Social media is all about engaging with people whether it be clients, friends, or relatives. As Li Evans of Serengeti Communications explains, “Everybody likes to share, and they like to share a story.”

She goes on to tell WebProNews that businesses are just now grasping how they can use social media. If they create valuable content, she says people will share it, which will expand their reach.

Contrary to some beliefs, effective social media marketing is a lot more than simply having a Facebook page. Evans says businesses need to, first of all, understand where their audience is. Although Facebook and Twitter have exploded in popularity, it doesn’t mean that your audience is there. If this is the case, these platforms will not be effective for your business.

It could be that message boards and forums are where your audience is. Although these areas have been around since before the term social media was even coined, Evans believes they are still very powerful, have a large reach, and rank in search engines. Other effective platforms include ratings and review services and location-based sites.

Secondly, businesses need to understand what their resources are. It is important to realize what you are capable of doing before you jump in. Otherwise, you could quickly get overwhelmed, which could lead to failure.

Thirdly, businesses have to listen to what their audience is saying. Just as businesses need to understand their resources before embracing social, they need to do a lot of listening too. If not, Evans says it could be compared to petting a shark. Businesses should know what is acceptable and what is not before they embark on a social media campaign.

Once a business applies these 3 steps, she says it can build a social media strategy.

What does every blogger need more of? Quality content!

This is the first of a series of six posts that tackle key content questions. Today, we’re looking specifically at content sources: places where you can get ideas and information that, with a little work, you can turn into quality blog posts.

Your posts may be text, images or video; they could deal with any topic. But every blogger needs post ideas, and all of us hit uninspired patches through which we still need to produce compelling content to a regular schedule.

Thinking strategically about the content sources you use can deliver several benefits:

• It provides its own inspiration: can’t think of a personal story to share today? No problem — use one of the many other content sources at your disposal.
• It can make your life easier: instead of scrounging around one or two sources of ideas, you can find and track great sources through which you’ll gain access to a constant flow of post ideas.
• It helps ensure you don’t omit important information: if your blog covers a growing market space, there are probably news items and events that you’ll want to make sure you cover. Monitoring key content sources will help you deliver the essential stories to your readers at the right time.
• It can help you to think intelligently about how you pitch each post: a greater choice of content sources offers you more opportunities to creatively reach specific reader segments in ways that resonate specifically with them.
• It can give you a wider range of tools with which to achieve your blogging objectives: try different content sources, and over time you may well find that different types of information produce posts that serve particular objectives. We all know, for example, that a review post can provide affiliate opportunities that can translate directly into revenue. Work out which post types help achieve specific audience, promotion or revenue goals, and identify content sources for those posts, and you’ll be able to focus on making the content resonate with your audience, rather than spending your time searching for basic post ideas.

I usually see content sources as falling into two categories: internal and external sources.

Internal Content Sources

Internal content sources are those that exist within my operation, myself, and my audience. They include:

1. feedback and audience discussion around past posts
2. the audience itself
3. my experiences, perspective, and opinion
4. my network of colleagues and contacts

It’s essential that you stay abreast of what’s happening on your site. Existing discussions can help you identify topics that unite your audience in sharing, learning, or debate — all of which helps build community.

It’ll also provide one means for engaging with your audience (along with social media and other sources of direct audience contact). Sure, your site stats are helpful as a frame of reference, but nothing beats actual user engagement for getting ideas about what your blog’s readers want to know, what makes them laugh, and what motivates them.

Thinking objectively about your own experiences in the field, as well as those of your contacts, can unearth some intriguing ideas and information that can immediately help you to develop posts. But beyond that, your passion for your field should see you investigating ideas with colleagues, and forming your own opinions about industry developments. Those unique perspectives can provide a wealth of post ideas — from interviews and news-style reports to the kinds of opinion and analysis posts that stick in  readers’ minds, and keep them coming back to check the comments long after they’ve read your post.

External Content Sources

External content sources lie beyond my immediate sphere of operation. They include:

• other media focused on the same topic, including offline media, such as interest magazines and industry publications, forums, user groups, social network trends and discussions, and more.
• other people focused on the same topic, including thought leaders, commentators, reviewers, passionate hobbyists, and organisational heads.

I like to subscribe to media that focus on the same topic as my blog, so I’m constantly fed content ideas through story alerts, media releases, and news updates. The same goes for tracking people who lead opinion or have expertise in my area — by subscribing to their blogs, regularly visiting their sites, and following them on social networks, I can keep a grip not just on the news, but on the discussions and thinking that occur in the broader arena in which I operate.

The posts that arise from these sources might be as pragmatic as a product or service review, daily reports from an industry conference, or ongoing commentary on a major development in your area of interest. Or they can be as theoretical as an essay taking in various industry-leading opinions, advice, and responses on a particular topic. The posts may be yours, or those of a guest blogger you’ve sourced through your offsite research. In any case, your blog won’t be short of content.

Continuous Content

Sourcing regular, quality content is every blogger’s challenge. But with that challenge comes the hurdles of variety, insight, exclusivity and personality. At the heart of it all, you’ll need a continuous content sourcing approach.

To source content continually, you’ll need to build content sourcing into your schedule, and into your brain. Yes, you’ll need to dedicate time to content-sourcing tasks, like flicking through RSS feeds, reading, researching, interviewing, networking, and so on. But all that becomes easy if you treat everything you do around your blog topic as a potential content sourcing opportunity.

