Dustin Stout

Social Media

Posts having to do with social media, including (but not limited to): Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, blogging and any other hot social networks worth writing about.

Evergreen Google Plus Productivity Social Media Images

  • The Biggest Social Media Mistake (and How to Avoid It)

    As the recent fate of Vine shows us, you should never put your audience solely in someone else’s hands.

    Are you working to grow or build an audience on social media? If so, I want to warn you about a very serious social media mistake that I see a lot of social media stars making.

    With recent news of Vine’s imminent death, it makes this post all the more crucial for ambitious social media brands and personalities.

    So if that’s you, pay attention–this is !important. (A little web design humor right there.)

    How About a Few Stories?

    Before I jump into what the biggest social media mistake is and how to fix it, I want to share with you some real life stories that illustrate just how devastating this mistake can be.

    Throughout my years owning a social media agency, I’ve seen this unfortunate situation happen time and time again.

    You’re smart, so you’ll probably figure out what this mistake is halfway through the first story–but read through anyways.

    You’ll be glad you did.

    Live Streaming Star Bob

    There is a close friend of mine whom, for the purposes of this article, I’ll simply refer to as Bob.

    Bob was an early adopter of Blab. He began doing regular broadcasts on the platform, growing his audience and actually building a revenue stream from it.

    Bob is a smart businessman who had a solid revenue strategy for his live Blab broadcasts. He was making things happen in a very cool and unique way.

    But, in case you haven’t heard, Blab is dead.

    I have listed some of my thoughts about why Blab died, but regardless of why it happened, the fact of the matter is that it did.

    Without any warning and despite a level of perceived popularity that had people abandoning all other live streaming platforms.

    Well, unfortunately, as savvy as Bob was, he put all his eggs in Blab and didn’t have a backup. He believed that his success on Blab was all he needed and was completely unprepared for when it up and disappeared one day.

    Now Bob is left scrambling to salvage, in whatever way he can, the audience he took countless hours to build.

    From Viral to Vanishing in 5 Days

    Back in early 2014 Crystal Paine was building a thriving business thanks to massive amounts of traffic from her Facebook page.

    She had heard experts say that you should not rely so heavily on one social channel for your traffic but didn’t quite realize the gravity of that advice until disaster struck.

    Her Facebook audience was over 200k and growing by the thousands without spending a single dollar.

    One glorious day she had a post go viral, gaining more engagement than any other before. It was incredibly exciting for her and her business.

    Just five days later, her Facebook reach vanished. Her posts started reaching as little as only 1% of her audience and the traffic she was getting to her website was nearly gone. And it wasn’t a temporary bug.

    “We had depended so heavily on Facebook for traffic, that when the bottom fell out, it hurt every part of our business. I worried about what it would mean long-term if things didn’t pick back up again. And this frustration spilled over into many areas of my life.”

    This is not where Crystal’s story ends. She learned a valuable lesson and recovered from it like a champion.

    But the hard lesson will always stay with her.

    Vine is Dead, Long Live Viners

    Today we have a very real scenario where a large number of creators have made a name for themselves on Vine. They’ve amassed millions of followers and tens of millions of views.

    Some of these creators have even managed to carve out a significant living creating sponsored content on the platform. One such star that I am aware of was paid more than $15,000 for one 7-second clip.

    But now that Twitter has officially decided to shut down the app, many of these creators are scrambling to figure out what their next move is.

    They’ve realized that they never had control of their platform.

    Even if you’ve managed to master Twitter, if it disappeared tomorrow, would you be prepared?

    What’s the Biggest Social Media Mistake?

    As you’ve probably guessed, the biggest mistake you can make in social media is assuming that social media is all you need.

    No matter how great a social network is and no matter how popular you become, it can all disappear at any time.

    Placing all your digital eggs into one social media basket is like handing the car keys over to your cat, Toonces, and going for a family drive. You’re leaving your fate in someone else’s hands. (Oh, now that feature image up top makes sense!)

    Putting all your digital eggs in one #SocialMedia basket is leaving your fate in their hands.
    Click to Tweet

    I have to admit, it’s my wife that came up with the Toonces analogy. She’s pretty awesome like that.

    So the most important thing you can do, in growing your social media audience, is: invest in a personal website and grow your email list.

    Last year I was watching an alleged “personal branding expert” talk about personal branding and he was asked a question:

    “Should I have a website or can I just use my [social media profile] instead?”

    His response nearly made me put my head through a wall.

    “No, you don’t need a website these days as long as you have a solid [social media profile].”

    miss piggy headdesk

    Let me make this very clear: anyone who tells you that you don’t need a website to develop a successful online presence is a short-sighted idiot.

    You can quote me on that. I’ll even give you a graphic to do so.

    biggest social media mistake quote

    Pin Quote

    It’s either that they are a short-sighted idiot, or they haven’t been around for long (and they won’t be around for much longer either).

    I love the way that Michal Hyatt puts it:

    “…when it comes to your platform, you can’t afford to build your house on a rented lot.”

    His analogy of social media being “rented” property and your website being “owned” property is spot on.

    When you’re on someone else’s digital property, they make all the rules and call all the shots. They can giveth and they can taketh away.

    “…you can’t afford to build your house on a rented lot.” @MichaelHyatt
    Click to Tweet

    Facebook, in particular, has proven this time and time again by making unexpected algorithmic changes. And now we see it in the form of platforms just up and shutting down.

    The only way to ensure your online success does not disappear overnight is to 100% own and control your primary place of growth. You can call this a home base or a digital HQ if you like.

    The only way to ensure your #SocialMedia success doesn’t disappear overnight is to own your primary place of growth.
    Click to Tweet

    Or you can just call it what it is–a personal website. Whatever you call it, the point is, this:

    Use social media as a means to drive people to your digital headquarters where you control the experience.

    Again, the two best ways to do this are with a personal website and an email list.

    What Does it Take to Have a Personal Website?

    There is literally no excuse these days for not having a website of your own. You can be up and running with a web property in less than 5 minutes if you needed to be.

    Gone are the days of having to know HTML and CSS because the technology for building a website has evolved dramatically over the last 10 years. But still, many people who have yet to create a website of their own have questions.

    I’m going to do my best to answer those questions for you and remove all the excuses for not sucking it up and getting yourself a website now.

    Bonus: Want a no-nonsense, step-by-step guide to getting a website up and running? Add your email below and I’ll send you my guide as soon as it’s ready.

    The Cost of a Website

    How much does it cost to have a website? This is the question that many people begin by asking. They tend to assume that the cost is greater than the reward.

    I beg to differ.

    Your basic, bottom-line cost for creating your own website, that you own 100%, is roughly as follows:

    • Domain name: $10-30 per year (you can get domains for as low as $4)
    • Webhosting: $5-20 per month

    Some web hosts will even give you a free domain name with your hosting package.

    Here is the only hosting company I use and recommend:

    Cloudways Hosting

    Lightning-fast, reliable, and hassle-free WordPress hosting for bloggers and business owners.

    Get 1 Month Free
    cloudways web hosting

    Disclosure: At no additional cost to you, when you click this link and make a purchase we will earn a commission.

    Let’s assume the average cost of a domain and moderately good shared hosting plan. The average yearly cost of owning a bare-bones website is about $120 per year.

    Anybody can do that. Especially if you expect to grow an audience and make a living online.

    The Technical Setup of a Website

    It literally takes me 5 minutes to set up a new website. But that’s because I’ve built a lot of websites in the last 7 years.

