercy of those social media giants. If Facebook makes a tweak to its algorithm, your content could forever disappear from users on Facebook – even those who have “liked” your page. And if YouTube decides to change the rules on how videos are monetized, you could suddenly find that your YouTube page is no longer relevant. Even worse, you might get forced to create types of content – such as long-form 30-minute videos – that simply aren’t a good match for your current resources.

But with a blog, you don’t have those same issues. You can control exactly what type of content appears on it, and you won’t be beholden to the Silicon Valley giants on how you can monetize it. Best of all, you can turn your website into a destination on the web. People coming to your corporate blog will also be stopping by to see what else your company offers. You won’t get that same experience on Facebook, where the goal is to keep you trapped inside the Facebook ecosystem.

#2: Your blog is a way to engage both prospects and customers

Blogging is all about engagement. Since you control the platform, you are unconstrained in how you can interact with customers. If you rely on Facebook, you are reliant on cookie-cutter templates where all content and all ads look the same. But with a blog, you can give full rein to your creativity as you engage both prospect and customers.

And all that engagement is key because it can help you better understand your customers. What are they looking for? What types of content resonate with them? What problems are they looking to solve? A blog can be a huge help in connecting and interacting with your customers.

#3: Blogs are more trusted and more credible than social media

In many ways, social media has been taken over by influencers, celebrities and hype artists. It seems like everybody is pitching, selling and promoting something. It’s no wonder people are starting to trust Facebook less and less – people are finally waking up to the fact that Facebook was created for advertisers, not for everyday users. The same goes for Instagram, which can seem like one long infomercial some days.

In comparison, blogs are viewed as places to find deep domain expertise, long thought leader pieces (not just 140 character fluff pieces), and in-depth reporting. The text-centric nature of blogs is what separates them from social media – you have much greater ability to tell the full story of your company and what it does, rather than just a “best of” summary that must be squeezed into a certain text limitation on social media.

Final Thought

As you can see, blogs are a great way to own your own space online. Having a company blog gives you the peace of mind that you can control your brand’s message, how your content is monetized and what types of advertising you can use on your site. Along the way, blogs can lead to a real boost in engagement and conversions – which makes them the perfect match for any company looking for incremental sources of growth.

The post Why Your Business Needs A Blog In Today’s Social Media World appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Just 20 years ago, it was still perfectly reasonable to read a print newspaper in the morning, tune in to news radio on the commute to the office, watch the evening news when you get home from the office, and maybe tune in to the late night news before going to bed. On weekends, you might pick up a news magazine recapping all the news of the past week. And, if you were feeling particularly ambitious, you might pick up the Sunday New York Times and spend a good chunk of a weekend afternoon reading the type of content that would prepare you for the week ahead.

The end of a news paradigm

Well, those days are long over. Print is dead because the 24/7 nature of the Internet means that news cycles are now measured in hours (if not minutes) instead of days and weeks. Anything you read in print form is already stale. And the rise of the mobile phone means that news and commentary is available instantaneously, on demand, whenever you want. Alerts and updates ping us relentlessly throughout the day. Many people now start and end each day by checking their phone, not by turning on the TV.

The really revolutionary part about all of this, of course, is how news media companies like CNN and the New York Times are no longer the go-to destination for people who want news. Instead, most people are perfectly content to rely on whatever tidbits they pick up via social media to be their “news consumption” of the day.

Social media platforms and the news

In fact, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, two-thirds of the U.S. population now get their news via social media. And the trend is much stronger with younger millennials, who are even more reliant upon social media to deliver the news they need. The Pew numbers are especially eye opening because they suggest that social media has stopped being just a complementary way to get the news (i.e. something “extra” to give you an edge) – it is now often the sole way that people get their news. In short, people now rely on social media to get them the news they need.

That might work well with “big stories” in the news – like news about the latest hurricane headed toward the U.S. mainland – but how well does it work for anything other than the biggest stories and trends? Unless you happen to have hundreds of journalist friends on Facebook, or thousands of media-savvy peers on Twitter, you’re probably getting just a very tiny sliver of what’s happening in the world.

We live in a YouTube world now

Consider that 18% of the people in the Pew Research survey said that they get their news solely via YouTube. What exactly does that mean? People are watching viral clips of late night comedians riffing on the daily news?

From this perspective, it’s easy to see why media outlets like CNN have adopted the “breaking news” and “viral news” mentality to retain viewers. They are trying to replicate the rhythm and feel of social media.

Or, even worse, media outlets like CNN are forced to adopt a strange hybrid of entertainment and news for the masses, who are really dying for a chance to get back to watching viral YouTube clips. From this perspective, sadly, “Saturday Night Live” is now more relevant than CNN in terms of people getting the news. People would rather watch a funny, two-minute comedy skit featuring a well-known celebrity than sit around watching some boring old guy in a suit for two hours.

Survival plans for legacy media

So how can companies like CNN survive in the current era? As long as they are part of major media entertainment conglomerates like Time Warner, they’re probably safe for now. Even if they’re struggling, it’s easy to toss around impressive-sounding Wall Street terms like “synergies” to explain why they should stick around. (Which is what leads to CNN originals like “The History of Comedy” – brilliantly middlebrow content with lots of celebrities designed to be shared on social media!)

Theoretically, the popularity of video on the Internet today means that the biggest TV news networks are also relatively protected from the raging social media storm around them. But that’s not really the case with print media. Already, most of them have become web-centric or web-only. But everyone these days is feeling additional pressure to create the kind of content that people are going to click on.