Soon, you’ll no longer sit down to write a blog post and start by wracking your brains for ideas. Instead, you’ll find content ideas pop up everywhere. You’ll stop asking yourself, “What will I write about?” and find yourself picking and choosing from a plethora of ideas that “just come to you”.

What’s your favourite source of quality content ideas?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years’ experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Source Quality Content … Continuously

Share This

A Guest Post by Johnny B Truant.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re blogging to make money, or to express yourself. So why would you ever give something away? If you’re in this as a business, giving stuff away without charging for it seems counterintuitive. If you’re just out there writing for the sake of writing, then what you want are readers… and how is giving stuff away going to get more eyes on your blog?

The answer is that what goes around comes around. What you give comes back to you. What you sow is what you reap, and all of that. It’s not just platitudes. It works.

I was thinking about this because I’m in the middle of a promotion where I’m setting up self-hosted WordPress blogs for free. (In fact, if you want one, click over and go get one.) This isn’t an experiment. It’s the third time I’ve done it. I continue to do it because each time I do, my statistics go way up, my RSS readership grows, my Twitter followers grow, and I meet a bunch of new people who may end up being customers later. And thanks to the fact that I’m an affiliate for website hosting (which my free blog setup folks would have to buy regardless), I make money too.

All of my best tips come down to giving things away.

• Want to grow your mailing list? Write a great report or e-book — and then instead of charging for it, give it away to people who sign up for your list.
• Want to reach a new audience? Write a really good blog post, ideally one that is immediately actionable for people who read it. Reveal your best tip or tips in that post. Then, give it to someone else as a guest post rather than running it on your site.
• Want more referrals? Give a greater percentage of sales to your affiliates. I’m not quite gutsy enough to do this myself, but Dave Navarro told me once publicly that he gave affiliates 100% of the sale price on a certain product and then paid the transaction fees (which would normally come from the sale price) out of his own pocket. He “lost” money on his own product, but built a list in his shopping cart of people who liked his stuff well enough to buy it — a list he could promote to later.
• Want more goodwill, better Karma, or more raving fans? Then do something for charity. Twice that I know of, Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz.com has rallied her audience to raise money for a cause. The first time, she raised relocation expenses for a female reader who needed to get out of a physically abusive relationship. The second time, she raised over $12,000 for Cambodia — enough to build a school. The benefit to her? Tons and tons and tons of “good feelings” out in the blogosphere about her, which converted casual fans into die-hards.

I could keep going. There are tons of ways for any blogger at any level to increase either business or readership by trying the experiment of temporarily swapping “what can I get out of this?” thinking for “what can I give that people would really want and love?” thinking.

The really cool thing is that if you plan a little in advance, there’s usually a way that you can benefit too. If you’re smart, “giving it away” can get you a lot more than you’re probably getting right now.

Give it a shot. And if you’ve done it, let’s hear how it worked out in the comments!

P.S: If you’re still trying to figure out how to get your start in blogging in order to try this stuff? Well, now’s the time because I think I mentioned I know a guy who’s doing a mutually beneficial free blog setup promotion right now.

——
Johnny B. Truant blogs at JohnnyBTruant.com and is one of the two guys behind The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Boost your Income and Popularity by Giving Stuff Away

Share This

Over the last couple of years a number of fairly prominent bloggers have decided to shut down their blogs and move their communications to subscription only email newsletters. Bloggers such as Jason Calacanis, Joel Spolsky and Sam Lessin were three (all mentioned in this post on Gigaom).

Some of these have moved to a free email subscription while others have gone to a paid model.

I’ve had a number of readers ask for my response to this and asking:

• is blogging dead?
• do I have to choose between email and blogging?
• should those starting out start with a blog or email?

Side note: In some ways I think that this post is pretty funny. Only a year or two back we were debating whether RSS had killed email and now people are debating whether email has killed blogging!

Today I thought I’d jot down a few random thoughts on the topic – I hope they add something useful for those pondering the topic:

1. It’s not an either or choice

My own experience over the last few years has been that things have really taken off for me when I’ve taken a dual approach. While I initially put all my eggs in the blogging (with an RSS subscription) model – I discovered a couple of years back that when I developed a newsletter along side a blog that my business really took off.

Over at digital photography school we are approaching half a million subscribers (combined total of RSS and email) – less than a quarter of these are RSS subscribers. Adding email as an option has expanded our potential reach incredibly.

2. Blogs build profile

One of the reflections that I’d have on the above 3 people who have abandoned blogs is that they’ve each used blogging to build their profiles. They have all done other worthwhile things to build their authority, credibility and reach – but part of what has enabled them to make their email subscription model work is that they had an established audience (partly from their blogging).

To start out with just an email subscription service and make it successful is not impossible – but I suspect some other kind of web presence (whether it be blogging, life streaming, Twitter etc) will help.

I guess it comes down partly to the stage you’re at as an online entrepreneur and how established your network is. If you’re well known, have a network already in some way and have the ability to pull numbers of email subscribers then it’s probably something to consider. But if you’re starting out online – you’ll probably need some kind of site or other presence online to help get the ball rolling.

3. Homebases

One of the things that I find useful about having a blog is that it gives me a ‘home base’. I’ve written about the importance of having a place that you control and that readers can find you (a home base) before and for me a blog is the ideal way to do this.