    But you don’t need to have any experience in order to launch your first website in less than 20 minutes. All you need is a webhost that has 1-click WordPress installs.

    All webhosts worth your time have 1-click WordPress installs. Your hosting provider will likely have plenty of documentation or walkthroughs for you. They may even offer a service to set it all up for you.

    Then, boom! You have your own website that you own and nobody else can control.

    You can then use your social media profiles to send people to it. However, now you then need a way to capture their email address and keep in touch with them.

    Why do you need their email addresses? How about a few quick facts:

    • There are an estimated 4.35 Billion email accounts worldwide
    • There are an estimated 2.586 Billion email users worldwide
    • When you send someone an email, 90% of intended recipients recieve it as opposed to the 2% or less reach that you typically get with Facebook.

    I could go on and on, but you can read more great stats from Campaign Monitor’s blog post on the subject.

    What Does it Take to Build an Email List?

    Having an email marketing strategy is not difficult. In fact, if you wanted, you could just read the book on it (it’s free)!

    But if you just want to get up and running as quickly as possible, here’s what you need to do:

    • Choose an email marketing software provider
    • Place subscribe forms everywhere you can
    • Give people a reason to subscribe

    I’m going to go over all three of those points in detail further into this post.

    Before I do, I’m going to answer the question most people will be asking when they hear they need to have an email list: What does it cost to have an email list?

    The Cost of an Email List

    Well, to do email marketing right, you need to have the proper email marketing software to do all your heavy lifting (like managing subscribers/unsubscribers, sending in bulk, gathering analytics, etc.).

    The trouble is, the cost can vary greatly depending on which provider you go with and what size your email list is.

    Let’s just assume the baseline of a beginner level, just getting started email list. Here’s roughly what you’ll be paying for the most highly recommended and popular email marketing services:

    • MailChimp: Free for up to 2,000 subscribers, plans start at $30/mo for up to 2,500 subscribers.
    • ConvertKit: Starts at $29/mo for up to 1,000 subscribers.
    • Aweber: Starts at $19/mo for up to 500 subscribers.
    • Mad Mimi: Free for up to 100 subscribers, plans start at $10/mo for up to 500 subscribers.
    • Constant Contact: Starts at $20/mo for up to 500 subscribers.

    Those are the best options for beginning your email marketing journey.

    If you’re looking for the simplest solution, my highest recommendation is ConvertKit. It’s not the cheapest, but it will give you the simplest tools and they have amazing resources for getting you started.

    If you’re looking for the cheapest solution, go with MailChimp. It served me well for years and they have a beautiful user interface that allows you to easily create, send, and track your email campaigns. And despite being the “cheap” solution for beginners, their software is second only to my top pick, ConvertKit.

    The Technical Setup of an Email List

    This can be as simple as a link to your sign-up page, a form in your blog sidebar or as sophisticated as a content upgrade or exit-intent pop-up. It’s just a matter of how much time, energy and know-how you have.

    Most email marketing software will give you a number of ways to get people signing up to your list:

    • Landing page (hosted by your email marketing provider)
    • Embeddable form (copy/paste code)
    • Various integrations to work with your website CMS

    You can start out simple by just using the copy/paste embed code they give you. If you’re on WordPress, this is as simple as placing a text widget into your sidebar and pasting the embed code into it.

    copy mailchimp embed code

    For example:

    paste into wordpress text widget

    If you want to get a little more strategic with your email opt-in placements (like I did when I boosted email opt-ins by 400% in one day) then you will need further tools to make your life simpler.

    As I said previously, OptinMonster is a great solution.

    However, if you want to stay a bit more cost-effective, I recommend all my clients and students use Ninja Forms and purchase their MailChimp Add-on ($19/yr) if you’re using MailChimp.

    It’s the easiest solution you can get for placing opt-in forms (and all sorts of other forms for that matter) wherever you need them on your WordPress site.

    Give People a Reason to Subscribe

    With so many people asking to get into your inbox these days, you need to come up with a compelling reason for people give up their email address. You can’t expect to just throw a sign-up box in your sidebar with the words “Subscribe to my email list” and expect it to work.

    No, you need to come up with a compelling reason for people to trust that giving up their email address to you is worth it.

    In order to do this, you first need to know who your target audience is. If you know exactly who they are, you can ask yourself these questions:

    • What are they struggling with?
    • What do they need help with?
    • What are they searching for online?
    • What questions are they asking?
    • What could I do that would make their life easier?

    If you can answer any/all of those questions, you can come up with a compelling reason for them to give you their email address.

    Create something that answers their question and offer it for free in exchange for subscribing to your email list.

    This is also known as a Lead Magnet.

    Optin Monster has a great article on this with 69 Highly Effective Lead Magnet Ideas. Here’s just a few to get you started:

    Now, don’t let creating these delay you from taking action. The most important thing is that you get started collecting emails right away.

    Every successful digital entrepreneur will tell you that their biggest regret is that they didn’t start building an email list sooner.

    Don’t make that same mistake! Get started now!

    Conclusion

    The only way to ensure that your social media success is protected from unforeseen changes, shutdowns or anything else is to have full control over it. The best way to do that is by owning your own website and email list.

    You can then utilize your social media platforms to drive people to your website where you control the environment and can capture their email addresses.

    Doing this will save you from ever having to worry about or experience that fateful mistake of taking a social platform for granted and having it swept out from beneath your feet.

    What question is keeping you from launching a personal website right now? Let me know in the comments below.

  • Instagram Announces Shopping Feature: What You Need to Know

    Instagram is going to jump into the ecommerce ring with its new shopping (a.k.a. product tagging) feature.

    Today Instagram announced some big news for its retail business users. They’re testing a new feature that will allow retailers to tag products within their photos, just as you would tag another user in a photo. Only these new product tags are a bit different.

    According to the official announcement these tags, when clicked, will allow for a more detailed view of the product you’ve clicked on. This product view will then also have a purchase link which redirects to the retailers own product page where users can then complete their purchase.

    As you can see, the photo is just a normal Instagram image with a small white button in the bottom left corner that says “Tap to view products”. When you tap it, the product tags appear and you can then click on them to view details.

    Although I, myself, am not a heavy Instagram user, I think this is very exciting news.

    With Pinterest first jumping into the ecommerce scene with Buyable Pins and then Twitter following soon after with it’s own Buy Button, this might feel like another adoption of the social media purchasing trend. But I think this is much more.

    You see, with both Pinterest Buyable Pins and Twitter Buy Buttons, it requires you to have a third party payment processor or platform in order to use them.

    For Pinterests’s Buyable Pins you need to have one of the following commerce platforms:

    • BigCommerce
    • Demandware
    • Magento
    • Shopify

    For Twitter’s Buy Button you are required to have any of the following marketplaces or platforms:

    • Open Sky
    • Fancy
    • Flightly
    • Gumroad
    • BigCommerce
    • Demandware
    • Shopify
    • Stripe
    • Deliveryagent

    So if you are selling your products outside of those platforms or payment gateways, you are out of luck. Or you have to find a way to add one of them as an alternative way to distribute your products, increasing your technological overhead. Not fun.

    But with Instagram’s new approach, they are doing something they’ve never made it easy to do before–send people to your website!

    instagram product tags workflow

    My biggest qualm with Instgram as a social media marketing platform is it’s difficulty in driving web traffic. (More on this in a future article.) This looks to rectify that problem.