The big moment of truth will come, of course, when Facebook’s video platform becomes large enough that people are not just watching viral videos on Facebook the social network, they are also tuning in to the scripted TV shows on Facebook the TV network. That’s when the days of CNN may finally be numbered.

The post Social Media And The End Of The News As We Know It appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Of course, data in its raw form is useless. It’s just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. But when you are able to analyze that data, it can become very powerful. That’s especially true since we are moving from an era of “structured” data to an era of “unstructured” data.

Structured data vs. unstructured data

From a marketing perspective, the easiest way to think about the difference between “structured” data and “unstructured” data is by thinking of the typical customer survey that you might send out after someone has purchased a product or visited your store. Most of the questions will be simple “yes/no” questions. Or they will ask customers to rate you on a scale of 1-10. All of that is “structured” data. It’s easy to put into a database and then analyze for insights. You can perform all kinds of statistical calculations very easily.

But then comes all the “unstructured” data. And this is where organizations are really stepping up their game. For example, that same customer survey might ask a question like, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us that’s not included here?” That prompts a customer to write an open-ended response. Just a few years ago, that would have required a human to analyze it. Now, thanks to the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, it’s possible to have a computer analyze it and add it to a growing database.

And the type of “unstructured” data that’s available today is growing at a prodigious pace, primarily thanks to all the digital devices out there. Your mobile phone is a potential treasure trove of data that grows by the minute. What company wouldn’t want to know the precise GPS location of every place you’ve visited during the day?

The rise of artificial intelligence

Moreover, the type of analysis that’s possible today is becoming quite impressive. There’s a whole new field called “predictive analytics,” which essentially promises to predict future customer behavior based on known data. You can literally predict how a marketing campaign will do, based on what you know about certain types of customers. Companies like Salesforce are coming up with AI-powered marketing solutions that promise to help companies find the proverbial needle in the haystack.

So it’s no surprise that so many companies have jumped aboard the Big Data bandwagon. It promises to streamline just about every part of a company and create new revenue opportunities. As the analytical tools become more and more powerful, it’s leading to real excitement about the potential ability of AI to transform organizations.

Data is the new oil

Within the mainstream media, in fact, it’s now fashionable to compare the role of data in the digital economy to the role of oil in the analog economy. Back in 2014, WIRED magazine breathlessly proclaimed that, “Data is the new oil of the digital economy.” Earlier this year, The Economistremarked that, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”

If you follow this analogy to its logical end, it would seem to imply that companies best able to harness and extract this data will become the most valuable in the world. Just as oil companies like Exxon Mobil became the most valuable and powerful in the world until the rise of Silicon Valley’s Internet champions, it’s plausible that new artificial intelligence (AI) companies will become the most valuable in the world, once they’ve truly figured out how to harness the remarkable power of data.

And when that day comes – the day when an AI company is worth more than an oil company or a Silicon Valley tech giant – that’s when Data will be King.

The post Is Content King Or Is Data King? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

#1: Encourage customers and prospects to learn about your products

The easiest types of videos to create are product videos. These can be simple 1-minute or 2-minute videos that showcase your best products. If you’re a fashion company, for example, you can showcase different people wearing your new clothing line. If you’re a tech company, you can create short videos showing people how to use your products. Then, when you’ve assembled a few of these product videos, you can add them to a playlist. This makes it very easy for customers to check out all of your products in one place.

#2: Develop a reputation for thought leadership and expertise

Another type of popular video on YouTube is the “how-to” video. This can be very simple – such as how to make a certain meal if you’re a restaurant chef – but is actually very powerful in helping to establish your reputation and expertise. After watching your YouTube videos, someone might invite you to speak at a conference. Or you might get asked to become a guest contributor for a popular blog.

#3: Enhance your overall brand messaging

Some YouTube videos fall under the topic of branding and marketing. For example, to highlight your company’s focus on eco-sustainability, you might interview the company’s founder, who can explain the various ways the company is working to reduce its carbon footprint. Or, to highlight that your workplace would be a great place for young millennials to work, you could create a video showing some of the fun, creative people already working at your company.

#4: Gain free word-of-mouth buzz for your products

This next category is perhaps the trickiest one to navigate – but it is what people usually think of when they hear “YouTube videos.” The key to “going viral” is coming up with a creative concept that is so impossible to ignore that you have to share it with your friends. The problem, however, is that it’s almost impossible to predict what will go viral, and brands risk looking very foolish trying to “look cool.” But when it works, well, it really works. For example, until Dollar Shave Club came along, the way you sold razor blades was touting all the great technology of the blades. Dollar Shave Club blew that right up with a viral video so insane that it was almost impossible to believe it was real when it first hit the Interwebs.

Final Thought

The important point to keep in mind here is that the true value of YouTube videos is not through direct monetization. In other words, you are not trying to rack up 1 million page views so that you can get paid out by YouTube. Rather, the goal is much more indirect – it’s to build buzz, boost your reputation and credibility, and engage with customers. By doing so, you will be on the path to selling more and growing your business with video. And it all starts with a YouTube channel that fits with your overall brand positioning.

The post 4 Reasons Why Your Company Needs A YouTube Channel appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Well, despite all of the options out there to engage publically with customers and partners, and the cost and challenges of building an enterprise customer/partner community, there are actually very strong reasons and valuable opportunities that can come from building your own community. Here are what I consider to be the top 5 reasons to make the investment in building an online customer/partner community for your organization.