Email has become increasingly powerful in my own business over the last few years but part of the success for me has been that I’ve had a homebase.

For me having a blog alongside email does two things.

Firstly the blog helps me to drive people to sign up for the newsletter. We try to write the most useful content that we can – content that not only helps our existing readers but also the kind of content that they share and that leads new people to us via social media, search engines and word of mouth. Any new person landing on our site almost always finds us through the blog (a few do it via the forum but the blog is #1).

As a result we’re able to grow our email newsletter subscribers by around 800 new people per day.

Secondly – the email drives people back to the blog. In some ways our emails are like a condensed version of our RSS feed. So every week our email readers are being driven back to our blog in massive numbers.

It might seem a little silly to have a blog that drives people to email which drives people back to the blog – but without the email first time readers would arrive on our blog and never return.

Of course being able to drive people back to the blog in large numbers allows us to monetize it – through advertising, some affiliate stuff, selling our own products etc.

I guess my main concern with only going with email is where the growth will come from in new subscribers if its not out there for people to see, taste and be drawn into. Interestingly some of those who do emails then post their emails on the web in an archive – which in some ways isn’t that dissimilar to a blog.

4. It’s all about your business ‘model’

I guess ultimately it’s about the business model you’re using. I monetize in a variety of ways including advertising (ad networks and direct ad sales), affiliate marketing, selling my own products and more. Some of these could certainly be done purely through an email model but others could not.

For example running ad network ads is something you can’t do via email (at least not the major ones). I could certainly sell ads directly to advertisers, do affiliate marketing or sell my own products via email – but the markets I’m working in seem to respond best when I take a multi-pronged approach (communicating in email, on blogs and via social media).

For me targeting multiple mediums increases the reach significantly.

5. Other factors to consider

The more I think about the more I realise that there are many other factors at play in these kinds of decisions. They would include:

• audience – who are you writing for and what mediums are they familiar with and a part of their workflow?
• style - your own style of communication is going to definitely play a part here. The differences between email and blogging are subtle but you’ll find that your style will lend itself to different mediums. Some people just have a knack with email while others are much more engaging on a blog, in video or in short form like Twitter.
• interaction - emails don’t have a comments section. This will be attractive to some (no more moderation) or unattractive to others. Of course people will comment (replying to emails, on social media etc) but one of the great things that happens on some blogs is the public discussion that happens after a post goes live – a communal experience that often adds a lot to a post. I guess it depends whether what you’re doing lends itself to communal interaction.

6. Will it end up looking like a blog?

I’ve had a number of conversations with people about this lately and about ideas to develop email subscription services. One conversation with someone pitching the idea of an email subscription was that he’d post his emails on a website so that new people could see what he was sending, get indexed in Google and so people could share them with friends.

When I asked whether he’d miss the comments people give he agreed and said he’d add a comments section to that website.

My reflection was simply that it was starting to look like a blog with the option to subscribe via email.

Final reflections

I’m certainly not anti the idea of email or even focusing solely upon email subscriptions instead of blogging – however I guess it comes down to what you want to achieve, who you want to speak to, what your current situation, and profile is, whether you’ve got time to do multiple mediums and what kind of medium best suits your style.

What other factors would need to be considered in making such a decision?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blogging vs Email – Is Blogging Dead?

Share This

Recently I went to the Connect Now conference and had the chance to hug Darren Rowse, meet Gary Vaynerchuk and hang out with my social media friends. One year ago, I didn’t think I’d be able to accomplish something so awesome.

Skellie was one of the people that made this possible. She wrote this killer book, The Blog Business Funnel (aff), which presented a new model of making an income from your blog.

The Blog Business Funnel

Skellie argues that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to monetize a blog via traditional methods such as direct advertising, affiliate sales and adsense. She highlights a system which shows bloggers how they can make plenty of money doing what they’re best at.

She recommends “using word-of-mouth worthy content to generate targeted traffic, then using your knowledge and insight to generate trust.”

How it helped me.

I’ve struggled with the idea of launching a business from my blog for years. I’ve had lots of issues and was flailing around, trying to find a model that aligned with my business goals and my promotional ethic.

I had read a lot of business products about how to build a profitable business but they were separated into different niches: sales, blogging and freelancing. I was getting the information I needed but I had no way to fit it all together.

Skellie took us through key launch strategies and details how we could apply them to our own business. I’m heavily into product launches yet it never occurred to me that it could apply for services. We are in the prelaunch stages and already have huge demand. We have several larger companies willing to send smaller jobs our way as well.

I knew that my business would be successful because I had an established blog and had worked hard to create trust with my audience. What I didn’t expect was for it to be doing this well less than a month after the launch.

Why it’s so awesome.

It fits into the third tribe marketing model.

I’ve struggled with the concept of promoting myself. It’s hard. I wanted to get the word out there but didn’t want to seem sleazy or that I was trying to take advantage of my friends.

I was able to learn how to sell myself and my business by just doing what I was already doing. Hanging out online, being darn useful and creating high quality content. She taught me how I could leverage that interest in a way that benefited everyone.

Skellie has extensive practical experience

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Skellie in Melbourne. She is the real deal. This is the model she used to rock it online and leverage that success to get employed by Envato. I watched her grow from a compelling blogger to someone that commanded respect in the industry. Everything she writes is from personal experience – experience that most bloggers don’t have.