    As long as you have an ecommerce function powering your product sales for your website, you’ll be able to (eventually) sell them on Instagram. This will be a whole new level for social media ROI.

    What This Could Mean for Brands

    For brands that have not yet adopted Instagram as a legitimate marketing platform–it’s time to start experimenting. I recommend sitting down, today, and developing a strong social media strategy for it and brainstorming about what it could mean to have a retail presence there.

    The early adopters get the worm. So don’t delay on taking a close look at this–this is a huge opportunity to stand out in your market!

    There are so many possibilities with Instagram’s new product tagging. For example:

    • Home Decor Brands: Imagine every time you post a gorgeous photo of a room, each item in the photo can link directly to purchase the product.
    • Accessory Brands: Don’t just show how fashionable that new bracelet looks, link it to the product page!
    • Technology Brands: Showing a photo of your product at work can now link directly to where people can purchase it! (I’ll be trying this one out.)
    • Fitness Brands: Workout photos get a lot of traction–capitalize on the virality by adding product tags to the nutritional supplement powering those pumps!

    Those are just a handful of examples off the top of my head. You get the idea though.

    Some of the brands that are part of this initial testing are:

    • Abercrombie & Fitch
    • BaubleBar
    • Chubbies
    • Coach
    • Hollister
    • J.Crew
    • JackThreads
    • kate spade new york
    • Levi’s Brand
    • Lulus
    • Macy’s
    • Michael Kors
    • MVMT Watches
    • Target
    • Tory Burch
    • Warby Parker
    • Shopbop

    If I were an online retailer (which, I guess, I am), then I would be following some, if not all, of these brands to see what they’ll be doing with these new Instagram product tags.

    Bonus reading: Instagram Sizes and Dimensions: Everything You Need to Know

    What This Could Mean for Influencers

    Now, the real interesting thing for me, as a social media enthusiast, is how this is going to affect influencers on the platform. Fashion bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, celebrities, and digital personalities could have a huge interest in turning their Instagram presence into an affiliate marketing gold mine.

    But will Instagram allow it? Do they really want stuff like this:

    Instagram Shopping Product Tags influencer image

    Okay, maybe it would be more like this:

    Instagram Shopping Product Tags JackThreads

    Nevertheless, this will be interesting to see if it evolves. If I were a fashion blogger though (clearly I’m not) I would definitely be paying close attention to this as well.

    And if anyone understands the weight of this move for Instagram, it’s Sue B. Zimmerman. I asked her what she though and she said:

    So many people wake up and the first thing they do is go to Instagram to get inspiration, motivation and education. I am excited that soon it will be a place where you can also shop for the things that you love without leaving the app. As long as Instagram delivers a seamless, positive shopping experience for consumers and businesses, I think it will be a huge win for businesses and consumers.

    I have to agree with Sue here. As long as they deliver the seamless experience, this is going to be a huge win.

    What This Could Mean for Twitter and Pinterest

    oh no gif

    Twitter and Pinterest should be all-hands-on-deck for this new announcement. Especially now that Instagram has a confirmed 500M Monthly Active Users.

    If I were on their advisory team, I’d be making sure that all my engineers in product development were focusing on bringing retailers this same level of website commerce integration.

    Their current limitations of having to go through third-party commerce platforms is holding them back from attracting more adopters. Hopefully Instagram’s announcement is the kick in the pants they needed.

    Or maybe they’ve already got this type of integration being worked on but haven’t announced it yet? Who knows. All I know is, they need to deliver on it soon.

    What Do You Think?

    What are your thoughts on Instagram’s Product Tags announcement? Is it interesting to you? Will you use it? Or does it feel like another step towards Instagram becoming less cool and more spammy?

    Let me know in the comments below!

  • Top 11 Things That Are Killing Your Pinterest Success

    These are exactly what you shouldn’t be doing if you want to harness the power of Pinterest.

    In case you weren’t aware, Pinterest has massive potential for driving blog traffic. And I’m not talking short-lived, low-quality traffic. I’m talking long-term, highly engaged traffic that can be a total game-changer for your blog.

    The best part about Pinterest traffic is that it’s actually easier to gain than many of the other social networks. If you properly invest your time into working Pinterest, the returns can be much greater than that same amount of time put into other networks.

    You want to keep one thing in mind though—there are two avenues to making Pinterest a successful social media channel for your blog.

    1. On Pinterest: this is the degree of success your account has on Pinterest (ie. followers, repins, likes, etc.)
    2. On your blog: this is the degree of success your blog has on Pinterest (ie. traffic, people pinning your articles, etc.)

    So in this post I’m going to give you some of the things that could be holding you back from experiencing huge success for your blog on Pinterest. These are things I see many bloggers doing and whether it’s because someone told them so or they’re just unaware of doing them, they need to be stopped.

    Success Killers On Pinterest

    The following are things that you should never do, or stop doing, on your own Pinterest profile immediately. They are unhelpful, counter-productive (and you know I love me some productivity), or completely useless to gaining success on Pinterest.

    Pinning Junky Pins

    don't pin junky pins

    If you want people to follow and engage with you on Pinterest, you need to be pinning things worth following and engaging. This seems obvious but without being aware of what a “junky” pin is, you may doing this without knowing.

    A junky pin is a pin that is:

    • Visually unattractive: Use tall images with good imagery rather than short, small images that look low-quality
    • Doesn’t go to the right place: Nothing is worse than clickin on a pin and being taken to a website that is not what you expected—or worse, an error page
    • Out of context: Make sure you’re pinning things in relevant boards

    Not only will these junky pins decrease your engagement and follow-worthiness of your account, but it will devalue you in Pinterest’s eyes. They are constantly working to rank and suggest high-quality pins and boards, so treat your boards as a museum curator would treat a precious collection.

    Bad Pin Descriptions

    Did you know that Pinterest is actually more of a Search Engine than a Social Network? Yea, true story.

    So stop being lazy with your descriptions. This alone may be stifling your Pinterest growth. Pin descriptions are what allows your pins to be surfaced when someone searches Pinterest.

    A well-though description is an indicator of a high-quality pin because it means the person who pinned it spent some time on it. Additionally, more words in the description means more reasons for it to match search queries.

    Hashtags in Descriptions

    Hashtags are not a thing in Pinterest. Period. Stop using them and focus on actually being descriptive instead.

    At one point in time hashtags were clickable inside of the Pinterest user interface. This is no longer the case. In fact, as of now, the next version of the user interface (slowly rolling out at the time of this post) doesn’t even allow clicking on descriptions to see it in full.

    So the only way someone would get to a list of recommended pins with one specific hashtag is to search for the hashtag.

    Even if someone does decide to search for a hashtag (which people don’t do) the hashtag search algorithm is notoriously bad. The searches will return results so poor that the user is likely to never search a hashtag again.

    By using hashtags you’re wasting time you could have spent creating a good description with actual keywords. Which brings me to my next point.

    Not Using Keywords in Board Names and Descriptions

    The following tip was brought to you by Peg Fitzpatrick.

    don't forget keywords

    Look, I know you’re super creative and you want to name your board something unique. That’s all well and good, but make sure that it has some sort of keyword in both the title and description.

    For example, if you’ve got a board named Nectar of the gods and a description of “Caffeinated delights to make your heart sing” nobody is going to know that this board is about Coffee. You have to, in some way, add in the keyword(s) that your board is about so that when people are searching for it, they will find it.

    You don’t have to turn into an SEO nut and start keyword stuffing the heck out of your boards. Just make sure that a human can understand, in plain English, what the core subject matter of your board is.