1. Grow a Community of Passionate Advocates

Your customers love you! But they’re also busy with their own challenges and don’t have the time or motivation to connect with you (let alone advocate for your brand!) At the same time, customers have challenges that come up with your product. And when they do, it’s difficult to know how to solve the issue or reach out and find others that could have been through the same issue and found ways to solve it. This can lead to frustration and, in the extreme, the perception that the organization doesn’t care.

Creating an online customer community helps solve both of these challenges. Customer communities give your customers a voice and a place to congregate to solve problems. When I was responsible for the SAP Community Network, I saw customers and partners solving problems in very creative ways, including:

• Asking questions about their toughest problems (with answers coming from literally around the world)
• Sharing ideas about new, creative ways to use their current technology
• Posting code snippets of new imaginative solutions they’d come up with
• Writing very long blogs filled with screenshots, code samples, photographs, and explanations of some really tough problems they’d solved using our technology
• Commenting on, liking, and sharing interesting blogs or Q&As that inspired or challenged their thoughts
• Some of the best, most interesting and valuable blogs receiving hundreds of comments from other members saying thanks, adding their perspectives, or just encouraging the author to keep going.

An online community creates the concept of a tangible “place” where like-minded members can congregate around a common topic, share ideas, build their reputation as a strong professional, meet other colleagues and experts in their field, and have a collective experience stretching beyond their physical boundaries. These are not experiences you and your customers can have purely on a public social media platform.

As the community grew, I led the effort to expand our reputation system with a full-fledged gamification system. The response was overwhelmingly positive. We saw a 400% increase in engagement activities as members saw more tangible evidence of the positive impact they were having on other members. Members enjoyed seeing their reputations growing visibly on topic area leaderboards (the SAP community has 400+ topic areas), and felt the competitive juices start to flow as they conquered the latest challenge, earned a badge, or rose to the next reputation level in the community.

And while all this was happening, we were growing a network of passionate, experienced, knowledgeable, and vocal influencers that, along the way, became advocates for the brand. By the way, when your prospective customers hear from current customers and partners, their voices are far more credible and valuable than your latest press release, paid ad, or website brochure.

What do you want your customer talking about on their personal blog or social media — the positive, engaged experience they have with you and other customer peers? Or how the last time they had a problem, they couldn’t find anyone to help them work through it? Build your community! Build your tribe!

2. Help Your Customers Help Each Other

One of the best parts of hosting an online customer community is seeing the power of unleashing the creative energy and altruistic behavior taking hold as members ask questions, answer questions, and share best practices. While I know your organization is full of really smart people, no one holds a monopoly on great ideas. Giving your customers and partners a place to congregate and share ideas can have a powerful effect on your customers, partners, and employees as they engage and learn from each other.

In addition, the power of community can have a tangible positive effect on your support resources. Think about the last time you had a question or problem with a device you use personally. For me, the first thing I do is a Google search about the problem. For companies that have established a community, the top search results are always from conversations happening in the community. Why? Because Google optimizes search based on engagement, activity, return visits, and social sharing — but we’ll get to that later.

Customers want (demand) solutions that can be easily found and are available online 24 hours a day. They don’t want to wait for business hours to call a support line, wait on hold, and then get bumped to higher level engineers when the call center doesn’t know how to solve the problem. How frustrating is that? Communities provide a place for customers to help each other. And guess what…every time a customer gets an answer from the community, that’s a problem that doesn’t find its way into your call center software. The industry calls this “call deflection” and it’s a measurable financial benefit to having a community. Bonus: As your customer base grows, the community scales along with it and you have that many more smart people (not on the payroll) helping answer questions. A real win-win for communities!

3. Learn From Your Customers and Partners

Once you’ve built a critical mass of engaged customers and partners in the community, you have to be ready to listen to what they have to say! They’ll help you understand the market in ways you’ve never known before. Some of that comes in the day-to-day conversations and engagement happening in the community. But it’s also possible (and valuable) to create a space to solicit ideas from your new community.

There are a lot of examples of organizations that have asked community members to give input into their product direction. MyStarbucksIdea, Dell IdeaStorm, and SAP IdeaPlace come to mind. This is a great way to hear directly from customers and partners about their experience, challenges, and ideas for how they’d like your product to evolve.

Typically, idea areas have a way for customers to contribute an idea and then allow other community members to vote for ideas they like the best, so best ideas rise to the top. There are also ways for others to add comments to help refine the idea into something stronger. On the back end, idea systems need the ability for your product teams to be actively involved in the process by seeing what ideas are bubbling up to the top, commenting, communicating when you are evaluating an idea, and finally accepting an idea into the product roadmap for the future.

This aspect of community is another win-win. Not only does it bring new, creative ideas into the pipeline, but it can also contribute to customers’ feelings of empowerment and that the organization is listening to their ideas and concerns. One caveat — you MUST make sure your product team is fully committed to participating. The last thing you want is to ask your customers to contribute ideas and have no one on the other side listening — ouch!