This isn’t for everyone.

Now, I love Skellie. She is one of the few bloggers I get totally fan girl over. I was worried that this would affect my objectivity so asked a friend for his opinion.

Frank Wall is a hiking blogger. His site is primarily monetized via advertising and ebook sales. He didn’t get as much out of the ebook as I did. He was intrigued by the idea and really enjoyed Skellies writing but it didn’t fit with his method of monetization.

I agree. Skellies book was perfect for me because I know I wanted to create a freelance business based off the success of my blog but had no idea how to accomplish this. I spend six months kicking arse with my guest pots and let my blog stagnate because I didn’t know how to handle the demand for my services.

Why I love Skellie

There is one blogger that I credit for igniting my passion in this industry. She showed me that you could write beautifully, no matter the topic. She revolutionized the industry for me and I’ve used her as inspiration. This blogger is Skellie.

I review a lot of products. This is the best value ebook I’ve seen in a year. Learn more about it here (aff).

Jade’s Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this product in exchange for my feedback, and get no affiliate commission.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Turn Your Blog Into A Profitable Business

Share This

You work hard to build your blog through traffic and content strategies, but are you working equally as hard at converting readers into paying customers? As Darren demonstrated during his week-long, $72,000 ebook launch, having your own product available for sale can help you generate an impressive revenue stream.

To get to the big numbers, however, you need more than just a high-traffic blog – you need a way to contact your readers via email, because that’s what really drives the sales. Let’s talk about why this is true (and how you can start using your blog to build a list who will buy from you).

The Blessing (and Curse) of A Blog Audience

Blogs are an incredible way to build a connection to your audience. People get a chance to sample your content, get to know you, and establish trust in you, all at their own pace. Your loyal readers can spread the word about you, creating “social proof” and an ongoing stream of new readers. It’s a beautiful thing.

The downside, though, is that a blog audience isn’t necessarily a “real time” audience, meaning that readers may not be keeping current with your content on a daily basis. And this will kill you when it’s time to do a promotion or sale.

You may be running a 5-day special on a new product or service, but what if readers only catch up on their RSS feeds once a week? They may miss out. Or, if their feed reader is too cluttered, they may never get to it at all. You run your promotions, and sales flounder.

But having a growing number of people who are subscribed to your mailing list turns the tables on this problem. If you’re releasing a product today, your subscribers will hear about it via email today – no matter what.

The Advantage Of An Email Audience

Unlike feed readers or tweet streams (which people often skim through, ignoring most of the content), email commands attention in a different way. Readers are used to opening emails in order to figure out what to do with it (read it, save it for later, or delete it), and they’re a lot more likely to give it a look – and click the links inside – within a few hours of it being sent.

So if you’ve got a promotion going tomorrow, you can let all your readers know about it tomorrow. Some may decide to ignore it, but they’ll have at least seen it, because their inbox gets looked at in detail at least once a day.

And if you’ve been doing your job using your blog to warm up your audience, they’ll be more likely to open that email soon after receiving it.

So let’s talk about a few field-tested strategies for getting your readers on your list.

How to Get Blog Visitors On Your List

To get blog visitors on your list, you need to have a reason for them to join up – and in most cases, people offer a freebie such as a special report or audio/video content as an incentive. The challenge with this, however, is that everybody’s doing it.

Years ago, just having something for free was enough to get people to join your list. But these days, people are inundated with free offers so you’ve got to do something more to stand out. Whatever it is that you give away needs to better than good – it needs to be spectacular.

The good news is that making this happen is pretty easy to do. All you need to do is create one small, product-worthy resource that solves one of your potential customers’ biggest problems. It doesn’t have to be a gigantic undertaking – just a resource that represents some of your expertise specifically positioned to solve a reader’s issue or help them become smarter than they were before.

I recommend you actually create a workbook for this free resource, because it’s a format that isn’t used too often and will more readily capture attention. “Special Reports” are a dime a dozen, but most people are accustomed to paying for workbooks, so your offer will automatically appear higher-value.

Why The “Free Product” Model Works So Well For This

Giving away a product-quality resource is an incredible list-building tool because it takes people by surprise – they’re not used to getting something truly substantial for free. And workbooks are particularly powerful because they contain the promise of some fairly immediate results – when the reader gets through it, they’ll either have a particular problem solved or they’ll have more information around a topic that’s important to them.

That promise of immediate results is a powerful motivator to get on your list, get your workbook and go through it. And once your reader finishes that workbook, they’ll be pre-sold on the idea that you are a person worth buying from in the future (after all, if your free stuff is product-quality, how much more impressive will your paid products be?).

One other benefit to this “over the top” free offering is that very few of your competitors will have the guts to do this. Just having this resource puts you at a competitive advantage.

What To Do If This Seems Like A Scary Amount Of Work

By this point you might be thinking that you don’t have the time to make a product-quality offer for your list. But it’s actually easier than you think. You don’t have to create a 100-page PDF or 6 hours of audio – all you need to do is pick one specific pain point your audience has and create a resource that lets them get one step further than they are now.

And to show you just how simple it is, I’ve put together a free workbook that steps you through how to put together a product-quality resource in a weekend (or even one day, if you’re ambitious). It’s not that difficult to do, and the payoff can be huge. I’ve personally used this free workbook strategy to drive over 3,000 people onto my list over the last seven months, all by adding additional free workbooks to a “library” on my blog.