    This can also apply to your pin descriptions. If you’ve put good keywords into your well-written descriptions, you (again) have no reason to think that adding hashtags will be of use.

    Forgetting to Add a Category to Your Boards

    This tip brought to you by Kim Vij of The Educators’ Spin On It.

    Just like the idea of keywords in your board names and descriptions, it’s crucial to select a category for your boards. This helps Pinterest to more accurately serve up your boards and pins to people who are looking for things in that category.

    Now, sometimes your board won’t fit 100% into a category, but you need to pick one anyways. Find the most related category you can and choose it. It’s better to have selected the category yourself than to have Pinterest decide for you.

    Don’t forget to add a Category for your Pinterest boards! -@EducatorsSpin
    Click to Tweet

    Deleting your pins

    james cordon smh gif

    Maybe you heard some great pinner that you idolize share how they’ve had success on Pinterest doing X, Y, and Z. Inside this article, they detail that one of the things they’ve done is gone through and deleted “low-performing” pins.

    What a complete waste of time.

    Not only does this take up the valuable time you could have used for creating high-quality pins or engaging with people on the platform, you’re doing something that Pinterest itself has warned against!

    Don’t delete your pins because someone told you it will boost your Pinterest ranking. It will not.
    Click to Tweet

    Now, I don’t meant to demean those pinners who have said to do this. The problem is that most of the people telling you to do things to become successful on social media have not had any formal marketing training. What they may not be aware of is that you can’t attribute success of an isolated action when you’re performing other simultaneous actions that will affect the outcome.

    In other words, if you’re experimenting with 5 things to see if it makes you more successful and you reach your goal, it doesn’t mean that all 5 things were the cause. It could have been one particular thing that moved the needle in the direction you were looking for.

    So, suffice to say, stop deleting pins.

    Inconsistent Pinning and Going on “Sprees”

    inconsistent pinning

    Success in anything is about consistency. In social media, you don’t want to blast people’s social feeds like a fire hose because they’ll quickly tune you out.

    With Pinterest, going on a pinning spree, pinning all the things to all the boards for an hour one day and then never coming back for a couple weeks will kill your success. Instead, be consistent. Set a daily goal of pins (recommended 15-20 max) and stick to it.

    Think of your Pinterest health like your personal health– it’s an apple a day, not 10 apples on Wednesday to make up for the last 9 days you’ve missed.

    You can use tools like Buffer, Coschedule, or Tailwind to schedule your Pins if you want to go on bulk pinning sprees. These tools will allow you to schedule out your pins over time so that you’re not bombarding people’s feeds and your account stays consistently active.

    Use scheduling tools to avoid pinning sprees & pin consistently. @PegFitzpatrick
    Click to Tweet

    This tip was also brought to you by Peg Fitzpatrick.

    Success Killers On your blog

    Moving beyond your own Pinterest profile, you want to make sure your website is optimized for Pinterest users when they come to read your blog. Hopefully you want to scale your effort beyond yourself by getting other people to pin your articles, right?

    So be sure you’re not making the following mistakes on your blog.

    Not Creating Optimized Images

    It was Peg Fitzpatrick that finally convinced me to make a tall, Pinterest-specific image for every blog post. After my initial experiment with this resulted in 400% increase in traffic in 30-days, I’ll never not create a tall Pinterest image for a blog post.

    Yes, I just used a double-negative Mr. Grammar Nazi. Get over it.

    optimize your pins

    Savvy Pinterest users know what a good pin looks like, and it must be taller than it is wide (minimum of 735×1,102 pixels). So make sure that you have a pin-worthy image ready for them.

    Grab my Pinterest image template below.

    optimal pinterest image template

    [Click for full size and “Save image as” somewhere safe.]

    Just pull that image into your visual content app of choice and create your awesome visual right over top of it.

    Making It Easy to Pin the Wrong Image

    This is a tip that some people will not like. But I don’t care if you like it or not, I want you to be successful.

    Too many bloggers believe that if they give their readers more options they will get better results. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

    The psychological principle of the Paradox of Choice has proven that more options lead to less actions. Anyone who has spent some time researching Conversion Rate Optimization knows that if you want people to take a desired action, eliminate all other options.

    So if you want people to pin your Pinterest-optimized images (because you know these images get more traffic) then make sure that you don’t make it easy to pin images that are not your Pinterest image. This means get rid of Pinterest plugins or apps that allow people to pin other images.

    shocked oprah gif

    Yea, I said it. Get rid of your Image “Pin it” buttons. That is–the Pin buttons that show up when someone hovers over the images in your blog post.

    Look, in order to increase your chances of success, you have to assume your readers are not Pinterest savvy power-users who are going to masterfully craft their pin so it drives mass amounts of traffic back to you. You have to assume they’re going to pin the first/easiest thing that they see.

    So why make it easier to pin low-quality or non-optimized images? Trust me, this is destroying your website’s chances at more Pinterest traffic. People are pinning the wrong images and getting less click-through because of it.

    In another post I’ve given you two ways to make it as easy as possible for Pinners to Pin your optimal image. One way is by using some HTML and the other way is by using Social Warfare.

    Either way, stop making it easy for people to pin the wrong images.

    Mobile Unfriendly Images

    The following tip was courtesy of Jeff Sieh, the host of Manly Pinterest Tips.

    So maybe you’re creating Pinterest-optimized images for your posts. Awesome! But are they passing the mobile readability test?

    Did you know that as much as 80% of Pinterest’s traffic is mobile? Inside sources say it’s even more than that. So it is critically important that your pinnable images be mobile friendly.

    Nothing is worse than coming across a pin that I can’t even read on my mobile device.

    So stop making Pinterest images that are illegible on mobile phones. All you need to do is check the image on your own mobile phone first. If you can’t read what it says, nobody else can. And if you’re not able to stay objective, just hand your phone over to the nearest literate person and ask if they can read it.

    Simple, right?

    “Make sure your pinnable images are mobile-friendly and legible.” —@jeffsieh
    Click to Tweet

    Making It Easy to Pin Bad Descriptions

    pinning bad descriptions

    Back on the search thing, you know how important good descriptions are. But you can’t always count on the people pinning your content to write great descriptions. So what you want to do is write it for them.

    This is another instance where the Social Warfare plugin shines, but if you don’t have it you can do the following:

    • Fill out your image alt tags
    • Fill out your image descriptions

    Recommended Reading: How to Create Optimized Social Media Images

    Filling this data out for people will automatically populate the pin description when they go to pin it. Now, they can choose to change the description if they like, but at least you’ve done what you can to give them a head-start.

    Bonus: The Infographic

    For reading all the way to the end, you get to see the full-length pin-friendly version of this post. You can even embed it right into your own website!

    11 things destroying pinterest success infographic

    If you want to embed this infographic on your own site, copy and paste the embed code below.

    <a href="https://dustinstout.com/killing-pinterest-success/"><img src="https://dustinstout.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/11-things-killing-pinterest-success-dustntv.jpg" alt="Top 11 Things Killing Your Pinterest Success" width="600px" border="0"/></a><em>Image courtesy of <a href="https://dustinstout.com">dustinstout.com</a></em>

    Now Be Pinterest Awesome!

    The ball is now in your court. Take this advice and apply it to your Pinterest efforts and watch your profile and blog traffic grow!

    Is there any other annoying or counter-productive Pinterest behavior that I’ve left out? You can let me know in the comments below.