4. Drive SEO to Your Website

As I mentioned, Google search algorithms (one of the most recent updates was called “Panda”, but changes continue to occur regularly) are optimized in ways that favor community sites. For example, some factors built into the Google algorithms that affect SEO rankings are also aligned perfectly with community behavior:

• Repeat traffic — a community powerhouse. Engaged community members want to check out what’s happening in the community on a regular basis
• Fresh content — another factor where community really shines. An active community can be a constant source of fresh, interesting content that cannot compare with usually limited resources of your web team
• Number of comments — blogs and forums generate copious amounts of comments, answers, and activity
• Dwell time — when you go to a company’s website, how long do you stay? Community members can get immersed in conversations, new topics, interesting blogs, etc and tend to stay on-property a long time.
• Bounce rate — the inverse of dwell time. Community members tend to hang out and don’t just come in and drop out quickly
• Social shares — you should include social sharing on all community content pages. Community members tend to be active in social and, if given the ability, will regularly share interesting content to their followers on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, and other channels
• Outbound links — community members often include links to reference materials
• Facebook likes — again, social shares and likes are community gold.
• RSS subscribers — community members that care about specific topics often set up RSS feeds to watch for the regular drumbeat of new content and discussions

So what does this mean in reality? At SAP, we took on a project to optimize the community for SEO. It included both IT changes (URL formats, page tagging, etc) as well as content changes (content audit for keywords, placement, etc.). Six months after we completed the project, the community went from 400,000 unique visitors a month up to 1.5 million UMV. We were blown away!

A year later, the community was driving traffic at levels nearing the .com site — without spending a dollar on paid search or marketing programs. The web team was fascinated and we worked together to build cross connects of content between the community and the main digital property. Another win-win because the digital team got a constant flow of fresh, relevant, authentic community-generated content, while we embedded links in the community with relevant product and services content for members interested in exploring solutions.

5. Transform Your Organization’s Culture

One of the main and important constituents in any enterprise customer community is your employees. A community is a place for customers and partners to talk with each other, but they are also talking with your employees as well. Employees from the support teams, product teams, engineering, consulting, marketing, sales, and other areas should be engaged in the community. As community momentum builds, often executives choose to have a presence in the community to share ideas, write thought leadership blogs, or engage with customers and partners.

My experience with communities is that this open exchange of ideas and fluid interaction between employees, customers, and partners has the ultimate effect of transforming an organization’s culture to become more open, resilient, engaged with market trends, and welcoming of customer feedback.

I hope I’ve helped convey some of the unique engagement opportunities, culture, and value that enterprise communities can create and bring to your organization.

Other public platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and StackOverflow are excellent for sharing news, acting as a front door for the uninitiated, and creating fun, engaging stories around the company and brand. However, the kind of focused, topic-led exchange of ideas, support, and sharing of best practices you find in enterprise communities is simply not possible on public channels where the cacophony of other voices creates more chaff than wheat and makes it confusing and difficult to have a real, engaged, and lasting relationship with your customers and partners.

Image credits: Nicholas Buffler, Expert Infantry, thiisbossi

The post 5 Reasons to Consider Building Your Own Community appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The Metrics That Matter

SEMRush will tell you where your blog ranks compared to the rest of the world. The first set of metrics you’ll get when you plug in your URL to SEM: Organic searches, paid search, backlinks and display advertising.

Organic Search

In the Organic Search section, you will find widgets related to a domain’s organic traffic, keywords that a domain is ranking for in Google’s top 100 organic search results, keywords ranking distribution, and the domain’s organic competitors.

Paid Search

In the Paid Search section, you will find visual information related to the domain’s paid traffic and its cost, ad copies, keywords that the domain appears within Google’s paid search results, keywords ranking distribution, and the domain’s paid competitors.

BackLinks

The Backlinks section provides data-visualizations on the number of the domain’s backlinks, the ratio between follow and nofollow links and referring websites

Display Advertising

The Display Advertising section provides visual data on the domain’s presence on the Google’s Display Network including the number of ads and publishers, text and media ads samples, and promoted landing pages (SEMRush).

Finding The Hidden Traffic Drivers

Aside from all of these amazing features, SEMRush also tells you what sort of keywords are giving you the most traffic. You can use this for competitive research as well. Keywords that work for your competitors may also work for you. Below, are sample keywords that Facebook.com uses. If you are the owner of Twitter.com, something like this may be extremely useful.

Another useful tool SEMRush has is that it shows you data on backlinks. Basically, you can see what sites are giving you the most clicks. This is another feature that can be used for competitive analysis. If Forbes is giving your competitor a significant amount of clicks, then maybe ads with Forbes is something worth investing into.

Another tool SEM has is that it tells you how much traffic you’re getting from mobile. It will tell you the portion of your search results are mobile friendly or not. So if you have pages on your website or blog that aren’t mobile friendly, SEM will inform you.

Using Data To Spend Wisely

The last part of this tool that we find absolutely amazing is that it tells you your top paid ad keywords. This is used for Google Ad campaigns. If you’re running a Google Ads campaign, this could help you optimize your campaign. Rather, if “cats” is giving you the most clicks on your Google ad campaign, SEMRush will tell you. You can also do this for your competitors. You can plan your campaign according to what works for your competitors.

So is your blog a waste of time? If you aren’t tracking your clicks on this level, then yes. If you aren’t looking at your competitors and their traffic, then yes. Your blog is a waste of time if you aren’t tracking your site’s progress consistently. If you know of any more useful tools to rank blogs, comment below.

The post Your Blog is a Waste of Time appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The infographic below was inspired by The Ultimate Guide to Leaving Comments on Blogs, a great post written by Darren Rowse of Problogger.

This visualization highlights the benefits of leaving blog comments, describes the four different personality types of blog commenters, and lists the DOs and DON’Ts of effective blog commenting.

I’d love to get your thoughts. Are there any other points you would add? What are some of your positive or negative experiences with blog commenting?

The post Ultimate Guide to Blog Comments [Infographic] appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

But content writing isn’t all that easy, it transpires. You might be a wildly creative person with lots of ideas, but writing interesting and informative posts about the same industry, or topic, every day might not fit with how your mind works.