(And the best part is, you can reuse the strategies in the free workbook to create additional products you can charge for after you get people on your list.)

When You’re Ready To Begin Building Your List, Here’s What To Do

What would it do for your blog’s reputation to have a product-quality resource available for free download? And how strong of a good first impression would you make on your readers if you offered it?

Take a look at the free workbook and decide what kind of resource you’re going to create to pull people into your mailing list.  One weekend is all it takes, and it could be the tipping point your blog has been waiting for.

Dave Navarro is a product launch manager who specializes in teaching smart blog owners how to build responsive email lists and create their own high-demand information product platform at his blog, The Launch Coach.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Convert Blog Readers To Paying Customers

Share This

I asked this question over on Twitter on the weekend and it was fascinating to hear the answers and see some of the thinking behind what different people do.

I thought I’d run it as a poll and open it up for some wider discussion here on the blog.

I’d love to get your comments on this topic. Why do you do the number of tweets that you do? Why don’t you do more/less? Do you use any tolls/automation to manage it – if so which ones?

Here’s some of the responses to my tweet asking the question:

“I only tweet a link to it once. I’ll tweet a second time if theres something interesting in the comment section.” – JadeCraven

“One. Sometimes two. Three if it really rocks. But I post daily and don’t want my Twitter to be an endless ME ME ME feed.” – CatherineCaine

“I tweet my new blog posts only once…to me, more is spammy, even tho I know not everyone will see it the 1st time…” – QuipsAndTips

“I always tweet a link straight after I post.Then maybe the next day depending on the post time, for those who may have missed it” – CptTremendous

“I space it out over days/times. Maybe btw 5-8 over a weeks time.” – MyMelange

“I usually retweet about three times, one in a.m., one in afternoon, one at night. Covers time zones.” – docudramaqueen

“Depends on importance and global relevance. If really important to me & relevant also to US audience, I may tweet twice in Aus..” – divinewrite

“Once. More than once is spam and makes followers unfollow and complain.” – Shuttlecock

See a full list of the responses to my original tweet here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How Many Times Do You Tweet Links to New Blog Posts? [POLL]

Share This

Traditionally, public relations agencies have considered any press good publicity. However, in this day and age of new media, that standard has changed. Sam Ford of Peppercom calls the traditional viewpoint “a major mistake.”

In an interview with Abby Johnson at SXSW, Ford explains that communicators should think qualitatively in terms of what people are saying, instead of quantitatively.  In addition, now as brands are getting more involved in social media, they need to realize that they might not like the feedback they receive.

If you are not ready to hear honest feedback, then maybe new media is not the place for you. Ford says, “Engagement only works if you’re prepared to engage on your side as much as you’re expecting the audience to engage.”

He also points out the harm in a brand “over-promising” its ability to engage if it cannot. Unfortunately, many Web 2.0 business models are built off of strategies for engaging the audience, but if the brand is not providing anything in return, it is essentially asking for unpaid labor to build its business.

Once a brand is involved and is ready to engage, Ford says it automatically thinks that the only way it can react to negativity is by responding. Instead of focusing on what to say next, Ford suggests that brands find solutions for the real problems. He said hearing is not listening.

If a brand wants to produce positive press, a brand should send a message that is additional material for the conversation the audience is already having. In the end, this will make the message spreadable.

Are you actively engaging your audience and truly listening?

Posted by katemats

Hi SEOmoz community! 

Let me take a moment to introduce myself since this is my first post on the blog.  My name is Kate Matsudaira (Kate Mats for short), and I started here in November as VP Engineering for the fabulous technology team here at SEOmoz.  Before that I worked for an online video platform called Delve Networks – where I learned a lot about online video, how people are using it, and perhaps more relevant to this audience, how to make it work for your business.  All this experience working with lots of customers to get their video online has given me a lot of insight into the many different ways to use video, monetize video, and optimize it to deliver the highest ROI.  In this post I am going to lay out a few tips and tricks for getting started with a video content strategy.

Lots of us keep hearing about how video is such a compelling medium and a great way to engage your customers.  Not long ago Rand presented a Whiteboard Friday Video where he covers some of the basics around video SEO, like the trade offs between using a third party site, or hosting the video yourself.  In the following post, I hope to add a little more to that topic and talk about some additional strategies that combine these ideas – starting with a 3 step process to help you get started with creating a video strategy for your website

Step 1: Getting Video on Your Website

So you have decided you want to add video to your site – let’s talk about some potential strategies to make the most of your efforts.

There are two options central options for getting video on your site – you can choose a 3rd party or you can host the video yourself. 

Generally hosting video yourself is not recommended unless you have lots of technical resources at your disposal (there are lots of moving parts to a video hosting project including: hosting the files, serving up video and the resulting bandwidth costs, selecting and customizing a player, collecting metrics and analytics, etc) – it used to be that this was the best option, but that is no longer the case.  For most people choosing a 3rd party video platform is a better solution because they will offer better bandwidth costs, provide you lots of tools to manage your video and help create a compelling user experience. 

For this article I am going to assume you are choosing a third party platform and not building everything yourself (although if you were, some of the advice may still be relevant for your project).