  • Don’t Just Boost Social Media Engagement, Scale It

    Widen your gaze: It’s not just about optimizing your posts for highest engagement, that doesn’t scale. I’m going to show you what does.

    There are approximately 43,235,901 blog posts written about “how to get more engagement on social media” (rough estimate). Some good. Most bad.

    The good ones will give you solid tactics for optimizing how you share things on your social channels so that they are most likely to get more engagement (comments, “likes”, shares, and the most important, click-throughs).

    So for the sake of time, Let’s zoom through some of the most common top tips for boosting your social media engagement.

    And then, I want to take the conversation a step further and show you simple ways to take boosting to the next level– scaling your engagement!

    How to Get More Engagement on Social Media

    Some of the most common tips to increase your social media engagement include the following:

    • Use visuals: Visual content has significantly higher engagement rate than standard text or even link posts.
    • Ask for the share: Just like in sales, if you ask for the share, you may just get it. Some studies show a significant increase in engagement when you actually ask for it.
    • Social Proof: Having social validation already on display helps people to decide whether or not something is trustworthy or credible.
    • Mention people: By using social network @mentions allows you to grab someone’s attention by sending them a notification. Kind of like saying, “Hey, I’m talking about you over here,” or, “Hey, I quoted you over here!” You’re guaranteed at least to get their attention and hopefully they’ll want to help you spread the word as well.
    • Use hashtags: For places like Twitter and Instagram, hashtags are a critical discovery mechanism to allow similar conversations to be discovered. Add yours and you will potentially get in front of a much larger audience.
    • Ask Questions: Asking questions gives people a directed way to engage. This way they have to do much less cognitive work to come up with something to say, because you’ve given them a clear direction in how you want them to engage.

    There are plenty more ways to get engagement, and most of those tips require you to know the culture of each social network. Understand these things, and you’ll already begin to break away from your competition.

    Here are a few great articles that I highly recommend for further reading into this subject:

    These are all must-know social media tips and practices. But this is not the end of your learning curve. Don’t stop at simply boosting your engagement!

    Let’s Talk About Scaling Your Efforts

    Great, you know how to get more engagement for the content you post on social media. Whoopty-doo! Good for you!

    These best practices, tactics and strategies are only step one. So I want to take the conversation one step further. I want to show you how to scale those best practices, tactics, and strategies.

    But first, what does “scale” mean in this context?

    Definition of Scale In the Strategic Sense

    chameleon scale gif

    In business, you hear phrases like “does the business scale,” or “are we operating at scale,” or “will this scale up?”

    In this context, the idea of scale refers to this:

    the ability to grow without being hampered by structure or available resources. (Investopedia)

    For a more real-life scenario, Josh Lowery uses this perfect analogy:

    To illustrate: In Year 1, company delivers $10M in revenue with $1M in operating costs. In Year 2, company delivers $12M in revenue with $1M in operating costs. Company scales because it grew revenue by $2M without increasing its operating costs.

    When you’re trying to grow a blog or website, your personal social media engagement rate is a result of your effort. But if that’s as far as you ever think about your content promotion, your highest potential engagement for your content will always depend on your direct effort. That’s tedious. And doesn’t scale.

    What you need is to have the people sharing your content to take into account these best practices, tactics and strategies. But you can’t control this, of course…

    Or can you?

    Here’s how you need to think to take your content promotion game to the next level:

    How can you leverage your well-crafted social shares and allow your audience to share on that same level?

    Can you follow that? Let me simplify just to be sure:

    “How can I get the people sharing my content to get better engagement and click-throughs when they share my content?”

    Well, now that’s tricky. But it’s one of the exact problems we set out to solve with our WordPress social sharing plugin, Social Warfare. And in my highly biased opinion, we did a pretty darn good job.

    The tools we’ve added to Social Warfare are specifically geared to allow you to have control over how your content is shared so you can be sure (as sure as you can be) that it’s shared the way you want it to be shared.

    However, if you’re not a Social Warfare user, or maybe you’re not even on WordPress, here’s a few tactics you can steal from us to get your content shared the way you want it.

    1. Click-to-Tweet Quotes

    Having an in-post social call-to-action is extremely helpful in getting people to tweet your blog posts. You can use ClickToTweet.com to create your own tweetable links and place them inside your article.

    Scale your social efforts by using easy click-to-tweet quotes in your articles. Find out how:
    Click to Tweet

    Simply follow the instructions and then add the click-to-tweet link in your blog post following the quote that you want people to tweet. Using the words “Tweet this quote” helps people instantly know what action you want them to take.

    So in this tactic, you’re crafting the tweet for optimal engagement and allowing your readers to share that exact tweet in a single click.

    Powerful stuff. And many people have already caught on to how powerful click-to-tweets are.

    Bonus tip: If you’re tweet is a quote of someone, don’t forget to @mention the person you’re quoting in the tweet. This ensures that every time that quote is tweeted it get’s them a shoutout, and gets their attention to possibly help you spread your reach further.

    This is a great example of why you should also be using influential people’s quotes in your content. Give them a reason to want to help you share to their audience.

    Why does this scale? Because you’re creating an easy way for people to share exactly what you want them to share, optimized for engagement. Instead of just you tweeting these things in an optimized way, you’re making sure others can do the same.

    2. Pinterest Optimization Secrets

    optimize your pins

    Pin this!

    Believe me– if you make your blog posts as Pinterest-friendly as you can, it can open up a floodgate of traffic to your site. I’m not talking one-off traffic either. I’m talking long-term, sustained traffic.

    Tall Images

    You can create tall images for your articles and place them in your blog posts. It will work okay.

    But typically tall images don’t look great when placed inside a blog post– the user experience is hindered. So instead, you can use the following snippet of code to hide the image from sight so that it’s just picked up when someone hits the Pinterest button.

    <div style="display:none;"><img src="IMAGEURL" alt="DESCRIPTIONHERE" /></div>

    Simply replace the IMAGEURL with the image URL and the DESCRIPTIONHERE with the description you want to show up on Pinterest. The image will be hidden from the page but show when your visitors hit your Pin button.

    Holy crap I just learned a super-secret Pinterest code-hack! Check it out:
    Click to Tweet

    Why does this scale? Because you want readers to have a Pinterest optimized image to select without ruining the layout of your blog posts. By having this hidden image pop up when they go to pin the article, they can share the optimized image and get more engagement on it when they pin it.

    Rich Pins

    cha-ching gif

    No, unfortunately this has nothing to do with how much money your pins have in the bank.

    When someone pins your webpages, you want Pinterest to be able to format the pins in a way that give you the best possible presentation– rich pins are the way to go. They allow for extra information to be extracted and shown on pins made from your website.

    In an article for the Warfare Plugins blog we outline everything you need to know about Rich Pins, as well as the other rich social snippets that your website should be capable of. I’ll link you to that in another section of this post.

    You will need to follow Pinterest’s Rich Pin Guidelines to get them to work, but they’re well worth the effort.

    Why does this scale? Again, when you give people the optimized thing to share, they get more engagement and you benefit from the traffic and social signals it generates.

    The Perfect Pin

    Here’s where things get really tricky– but could make a world of difference. If you choose to go this route, you may only want to do it for your most important blog posts.

    Constructing the perfect pin means you need to have both a great (tall) visual and an optimized Pinterest description.

    What is an optimized description? Think of it this way: People are using Pinterest to search for things. In order to get your things found by these searchers, your description has to include what they’re looking for. So take a Pinterest engineers advice and optimize your pin descriptions for search.