Maybe you’re a great writer but you struggle coming up with ideas. To get by in the content writing world you’ll need to keep those ideas going.

Tricky.

Write Down Every Idea

I keep a teeny tiny pocket sized notebook on me all the time and I write in it whenever I think of an idea. As a result it is full to the brim with lists.

I don’t know about you, but I often find my best ideas come to me when I’m doing something else. Thinking up new topics is hard, so if you think of something great don’t let it pass you by.

Jot down a provisional title, or a general idea, and any points that come to mind. When you run out of things to add, stop. You don’t have to write that idea into a great post straight away, because chances are you haven’t thought it through as thoroughly as you could have. You might come back to it days, weeks, or months later. You might never write it at all.

You can also take the technology route and make your lists on your phone, tablet or laptop. Evernote is really helpful to make your lists accessible. It doesn’t matter if you’re jotting things down on your hand; the important thing is you’re improving your process.

I use a notebook because I am a scribbler, and you can jot ideas and diagrams and all sorts of nonsense when you’re writing with a pen. Flicking back through these ideas might allow you to write more than one post from a single concept. You’re looking at your own idea with a fresh perspective, more writing under your belt, and a whole heap of research done. What was ‘how to do…’ can easier become ‘30 ways to streamline…’

Once you’ve written on a topic once, don’t consider it exhausted.

SEO Companies, Know Your Keywords

To maximize the SEO benefit from pieces of content, SEO companies recommend including your targeted keywords, while making sure that the article sounds natural and flows. Fitting the right keywords into your content each time can be tough, but actually they make a great starting point. While your posts don’t have to revolve around these words, having them in mind from the beginning can make forming a cohesive post on the topic much easier.

It’s all too easy to ramble a bit when you don’t really know what you’re trying to say, both aloud and in writing. If you keep your focus you’re more likely to stay on topic.

Write a Series

After a few weeks of stellar blogging, you might find the ideas well is running, well, a little bit dry. Writer’s block is a horrible issue, and sometimes the only way to overcome it is to walk away for a while and come back later.

A series of posts or regular feature can be a great way of making the most out of an idea. Some topics would require a mammoth post, and would have to skim on details. So rather than trying to say everything at once, why not break the whole thing down in to little digestible chunks?

It will be easier to read, people are likely to stay on your blog longer, and it will be more helpful than trying to get everything in at once.

And you’ll have written five posts rather than just one.

Perfect Is Really, Really Hard

If you try and write perfectly every time, you’re probably blog blocking yourself. Obviously your spelling and grammar need to be great, but if you’re striving for perfection you might only be able to write 100 words in a day – you might struggle to come up with any ideas at all.

SEO companies don’t always want perfect, sometimes really good is good enough. As long as you’re producing something useful, don’t get too caught up in being perfect.

Write What You Know

I’ve just written 750 quite lovely words on not being able to write blog posts – in the form of a blog post. What a beautiful thing. When you get to your laptop and your head just isn’t in the game, try thinking outside of the box a bit. Writing about what you know requires less thought and research, so you’ll be able to produce something a bit quicker. Chances are it will also be more interesting because you’re a bit of a pro on your own topic.

By writing about the problem I’ve been able to give myself some ideas, and I’ve hopefully provided something useful and meaningful for others.

Maybe I’ll write a series.

The post How To Conquer Bloggers Block appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Put yourself in the shoes of the professional blogger or writer who doesn’t make ends meet with consulting or free-lance services for a moment, though. They almost have to depend on either online sales of what they write, often in the form of e-books and paid email subscriptions, or some sort of advertising as revenue. Affiliate advertising is enormously popular among this set and has proven a lucrative career for many online entrepreneurs.

But as audiences become desensitized to advertising, perhaps even antithetical to it, and the all-important conversion and click-through rates dwindle, what can individuals do to continue to drive revenue?

These are the questions we asked ourselves at CafePress a few months ago. (Disclosure – I’m an executive at CafePress. This post is about something we’ve launched. It’s cool, though. Keep reading.) Certainly, CafePress offers an opportunity for anyone to monetize their content — image or written — by placing it on any number of products. You can upload a picture you took of your family, a pet or sunset and turn it into a mouse pad, shower curtain, canvas wall art, wall clock and more. You can pull that funny Tweet you posted yesterday and make it a bumper sticker, poster or T-shirt, too.

So as we asked that question — how can we make it easier for people to monetize their content without just asking them to slap an affiliate ad on their blog — we landed on what we think might be a pretty neat idea: The PressIt Button.

The PressIt button allows you to apply a class to any image you have on your website and make any text on your blog or website active to be placed on CafePress products. When you set an image to be “Press-able” a little, green “PressIt” button appears in the upper corner of the image. You click it and a carosel of products with that image appears. Your audience can then buy something with the image if they so choose.

Photographers and graphic artists now have an easy way to productize their content!

But the button also appears when anyone visiting your website highlights any text on your site. The button appears in the upper corner of the highlight. If clicked, the carosel loads with products containing that word or phrase on them.

Here’s a little introductory video to show you what it looks like.

The WordPress plugin is available here. The JavaScript and other information can be found at the PressIt info page. We’d love for you to give it a try, of course.

But now back to the meat of the discussion: How can bloggers and non-profits and other companies monetize their online content in creative ways? Not everyone will want or need print-on-demand solutions to allow their content to be productized. But not everyone is a consultant or free-lancer either. How are you monetizing your online presence?