Once you’ve chosen a platform (there are lots of options like YouTube, Delve Networks, Ooyala, Brightcove, Fliqz, and more – evaluating each of these could warrant a whole post in and of itself!) you have to think about your video strategy – do you just want video on your site, or do you want videos hosted off-site as well?

Step 2: Defining your strategy – should you host it or post it?

Once you’ve evaluated some options and feel like you know how to get video on your site, the next step is to decide should you just host the video on your site, post it to the video sharing sites, or both*.

* Note: I wouldn’t suggest posting the same video (in the same way) since you really want users to link to your website, not YouTube, for the same content, or you would want your site to show up in the SERPS instead of the video sharing site’s version of your content. But this is not a one size fits all recommendation and there may be cases where this is appropriate; such as when you pay to produce a high quality piece of content and want it on your web site, but want to take advantage of the traffic from a video sharing site – more on this below.

Everyone knows that sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion get a lot of traffic, and that posting to these video sharing sites can be a great way to get exposure and expand your reach.

There are some clear advantages of these big video sharing sites including: 

• Easy to upload video
• No bandwidth costs
• Lots of traffic
• Easy to share (embed, email to friends, rss feeds, etc)

But there are also some disadvantages:

• Videos are watched on their site, not yours!
• Harder to monetize – if you are pursuing a video ad strategy to monetize your content this harder to do on big video sharing sites
• No link juice if people embed/share your video
• Limited analytics to understand user engagement, video bounce rate, etc
• Tend to be lower quality
• Ads appear on your content
• Limited length/duration

These sites can provide a powerful marketing channel to your site, brand and content. However, if your ultimate goal is conversions you need to have clear plan on how to get traffic and viewership on that track (and that for most of us, means back on your website).  This means that you need to think carefully about a strategy that makes sense. 

Here is a good list of questions that might help you pick a strategy that works for you.

• Do you want increased brand awareness?
• Are you planning to put ads on your content or charge a premium or pay per view model for your video?
• How are you going to get users to come to your site using your video?
• Are you concerned about bandwidth costs?
• Do you just want something simple, or is having a full fledged platform important to your business goals?
• Is your content long, or is high definitely/quality really important to you?
• Can you create entertaining or useful videos that would gain traction and views on a video sharing site?
• Or is your content very product specific and best used to help your current traffic convert?

Of course you don’t have to pick one or the other, you can use a hybrid strategy. Some ideas I’ve seen work well in practice include:

Put mini videos on YouTube, and the longer length content on your site.
This will act like a teaser and encourage users to come to the site for the rest of the content.

Here is an example of a Yoga web site trying to sell their DVDs – in this case they are trying to build up their YouTube brand (see the call to action encouraging users to subscribe), but are also trying to drive traffic to their site by enticing you with the first part of a DVD series.  =

YouTube compresses video to a lower quality, so you can offer an high definition or higher quality version on your site. 
This is particularly compelling for entertainment based content, or any content that would be thoroughly more enjoyable in full screen mode.

In this example, 4KidsTV offers a cartoon series that offers the lower quality versions on YouTube, but direct people to their site to watch the higher resolution content as seen below.

Offer relevant materials (articles, white papers, quizzes, etc) on your site that compliment the content in the video. 
Indicating this in the video description will encourage users to visit your site for additional information.

In this YouTube video, there are instructions on how to style your hair a particular way using Foxy Hair Extensions.  This user has several of these videos that are very useful and instructional, but they also encourage viewers to purchase the product in the video they are selling.

Put the same video on both YouTube and your site. 
Typically you would do this if you wanted to leverage the YouTube distribution channel, but you wanted something else that YouTube didn’t offer – for example some other video providers offer customizable players, substantial analytics, subtitles, etc – or perhaps you have limited resources and want to put the video both places. This strategy allows you to still take advantage of the audience on a big sharing site, but also gives you the ability to showcase the video content to your users as well.

If you are going to use the same video on both YouTube and your site – it is duplicate content in some sense (which in SEO is generally bad), but you can skirt "duplicate content" for video by having a different title/description when you post to YouTube vs. your own site.  And this approach could potentially get dual benefits (findability of content on YouTube + visibility on your site and ability to serve advertising/content/have video sitemaps/etc). 

If you do go this approach I recommend you think about your users – make sure your web site adds additional value in supplemental, relevant content or a superior experience.  And also make sure that the video you are using is designed to help your strategy – if you want more brand recommendation make sure your video showcases your brand in the content, if you want to drive your users to take an action make sure that call to action is clear in the video, etc. 

One thing you might want to stay away from is having the the exact same video on your homepage (or the landing page you are steering people to via your video). In general it wouldn’t be a great feeling for a user who watched the video, to go looking for more information and see the exact same video they just watched – you need to give them something different and relevant.  For best results, drive people to a specific landing page or microsite (with a very short and easy to remember url) via your video that is tailored to the actions and conversions you want them to take (and this also allows you to track the traffic coming to that page since users have to type in links and can’t click on them in the video).

Finally, it is also important to pick the right content for this strategy.  This means creating content that drives your objectives. For example, choose a video that will showcase your brand – that way if it is embedded elsewhere it will carry your branding along to those sites.  Having your url or landing page url actually in the video content will show viewers where to go to get more information or similar content.  Give them call to actions – tell them what they get if they go to your site – tease them with more content, make it clear what you want them to do.
 

Step 3: You have a plan, now optimize it!