    Now, here’s where it gets tricky. It is possible to create a “Pin it” button that, when clicked by your readers, will generate a Pin with exactly the image you want them to pin and exactly the description you want them to have with it.

    In other words, you give them exactly the right image and exactly the right description.

    Essentially you just need to create a link that follows this formula:

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=YOURURL&media=LINKTOIMAGE&description=YOURDESCRIPTION

    You would simply need to replace the words in ALL CAPS with the appropriate piece.

    • YOURURL = the URL of the page being linked to
    • LINKTOIMAGE = the link to the image file you want pinned
    • YOURDESCRIPTION = the description for the pin

    But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. All of those elements need to be HTML encoded. What does that mean? Without getting too jargony– it’s a way of formatting special characters in HTML. So what you’ll need to do is get your three elements (link, image source and description) and use an HTML encoder to encode them before placing them inside your Pinterest pin link.

    So as an example, I’ve created the following link for this post, demonstrating exactly what it will look like for users when you paste in the link:

    Custom Pin Link

    Now here’s what the actual HTML of the link looks like:

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdustinstout.com%2Fboost-social-engagement%2F&media=http%3A%2F%2Fdustinstout.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F06%2Foptimize-your-pins-735x1498.jpg&description=It%E2%80%99s%20not%20just%20about%20optimizing%20your%20posts%20for%20highest%20engagement%2C%20that%20doesn%27t%20scale.%20This%20post%20shows%20you%20how%20to%20get%20the%20exponential%20growth%20you%27re%20looking%20for.%20via%20%40DustinWStout

    Does your head hurt yet? Yea– mine too.

    So, suffice to say this is a lot of work. But if you don’t want to do this work (or you don’t have a plugin like Social Warfare that does this for you) then you have one more way to optimize.

    Why does this scale? Because now, instead of hoping they choose the right image to pin and the right description, you’re giving them only the best option and all they need to do is click the button (or link) and pick a board. They get more engagement and click-throughs, and your content benefits.

    Optimize Image Alt Tags & Descriptions

    Make sure your image alt tags and descriptions are filled in. See my article on Creating Optimized Images for a full breakdown of this process.

    Pinterest will scan for these alt tags and description fields on images and automatically populate one of them for the Pin description. My best advice though is to utilize the alt tag first and foremost, but stick within the guidelines I mention in the above-listed image optimization post.

    I’m spending a lot of time on this Pinterest section because the traffic potential from Pinterest is huge. I know first-hand.

    These Pinterest strategies can skyrocket your Pinterest traffic!
    Click to Tweet

    Why does this scale? When people are pinning your content with the proper descriptions and keywords, they are more discoverable in Pinterest search. This means you have all those people growing your Pinterest search discoverability.

    3. Customize Social Open Graph

    I know this has been a pretty complicated post already, so I’ll save you on this one. In a nutshell, you can use WordPress plugins (such as Yoast SEO or Social Warfare) to customize the information that social networks display when your link is shared on them.

    On the Warfare Plugins blog we have a full article dedicated to understanding Open Graph, Twitter Cards and Rich Pins which I highly recommend.

    Why does this scale? Because when someone shares your content with optimized Open Graph image, title and description, it looks more attractive and will get more engagement for them.

    4. Finally, Share Links to Your Social Posts

    Take this post for example. Scroll to the bottom and find the very last quote. You’ll notice I have a “Pin this Quote” button beneath it. This is simply a link to a pin I’ve pinned on Pinterest. A simple call to action allowing people to repin my quote.

    Simple, highly effective.

    facebook time stamp

    You can do this same thing with any social post– just grab the link to the social post, give it to people and ask them to reshare it. You can find the link for most social network posts by clicking on the timestamp.

    If your website theme is coded to easily place buttons wherever you want (an easy customization to make) all the better. You can see examples of how I’ve done that on my Style Guide page.

    This cross-promotes one network to another, leveraging your audience reach across platforms.

    And if you don’t have the ability to easily code buttons with links to your social posts, you can always just embed social posts right into your blog. The following social networks all allow for grabbing an embed code for your social posts:

    • Facebook
    • Google+
    • Twitter
    • Instagram

    Simply find the additional menu options icon on any of your social posts and they will likely reveal an option to grab the embed code for that social post.

    Here’s what that looks like for a Facebook post:

    Tweets are easy to embed if you’re using WordPress, just paste the link to the Tweet and it automatically generates the embedded tweet:

    And how about an Instagram embed:

     

    A post shared by Dustin W. Stout (@dustinwstout) on


    Why does this scale? With embedded posts you’re allowing your engagement to go beyond the confines of the social network walled gardens.

    Wrapping This Thing Up

    The above tactics and strategies will help you take your social media engagement from manual effort to scale. Instead of doing all the work and automation yourself, you will have an army of readers who will do it for you.

    When the people sharing your content get more engagement and click-throughs, you benefit exponentially. That’s how you scale your efforts.

    That is where the real power of social media is at.

    And when your readers understand the effort you invest to make their lives easier and that sharing your optimized content gets them more engagement, they will bookmark you as one of their go-to content sources.

    Now, in the comments below tell me what tactic you’re going to try first, or which one is your favorite.

  • Forget Your Follower Count and Focus on This

    I’ll just come right out and say it— follower counts are mostly worthless.

    Having a million followers doesn’t mean anything unless those followers are engaging with your content.

    It’s easy to hoard followers on social media. All you need to do is follow as many people as you’re allowed to and you’ll get people to follow you back. Heck, you can even jump on Fiverr and buy large amounts of followers for pretty much any social network if you want.

    But what’s the point?

    To have a big number on your profile page? To impress people with how “popular” you are?

    Well I’ll tell you what— the only thing more embarrassing than a social media profile with zero followers is a social media profile with a ton of followers and zero engagement. It means you’ve effectively attracted people who don’t care about what you have to say. Or worse, you’ve just attracted a bunch of robots.

    For bloggers, a similar vanity-driven metric is the page view. What does it matter if you’re getting a million page views if they’re not leading towards a tangible goal?

    Unless you’re selling advertising on your blog, I’ve got bad news for you— page views aren’t going to pay the bills. And even then, if those page views aren’t leading to ad clicks then you’re not going to be making much of a living.

    The one meaningful metric you need to be measuring is this: engagement.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Forget follower count, what you need to be measuring is engagement. #SocialMedia #Marketing” quote=”Forget follower count, what you need to be measuring is engagement.”]

    What is engagement?

    Engagement is a piece of social media jargon that has been tossed around so much it’s almost nauseating. Unfortunately though it’s the best way to articulate the most meaningful part of what social media and digital marketing should be about.

    Here’s how I define engagement in a digital marketing context:

    engagement – interactions, exchanges and actions taken on your content.

    Now let’s break down what that looks like on social networks and on your blog.

    Social Media Engagement

    On social media networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and others, engagement is pretty easy to monitor.

    Some examples of social media engagement would be:

    • Comments / replies / mentions
    • +1s / Likes / Favorites
    • Shares / Reshares / Retweets
    • And the all-important click-through (when you share a link and someone actually clicks it)

    Smart social media marketers value these far more than follower count, because these are the types of actions that tell you whether or not your social media posts are being seen. Even more importantly— if they’re being seen and causing people to respond.

    Being that the goal of most businesses and brands on social media is to get people to know, love and buy from them (or continue buying from them), it only stands that interaction is the most valuable way of knowing if you’re attracting the right audience.