As always, the comments are yours.

The post Blog Monetization Without Advertising appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

They’re often behind the scenes, in the shadow of a more famous celebrity blogger. They rarely get (or take) much credit. But these people make it happen. They’re the keepers of calendars and the champions of quality.

So let’s get to know our local blog editors. We picked our favorite marketing blogs and emailed a few questions to the current and recent editors. Here’s the lineup…

Sonia Simone

Chief Marketing Officer (and co-founder) of Copyblogger Media and publisher of the Copyblogger blog.

Sean Work

Editor of the KISSmetrics blog.

Georgina Laidlaw

Until recently, Georgina was an editor for ProBlogger. She is also a freelance writer.

Russ Henneberry

Until recently, Russ was the editor of Daily Egg, the Crazy Egg blog.

Jess Ostroff

Editor of Convince & Convert. Also (among many other things) Jess is the Director of Calm at Don’t Panic Management.

Jay Kelly

VP – Operations of SME Digital and Editor of Social Media Explorer

Question 1.

As the editor of a blog, how do you spend most of your time?

SONIA: Planning out content — getting the balance right, working with writers to develop ideas, and keeping an ear to the ground to find out what readers are most interested in. That and cutting extra words.

SEAN: Emailing

GEORGINA: When I was editor atProBlogger, my time was divided between fielding submissions and editing those we’d accepted. We published about 15 pieces a week then, so there was a lot of editing, but also a lot of submission review.

JESS: Vetting guest post ideas, scheduling new content, and editing, editing, editing! You’d be surprised at how unpolished some of our posts are before they get through the system.

RUSS: I used to spend most of my time working with articles that came in and heavily editing them to ensure their success.  I have realized that it is a far better use of my time to find good people and work directly with them to understand the audience, generate article topics and train them on the style and formatting that works well on the blog.

JAY: I am fortunate in that most of our contributors do not require heavy edits, however I do spend a lot of time formatting posts and selecting pull quotes for aesthetic purposes. I also spend a good bit of time researching and reaching out to potential new authors.

Question 2.

What really pisses you off about your job? Anything?

SONIA: Comment spam. If I say one more word about it, I’m going to start to curse.

SEAN: Unnecessarily long emails. I really value “straight to the point” emails because it helps me get through my day faster.

GEORGINA: The thing that always gets to me about editing is that I’m a writer, so while there’s a level of satisfaction involved in editing, it always ended up being outweighed by frustration. This is why I left a regular editing job to be a freelance writer, and why I stopped working on ProBlogger as a freelance editor this year: because ultimately I wanted to focus on writing.

JESS: Dealing with Jay Baer all the time. Just kidding! It pisses me off when people ask to contribute to the site but then ask ME what I want them to post about. I also hate when people don’t read the directions in our guest blogging guidelines and contact forms. Reading directions is a really important skill, and we often ignore submissions that don’t follow our instructions.

RUSS: One word: trolls.

JAY: My biggest pet peeve is when a guest blogger takes the time to prepare a compelling post, then does not monitor or respond to comments.

Question 3.

Guest posting has become super popular.  Any suggestions for guest bloggers on how to pitch a post?

SONIA: Know the blog! *Really* know it. Write for the blogs you love, not the ones you think will be most “strategic.” Because the ones you love are also the ones you’ll get the greatest value from in the long run.

SEAN: Don’t just pitch posts for backlinks. Show that you’re an authority on a particular topic – it will go a long way…

GEORGINA: My main piece of advice would be to get to know the blog before you pitch. So many people wasted so much time (theirs and mine) by pitching inappropriate posts to ProBlogger. Also, provide detail in your pitch, so the editor knows exactly what you’ll cover. The more work you put into your pitch, the easier it’ll be to write the post—and make it relevant to the host site’s readership.

JESS: Show me that you’ve actually read the blog and know our audience. If you offer an idea that we JUST wrote about, that is too basic for our readers, or has nothing to do with our preferred topics, you’re doing it wrong. On the other hand, pitching an idea on how you can enhance a specific topic that we frequently write about or offer a creative take on something we haven’t touched upon is always a good way to go.

RUSS: Firstly, understand that most blog editors LOVE guest bloggers… if they are good.  Here’s how to be good at the pitch:

The first thing I am looking for is ANY indication that you have ANY idea what this blog is about.  If the pitch looks like a canned email — I don’t even respond.  Start with something like “I read the article ‘XYZ Article Title’ and really enjoyed it. I think I have an idea for an article that your readers will really love.  Would you be interested in that?”

Also, in the initial email provide links to articles on your own blog or other blogs that you have written that are comparable to what you aim to write for the target blog.

That’s it.  Keep it short and personalized to each individual blog.  If the editor is interested they will reply back that they would like to discuss your article idea. These are the kind of pitches that make blog editors smile.

JAY: Guest bloggers are a great way to get additional perspective on issues.  What I am typically looking for is something that pushes the envelope on thinking.  If you are pitching something like “5 Tips on Using Twitter” or a basic how-to idea, chances are good that I won’t publish it.

Question 4.

Have you ever published something you didn’t agree with?

SONIA: I try hard not to do that. I will say that I’m still not 100% convinced by Sean’s position in this post: There is No ROI in Social Media Marketing.

SEAN: Maybe? Can’t really remember off the top of my head. We do A LOT of publishing over at KISS. Usually, if I think someone is giving incorrect information I will make it correct or I will ask someone who knows more about the topic.