There are several pieces to optimizing your video marketing – since several of these are likely worth of a whole post, in the interest of brevity I have broken it down into two areas: the video itself, and the metadata for the video (either on your site or the video sharing site).

For the video: 

• Showcase your brand in the video.
  Edit your videos to showcase your brand in the introduction (pre-roll), or in an overlay like a sub-title (these are easy to add with most video editing software), or in a backdrop in the content (think about interviewing people in front of a big canvas with your brand on it – like celeb pictures at movie reviews).  These can be very effective since your branding will travel with the video.  Videos sharing sites make it very easy to share (now, there is a compelling statement!) and could end up embedded or ripped on lots of other sites, or in search results, etc. Thus, adding your branding to the video file itself ensures that your company information, brand, or website URL travel along with your content.
• Use descriptive filenames.
  When you create a video some cameras will name files things like a234rt.mp4, this isn’t terribly useful to search engines.  So just like using descriptive names for your images, renaming your videos to something more meaningful (i.e. dog-walking.mp4) will help with video SEO efforts.
• Add a call to action at the end of the video.
  Make it clear to users what to do next — give them your website address, send them to a link to learn more, direct them to similar videos on your site.  This is your great chance to steer them where you want them to go.  Make it clear to the user what they get if they go to your site.
• Make your audio clear!
  A recent NPR story noted that YouTube engineers are creating automated video transcripts to aid in video search. Having clear, understandable audio will help get more accurate transcripts (which not only improves searchability but also accessibility for hearing-impaired users).  This is also great for regular users, too, since sometimes it is hard to hear when you have poor quality audio, multiple sources talking at the same time, or music playing during someone’s dialogue.
• Think about the duration of your content.
  Some video sharing sites, like YouTube, limit content to 10 minutes, but generally breaking up your video into small digestible chunks will make it both better for the user (they don’t have to watch 10 minutes on a topic they don’t care about to get to the 3 minute segmented they are truly interested in viewing) and give you more unique and (hopefully) compelling content.  Plus if you are using a 3rd party solution this can help minimize bandwidth costs.
• Add text titles, textual graphics, and other text in your videos.
  Much like OCR technology Google is employing new technology to help understand video, so if you put captions and other textual elements into your videos that can help both users and search engines (think about these elements like headings used in news broadcasts)
• Create interesting content.
  In general this should go without saying; but I figured I should state it clearly since I have had someone say "I don’t understand why people aren’t watching my [very boring and dry] commercial on product X"

And the metadata:

• Fill out all of the information fields.
  If there are fields to be completed like title and description, make sure you fill them out (and use your keywords where appropriate).  Use the same approach you’d employ when optimizing your web pages for SEO; video search is very similar to classic web search.  Don’t leave any information blank since this is how the video sharing sites expose your content to their audience.   
• Use descriptive and catchy titles.
  This helps users know what your video is about and can assist with viral efforts.  Using keywords in your title, description and tags will make it easier for users to find and discover your content – and they can help you rank higher for those keywords.  But like most things in SEO, don’t go overboard – pick a few relevant keywords/tags to focus on that will have the most relevance to users viewing that video. (For example, if you made a video on how to cook pancakes, but you are trying to drive traffic to your kitchen supplies e-commerce site – keywords like pancakes, cooking, etc are probably better choices than "griddle" because they are far more relevant to the user)
• Take the time to setup a profile, channel, etc.
  Like Twitter and Facebook, taking the time to fill out your profile and make it meaningful will help users understand your brand and can help you gain more traffic share on the video sharing sites.  Many of the video sharing sites make use of channels, so having a channel with organized content gives your account credibility – generally like other community based websites being part of the community will improve your visibility and spending time on these sharing communities should fit into your overall video strategy.
• Choose a good thumbnail.
  It is the first thing users see and plays an important role on whether they click or not.  Make sure you try to pick a thumbnail that is compelling and relevant.  You could probably write a whole post on picking compelling thumbnails, but at a basic level, use common sense and try to answer the question "what photo best encapsulates the content of my video?"
• Put meaningful content around the video.
  If you put the video on your site, having great indexable and meaningful content around the video will help search engines understand the context of the video and related content.  This is also great for your users.  For example, if you have a video on making pancakes, content about pancakes, the history of pancakes, or recipes would all be great surrounding content.  For interviews, a summary or other relevant articles would be helpful for the user.  And in some cases, transcripts of the video make *excellent* accompanying content.
• Create a transcript.
  Some video sharing sites allow you to submit transcripts, there are also some players that allow you to share this with users.  This can help a lot with content since transcripts can be understood and indexed by search engines.  And if accessibility is a concern for you, creating transcripts is likely hugely beneficial to your customers in the first place.
• Submit a video sitemap to Google.
  This is the easiest way to increase your chances of your video showing up in Google search results. You can find more information on that at Google Webmaster Support. [Special tip for those of you reading this in detail: if you want to drive users to your site and only have the thumbnail show up in search results make sure and set the parameter allow_embed="no" ]
• Take advantage of mRSS and HTML 5.
  There are lots of great attributes you can specify for the video including things like tags, that make it easier for the search engines to understand and index your content.  And with mRSS you can submit the feed to Google, so as soon as you publish new video it will be pushed to them – just like RSS and your blog! 