    While these metrics can also be a full of fluff, they are far more valuable than a simple follower count.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Once you know what causes people to take action, you can create more of it. #SocialMedia #Marketing” quote=”Once you know what causes people to respond or take action, you can create more of it.”]

    To monitor these stats there are a number of tools you can use. Personally, I use Buffer’s analytics.

    buffer analytics

    Buffer offers all the social media engagement metrics you could possibly need for:

    • Google+
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • LinkedIn
    • Pinterest

    For each of those networks you have all the metrics you should be tracking. But most importantly you want to look at the higher value engagements:

    • Shares / Reshares / Retweets: This means they’re spreading your content to their audiences, growing your reach further than yourself.
    • Comments: This means your content has cause them to stop in their tracks and say something directly to you. Take these opportunities to grow your relationships with them.
    • Clicks: People are actually compelled to click-through on the links you’re sharing, giving you the ability to take their engagement with your brand further.

    Those are the highest value actions that your followers can take on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. These are the actions you should be looking to get more of.

    Within Buffer you can discover which posts are driving these actions. Find out which ones are working the best and create more content like it.

    If you don’t have access to Buffer analytics though, here are some ways you can track these metrics.

    Native Social Analytics

    Most social networks will give you a pretty decent amount of analytics. Let’s break them down one by one:

    Facebook

    facebook insights

    Facebook offers a decent amount of metrics for pages (not profiles). In fact, they even have an entire section called Engagement. That section displays the amount of Likes, Comments and Shares in a given time period.

    It’s also good to look at the Post Reach section to see how many people are actually seeing your posts. You can then compare that to the number of Likes, Comments and Shares to see how well your content is actually doing.

    Aim to improve your engagement and your reach will follow.

    Twitter

    twitter analytics

    Have you explored how to use Twitter fully? If not, I highly recommend spending some time getting to know the platform–it can help you learn a lot about your target audience.

    If you go to your Twitter Analytics you can see a full set of tasty stats about your profile. There’s a lot of clutter on the main Twitter Analytics dashboard though, so the first thing you want to do is go to the Tweets tab.

    Skip everything you see in the primary column and look straight to the Engagements section. There you’ll find

    • Engagement rate
    • Link clicks
    • Retweets
    • Replies

    Your engagement rate is the one metric you want to look at improving. That is the average percentage of engagement you get per tweet.

    You can then scroll through the Top Tweets tab and find which of your tweets performed the best. Take note, and tweet more things like those.

    Google+

    Google+ insights

    For Google+ pages you are able to see a limited number of metrics to gauge how well your content is performing.

    From your My Business page click on the View Insights button. Then immediately click on the Engagement tab. You’ll see a nice graph of the actions taken on your posts over the last 30 days.

    Below that graph you will see a box that will allow you to scroll through your recent posts and the actions taken on them. Again, you’ll want to take note of what content was getting the greatest return.

    You can also take a quick look at the box below the Recent Posts box that lists Average actions by post type.

    google+ engagement by post type

    This will show you instantly what types of posts are getting the most engagement.

    For more comprehensive Google+ Analytics for both pages and profiles, you may want to check out Steady Demand Pro.

    Pinterest

    pinterest analytics

    I’ve really come to love the simplicity of Pinterest analytics. They give you just what you need, segmented in a way that’s highly effective.

    When you visit your Pinterest Analytics page click on the Your Pinterest Profile link. Then you’ll want to immediately click on the Repins tab. You’ll be able to see a list of your most repinned content and you’ll also be able to see how many clicks that content has also gotten.

    Periscope

    saving your periscope broadcast stats

    At the end of every broadcast you are given a handful of metrics. The only one I care about is retention. I spoke about this as one of my Periscope Pro Tips.

    Since you can’t currently see any other stats besides the four given at the end of a broadcast, the only engagement metric you need to focus on is the retention. This is the percentage of people who jumped into your broadcast and stayed until the end.

    If your retention is high, it means you’re effectively capturing and keeping your audience’s attention. If your retention is low, that means you’re not providing the value that your audience is looking for— or maybe you’re just broadcasting too long.

    Hearts are a secondary form of engagement that you can monitor is the number of hearts given in the broadcast. While this is also a shallow measure, it’s still a small gauge of whether or not the people in your broadcast are enjoying what you’re saying.

    YouTube

    youtube analytics

    It’s no doubt that when it comes to YouTube analytics— there’s more than enough to dig through. It’s actually kind of overwhelming, even for someone who’s used to looking at analytics and stats all the time.

    So again, it’s important to monitor the metrics that matter the most. What metrics matter the most on YouTube?

    I asked that question on Twitter and here’s the best response I got:

    Much like Periscope you want to monitor your retention more than anything else. To find this you’ll need to navigate to your Creator Studio > Analytics > Audience Retention.

    The most important numbers on this page will be Average Percentage Viewed. That is the average percentage of a video that your audience watches per view. When that number is low, it means people aren’t sticking around to watch your entire video.

    You also have an entire section devoted to Engagement reports under your YouTube Analytics. The most crucial to me are:

    • Subscribers
    • Comments
    • Shares

    Knowing if and why you’re growing in these three areas is crucial to the long-term success of your YouTube channel.

    Website Engagement

    Now that we’ve talked about the ways to measure engagement in social, it’s time to get into the most important place to measure engagement— your website.

    This is also a little more complicated because it will involve getting to know Google Analytics and diving deeper than your usual Overview dashboard. It’s important though because it’s a vital part of a growing website.

    It’s easy for bloggers to get caught up in vanity metrics such as page views or visits. But these numbers in and of themselves can be shallow measurements just like follower counts.

    The primary engagement metrics most website owners or bloggers should take into consideration are:

    • Comments
    • Social Shares
    • Email sign-ups

    Those are all good metrics to monitor, and they do represent valuable engagement. But that’s about where it stops for most.

    You should actually be monitoring one more metric that could be the one insight you need to take your content to the next level.

    What is that metric?

    It’s what Chase Reeves calls The Engagement Report. This is a Google Analytics report that you can run by following a 5-step process:

    1. Set a long date range
    2. Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
    3. Click the Comparisons icon
    4. Choose Page views as the primary metric and Avg. time on Page as the secondary metric
    5. Take note of the green bars

    google analytics engagement

    The green bars will indicate the pages that people are spending the most time on. What does that mean? You’ve managed to keep their attention span engaged. It means they’re actually reading your content, not just scanning for a few seconds and then leaving.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Using @GoogleAnalytics, find your most engaging content with these 5 steps. #Marketing” quote=”Using Google Analytics, find your most engaging content with these 5 steps.”]

    Conclusion

    The big idea that drives all of these engagement metrics can be summed up into one word: Attention.

    Are you getting people to actually pay attention to what you’re creating online? That’s the question you need to be asking above all and before all else.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Are your #marketing efforts getting people to pay attention & take action? Measure these metrics:” quote=”Are your marketing efforts getting people to pay attention & take action?”]

    Focus on producing engagement and forget about how many followers you have. Monitor whether or not your engagement is going up and keep doing more things that foster that engagement.

    If you do this well, higher quality followers, higher quality shares and more sustainable success will follow.

    So what do you think? Did I leave any engagement metrics out? What would you add? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

  • Periscope Pro Tips: Everything You Need to Know

    A handful of tips I’ve learned about successful Periscope broadcasts.