GEORGINA: Yes! As a non-technical editor of brand blogs, I’ve frequently published content I don’t personally agree with, but which represents common or popular practice. I’m not a specialist in all areas of blogging, so at some points you need to trust your writers.

JESS: Honestly, not really. I really believe in the stance that Convince & Convert takes when it comes to no hype marketing and that vision holds true when we’re publishing content from other people as well.

RUSS: I certainly don’t publish articles that I don’t agree with because they are factually inaccurate but I will absolutely publish something I disagree with that is debatable.  I have published marketing advice that I disagree with philosophically, strategically and tactically but there must be proof.  As Edward Deming said “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

JAY: Fortunately, I have never been in the position where I’ve been faced with publishing something that I have flat out disagreed with.  The beauty of being an editor is that through our contributors, I have the opportunity to expand my knowledge base and see issues from different points of view.

Question 5.

How far in advance to you schedule your content?

SONIA: Typically 2-3 weeks, but there’s always a certain amount of last-minute juggling.

SEAN: Usually a couple of weeks. However there is a constant game of musical chairs being played every week :)

GEORGINA: At ProBlogger I scheduled between 2 and 4 weeks in advance. That sounds like a lot, but we received a stack of submissions on a constant basis, and my years editing other sites before that one proved to me that a big buffer is a good buffer—especially when you’re the only one working on content. It’s important to have the flexibility to drop things in as you need to, and to remain current, but it’s also important from a professionalism and consistency standpoint to maintain a regular schedule of high quality posts.

JESS: I usually try to have things scheduled the week before they publish, but sometimes it doesn’t happen until the day before depending on when the content is received. For guest posts, we’re often scheduled out anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 weeks in advance, although final formatting doesn’t usually happen until the week before. If I have the time, I’ll get a bunch of them edited and scheduled weeks in advance, but finding that kind of time is a luxury :)

RUSS: My writers often have ideas in the queue as much as 3 months ahead.  Our blog does not attempt to cover things that are necessarily timely or news oriented (a la Mashable) so we are able to stay away from having to be responsive to the latest newsflash.  Finished (or close to it) content is usually scheduled two weeks ahead.

JAY: I schedule out three months as far as who is responsible for posts on particular days, and begin reviewing ideas.  I request their final drafts the Sunday before the post is scheduled to run.  Typically Sunday evening and Monday morning are spent scheduling posts for the week.

Bonus Question:

How did you land that awesome job?

SONIA: I was incredibly tenacious and I made myself incredibly useful. I’ve found that’s a good combination.

SEAN: Being a henchman for Neil Patel back in the day. I managed his SEO agency while he flew around the world doing deals. I went on to start O.C. Search Consulting  and he came back at me with an “offer I couldn’t refuse”.

GEORGINA: I landed the job through a referral. The Blogging Ninja (Shayne Tilley) was a friend of Darren’s, and when Darren needed an editor, Shayne very kindly recommended me! Darren and I met and discussed the site and his plans, and the rest is history.

JESS: I interned for one of Jay’s interactive agencies back in 2007 when I was still in college. He graciously allowed me to be his virtual assistant at the end of 2009, and my responsibilities have grown ever since! I think proving that I was extremely detail-oriented and somewhat of a grammar snob has served me well.

RUSS: I got this wonderful job by writing and being in the trenches.  I think it’s hard to gain the expertise need to be a true teacher (which is what a lot of bloggers are) without both honing your skills as a writer and doing the grunt work of your industry.  In my case this meant developing, executing and measuring the marketing for real businesses.

JAY: I run the operations side of SME Digital (the agency division of Social Media Explorer) and I fell into this position when Jason accepted a new role with Café Press.  It has been trial by fire for me, but he had established a pretty well-oiled machine that I was able to jump right into.

Wrap It Up

Let’s wrap up this round up with a few observations.

• These people are busy. Don’t waste their time. If you’d like to partner with them, do your homework first.
• They know what they’re doing. They’ve seen it all before. They’re job is to keep quality high. Of course, spammers make them cranky.

Huge thanks to the blog editors who participated. You guys deserve more credit. I really believe that. And by the way, the answers you provided required no editing at all. Not a comma out of place, naturally…

The post 6 Questions for 6 Blog Editors appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

How does this little bit of neuroscience have anything to do with blogging?  Because the most successful blog posts are those where the writer has tuned into something that the reader is experiencing.  This affects that part of the brain, generating an emotional connection with the reader.

For those who understand how people really make decisions, that’s the key. You may imagine that we weigh all the rational choices and do some mental calculation in our heads that helps us make a choice but in reality, all the possible considerations would literally stop us in our tracks if we didn’t have the shorthand of emotions to guide us.

Typical objectives for a corporate blog don’t take this into consideration.  They focus on goals like providing thought leadership, generating traffic, or to improving SEO–all reasonable goals for a blog but they tell only part of the story.  If you want to truly influence people, the most effective way to do that is to connect with them on a deeper, emotional level.

And as a marketer, influencing people is your job.

This means that when people read your post, they  must feel something.  When a reader connects with you emotionally, you are able to establish trust and as we all know, trust is what makes people want to do business with us. The secret sauce is how you accomplish that.

At Lion Brand, we have several talented writers who are passionate about our product.  Our objectives are to inspire and educate people.  But the real home runs are when we are able to touch peoples’ emotions.  A recent post by a guest blogger is a perfect example of creating that emotional connection.