Once you get it on the page, and you spend some time optimizing your content for maximum usability and impact – make sure you have setup some sort of way to measure you success.  You should certainly pay attention to views (even better if you can get more detailed video engagement metrics), but many platforms offer even more detailed metrics to help you measure and track the effectiveness of your strategy.

That should be a good first set of things to do to get started with a video strategy.  And of course, this is just the beginning there are lots of options and many creative ways to leverage this compelling medium to aid your goals.

If you liked this information or found it useful or have thoughts on video related topics you would like to learn more about, I would love to hear your feedback so please post it in the comments!

Do you like this post? Yes No

While I get many questions from bloggers asking for advice on ‘how to blog‘ perhaps one of the biggest questions a new blogger needs to ask themselves before they move on to the HOW to blog question is ‘WHAT will I blog about?’

There is no real right or wrong answer to this question as blogs come in all shapes and sizes and focus upon all manner of topics. However thinking through the question before you start a blog will help you make some of the other decisions that you’ll want to make later on in this guide (for example the domain name and the name of your blog will probably come out of this decision).

Reasons to Focus Upon a Niche with Your Blog

Choosing a niche to blog about is important for a number of reasons. These include:

1. Niche Blogs Appeal to Readers

My first blog was a personal blog with no real niche focus. It did start with a main focus upon Spirituality, but over time began to cover a large range of topics including blogging, photography, culture, politics, personal stuff that I was doing etc. The more topics I covered the less I appealed to everyone.

Sure a certain group of people were interested in Spirituality and Blogging, but less of them were into photography, even less also liked my stuff about Australian Pop Culture….. each topic narrowed the chances of me writing something that would appeal to all of my readers. I started to get complaints from them – ’stop writing about XXXX’.

When I began to break topics out onto their own blogs my audience responded well – those who were into photography gathered around that topic, those that were into blogging gathered on that blog.

In the end this is about relevance – people seem to be drawn to niche focused blogs because they know that they’ll see content on them that focuses upon the things they are specifically interested in.

2. Niche Blogs Monetize Better

I tried to make money from my personal blog for a while but found the going really tough. At the time I mainly tried to make money from advertising and found that sponsors were simply not interested in promoting their product (which had a specific focus) to an audience who were there to read about a whole range of things.

What camera manufacturer wants to promote their latest camera on a blog about photography that also touches on spirituality, politics and what movie I saw on the weekend?

Niche blogs also tend to work better with contextual ad networks like AdSense. AdSense is getting better are providing ads that related strongly to what is on a specific page of content but I have seen instances where blogs covering lots of different topics attract ads that don’t always relate to content on a particular page.

The other thing about AdSense is that it is a system that gives advertisers the ability to target specific sites. These types of targeted campaigns can be quite profitable but they are less likely to happen if a blog covers a large range of topics, many of which don’t relate to that advertiser.

When I went niche I found monetizing with advertising a lot easier. In fact monetizing with a variety of methods seems to be easier on niche blogs. Affiliate promotions and selling your own products work better because your audience is there to get information on certain topics – so when you promote products on those topics…. they’re much more likely to buy.

3. Niche Blogs Do Better in Search Engines

It is possible to rank well for all kinds of topics on a generic/multi topic blog. It’s possible – but I find it is easier when you have a blog with a focus upon a niche topic. If your whole site is about the one topic Google treats it as more of an authority on that topic the more content you add, the more you interlink the posts, the more other sites in your niche link to it etc.

There are certainly exceptions (mega sites like Wikipedia are obvious ones) but unless you have the pulling power of a massive site like that a niche focused site could be the way to go.

4. Niche Blogs Build Credibility and Profile

One of the consequences of moving to more of a niche focus with my blogging was that I noticed I was starting to become known for that topic.

The first time this happened was after I started my first photography blog and 2 months later had a phone call from a city-wide newspaper asking for a quote on a photography related story. This had not happened to me before as a result of my personal/multi topic blog but having a site purely focused upon a single topic gave a perception that that topic was ‘my thing’.

For me having niche focuses has helped me to become known on different topics – which has led to all kinds of opportunities in those niches – including writing books, speaking opportunities around the world, main stream media appearances and all manner of partnership opportunities with wonderful people in my industries.

Not everyone wants to build their profile and become known in an industry – but if that’s part of your goal then a niche blog on those topics can be powerful.

Note: Niches Need Not Just be Topic Related

Before I conclude this post on niches I thought it might also be worth noting that a blogs niche need not only ever be focused upon a topic. I explored this more fully in a post titled – Does Your Blog Focus Upon a Niche Topic or a Niche Demographic? As the title of that post suggests – there are some successful blogs around that cover a variety of topics – that appeal to a similar type of person or demographic.

So instead of just writing about video games – a blog might choose to blog about topics that appeal to teenage boys – video games being one of the topics that they might have an interest in.

Worth noting though is that if you do decide to target a niche demographic rather than a niche topic – you could be opening yourself up for a lot of work. Covering a diverse range of topics can certainly work – but to cover them all comprehensively can take a lot of time and energy.

How to Choose a Niche for Your Blog

Now that we’ve looked at some of the reasons WHY a niche can be a powerful thing to think about before you start looking at HOW to blog – later this week I’m going to continue this post with a followup post exploring a number of factors that those looking to start a blog might consider when choosing a niche.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Blog: Choose a Niche for Your Blog [Why Niches are Important]

Share This

Newer Posts »