Franklin Habit, wrote a post called Me, Me, Me, about how he feels guilty about knitting sweaters for himself.  He talked about how he gives away most of what he knits and it is sometimes unappreciated. He goes on to say that if he knit more for himself, he would know that he could make something that fit perfectly and it would give him great pleasure.  Franklin was able to tune into a universal truth about knitters and about people in general that speaks to the guilt of taking care of yourself.  He did it with openness, vulnerability and humor. (I invite you to read the post and consider how you relate to it, whether you knit or not.)

The numbers back up the power of connection.  That post, written within the last couple of weeks has been viewed over 11,000 times, shared on social media a couple of hundred times and has received many comments that talk about how he captured their feelings exactly.  Clearly engagement is closely related to connection.

There is truly nothing like the feeling that someone “gets” you.  People who read that post knew they had been “felt.”  This mirroring of peoples’ emotions is one of the most important ways to connect with others.  When reading his piece they said to themselves,  “Yeh, that’s how I feel too sometimes too.”

I know myself that my most successful posts were written when I was emotional about something and felt I needed to right a wrong.  When I wrote this post about how businesses need to change to be able to participate in social media I was feeling angry about an interchange with someone who didn’t understand this. I believe that the sharing of this post was based on others who felt the same frustration that I did.

It’s not realistic to think that you can create a moving piece of writing every day.  In the same way that relationships are built on a range of communication from small talk to deep, relationship-building conversations, a blog will consist of a mix of different types of writing.

There are probably thousands of blog posts about (pick your number) of ways to get more traffic or to write a successful post.  And all of those tips and tricks can lead to the “small talk” part of the relationship.

But the real secret sauce of a great blog post is the ability to connect with another human being and to make that person feel that you know her.  That’s how we create relationships that last.

RELATED:

For an excellent explanation of how we connect with people by mirroring their emotions, read Mindsight by Daniel J. Siegel M.D.

The post The Secret Sauce Of A Great Blog Post appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

When you’re responsible for the endless loop that is content marketing, it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds. Yes, you need an editorial calendar. Yes, you need to allocate responsibility for consistent content creation. Yes, you need to understand channel, tone, and that “content” is inclusive of multimedia. But you also need context and a larger frame of reference. In other words, you need to step back from the camera and look at the script from time to time, instead of just rushing to the next location and the next shoot.

Successful marketing makes the customer the hero of a story. There are only so many basic plots out there. Twenty, if you’re listening to Ronald Tobias. Seven, if you prefer Christopher Booker. Three, if you follow Robert McKee. And just one if you’re a Joseph Campbell fan.

For now, we’re going to discuss two basic plots, and how the principles of storytelling and storyboarding can help you develop an editorial narrative with your customer as the Hero, and spot any “holes” in the plot that your current strategy might have.

It’s Your Customer’s Journey

First, we’re going to look at The Quest, which is reasonably similar to Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” It’s the classic adventure plot. Hero is faced with a challenge. He/She attempts to overcome the challenge a number of ways, each ending in failure. Finally, the Hero is successful and receives his/her reward. I’ve seen this plot applied to storyboarding customer experience. The basic idea is to take a customer persona, and walk them from the problem, through different possible solutions, to finally success and their benefit. Notice the similarities?

In a storyboard, the plot plays out in six panels. The first two state the customer’s problem (the Hero’s challenge). The next three show different options for a solution (attempts to overcome). The final panel shows the benefits, from the customer’s perspective (our Hero receives the reward). One nice aspect of plotting out your customer experience this way is that it’s less tempting to switch to your POV instead of your customer’s. If you’ve ever read a list of benefits that actually read like a sales sheet and had little to do with the actual emotional or practical payoff for the user, you know what I mean. The storyboard format forces you to orient the story around the customer.

This technique can be a helpful diagnostic tool for checking the tone of your content against the customer narrative you’re trying to create. If your content isn’t telling that story, it’s time to make an adjustment.

Taking that idea a step further, you could use a similar template to plot your content strategy. If the “customer experience storyboard” is a classic adventure plot , then the “content strategy storyboard” follows a classic romance plot.

A Tale of Boy Meets Blog (or Email, or Tweet…)

Your content strategy is really more like a Love Story than a tale of epic Adventure. A content marketing plan is about sparking and developing a relationship to the point of commitment, and then continuing to keep that relationship strong. If you’ve ever watched a romantic comedy, you know how this plot works.

A person’s first encounter is with your content. That blog post he found through search, or the fun graphic she discovered on social media, is your company’s “across a crowded room” meet-cute. Their fears, concerns, or areas of resistance are the obstacles your content will need to overcome to win them over.  Your conversion or landing page is basically you, on bended knee, asking for a commitment. And your welcome emails, transactional emails and other post-purchase content are the little love notes in their lunchbox, keeping those fires burning.

You can really have fun with this narrative. Who’s your ideal hero/heroine–the person most likely to fall in love with your company ? What kind of content will catch his or her eye? How have they been burned in relationships with other companies like yours before? Who are your rivals (and what’s the best way to thwart them)?

You could even go so far as to outline this like an epistolary novel. Diagram the expected back-and-forth. Map it against your current content plan:

• Is your content at the edge of the funnel adequately attractive to strangers?
• How are you building trust with your returning visitors?
• Where are the holes in the story?
• Where would the guy lose the girl in your current plot?

Have you run across any good examples of organizations using storytelling and narrative tools to develop their content plans? Good tools or approaches for visualizing the customer story, so that it can be applied to your content marketing? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

The post Does Your Content Strategy Tell Your Customer’s Story? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.