    It’s only been a handful of months since Periscope was launched into the public and already it’s gained great momentum. With this new surge of buzz around live-streaming, now is a good time to evaluate whether or not it’s right for you.

    If you’re a brand, @VincenzoLandino has written a great article on how to know if Live-streaming is right for you.

    If it is right for you, or you at least want to try it out, I want to help shorten your learning curve. I want to jump you ahead of the class with my best Periscope pro tips— some of which the most successful people on Periscope haven’t figured out yet!

    I’ve broken these tips into 3 phases of your broadcast:

    • Pre-broadcast
    • In-broadcast
    • Post-broadcast

    Or in other words this is everything you should consider for before, during and after you broadcast on Periscope. I’m not going to cover the basics of getting started, so if you’d like to start there my buddy Blake Croft has created a Quick Start Guide to Periscope you can take a look at.

    So let’s just dive in.

    Pre-Broadcast

    Periscope is super simple. You can just open up the app, hit the camera icon, type a title and hit Broadcast.

    starting a periscope broadcast

    But if you really want to have some extra “awesome” behind your broadcast, you’ll want to make sure you’ve taken the following into consideration.

    Add your URL in your bio

    editing your periscope profile bio

    Since Periscope doesn’t have a spot for you to add a link to external websites, you can utilize your bio. It’s important to know the limitations.

    You are limited to 160 characters for your Periscope bio. However it will only display between 117-122 characters when someone views your profile. The rest of your bio after the 117-122 characters will be hidden after the “…”.

    So to make the most of this, be sure you place a link to your website or blog within the first 117 characters. That way during your broadcast you can just direct people to your bio to find a link to your website if they want to find out more about you.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Add your website URL to your #Periscope bio. This is HUGE!” quote=”#ProTip: Add your website URL to your #Periscope bio. This is HUGE!”]

    If you’re really looking to grow a strong online presence, this is a no-brainer. Do it.

    These links are not clickable in the mobile app but they are on the desktop app— and that’s something at least.

    Set up some IFTTT recipes

    ifttt homepage

    The only social network currently integrated with Periscope is Twitter. Which makes sense, because Twitter owns it.

    For those of us who are a bit more “connected” than that and want to spread our Periscope broadcasts to other platforms, we need to find an easy solution to ake it happen.

    With IFTTT you can connect many of your social channels including (but not limited to):

    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Reddit
    • Instagram
    • Buffer
    • App.net

    Obviously with Buffer and App.net the possibilites are greatly expanded since they both have more social channels that can be connected. There are dozens of other channels that you could potentially connect to in order to help distribute your live streams further, automagically.

    Here’s the recipe I use for Facebook:

    This says that whenever I tweet something with the hashtag #Periscope it will be automatically shared to my Facebook profile with the link to the broadcast. Since Periscope automatically posts a “Live on #Periscope” tweet with a link to your broadcast when you begin, this then gets automatically shared by IFTTT on Facebook if you’ve activated this recipe.

    Be aware though that this also means if you share someone else’s broadcast on Twitter that it will get picked up by the IFTTT recipe as well. So you may want to change the hashtag in the recipe to something more custom and then just be sure to add that hashtag yourself to your broadcast titles.

    Big thanks to @iSocialFanz who helped me to figure this one out!

    Give IFTTT a look and see if there are any channels you can use to help expand the reach of your broadcasts.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Use @IFTTT to automatically share your #Periscope broadcasts to Facebook!” quote=”#ProTip: Use @IFTTT to automatically share your #Periscope broadcasts to Facebook!”]

    Precompose headlines in twitter

    edit periscope headline in twitter

    You are allowed to have up to 120 characters for your broadcast’s headline. But when your broadcast gets tweeted out not all 120 characters will be shown.

    “LIVE on #Periscope: “ will automatically be added to the tweet about your broadcast which is why they wont let you use the full 140 characters that Twitter normally allows. But on top of that the link to your broadcast will take up another 22 characters leaving you with only 97 characters for your headline.

    That’s plenty to work with. Especially considering headlines can include emoji.

    So if you really want to take the guess work out of making sure your headline is the right size, my advice is to compose your headline first in Twitter. Make sure that your headline leaves at least 43 characters left in the Twitter compose box then copy and paste it into your Periscope headline.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Precompose #Periscope headlines in @Twitter to maximize your characters!” quote=”#ProTip: Precompose #Periscope headlines in @Twitter to maximize your characters!”]

    Your opening shot

    periscope video thumbnails

    When you first hit the broadcast button whatever your camera is pointed at will then become the video thumbnail preview for your broadcast. So just be aware that this is what people will see when they see your broadcast in their stream.

    You’ll also notice that it’s the rear-facing camera that is active when you begin the broadcast, and you cannot change this.

    My suggestion is to utilize this as an opportunity to add some visual allure or context. Try one of these ideas:

    • Show your website homepage (my favorite)
    • Show a hand-written note
    • Show a graphic of some sort (Donna Moritz does this well)
    • Show your face (Blake Croft does this often)

    Doing this will make your broadcast stand out in the feed from all the compltely random screenshots of people who don’t realize this little quirk.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Your opening shot when you hit Broadcast is what will be seen in the #Periscope stream.” quote=”#ProTip: Your opening shot when you hit Broadcast is what will be seen in the #Periscope stream.”]

    Have something to say

    loki has nothing to say

    There’s nothing more annoying than jumping into a broadcast where all the person is doing is saying “ask me questions”. If you don’t have direction or some type of point to make— don’t broadcast.

    Sure, the occasional “Ask me anything” is fun, but you can only do that so many times before people get bored. Your audience is not there to entertain you, they’re there to recieve something of value.

    Having something to say, and training your audience that you always have something to say will produce a loyal audience who keeps coming back for more.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Never hit Broadcast on unless you have something of value to say. #Periscope” quote=”#ProTip: Never hit Broadcast on unless you have something of value to say. #Periscope”]

    In-Broadcast

    These are all the things you want to be aware of during the broadcast.

    Give them some time

    When you first go live, it may take some people a few seconds to:

    • Get the notfication you’re live
    • Leave whatever app they’re already in
    • Launch the periscope app
    • Get a stable stream to finally see/hear you

    So one thing you can do is start your broadcast with a bit of context— small talk letting people know where you are, what you’re doing. I like to do somthing to the effect of:

    “Hey everyone it is about 10:15 here in sunny SoCal. I’m on my fith cup of coffee for the day and boy am I wired! As you’re coming in, let me know where you are!”

    Then you can begin to start introducing your point or the reason you’re broadcasting.

    Encourage sharing

    sharing a periscope broadcast

    [HT to @Ryan_Bilello for allowing me to capture these screenshots.]

    After I’ve explained what I’m going to be talking about, I ask users to tap the people icon and share with their followers if they think others will be interested. I know you think you’re that good and that people will automatically share without you having to ask, but it never hurts to remind people to share.

    And it’s proven to be highly effective.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Encourage people to share– sometimes that’s all they need.” quote=”#ProTip: Encourage people to share– sometimes that’s all they need.”]

    Stay in frame, and no nostrils

    periscope framing template

    This might be a no-brainer to some, but I couldn’t just leave this out.

    You want to make sure that your head is in the center of the video. If you position yourself too low then you’ll get covered up by the comments and people wont be able to see your face.

    But you also want to be sure that your camera is either parallel to your eyes or slightly above your line of sight. It’s better to be looking up at the camera than for the camera to be looking up your nose.

    Don’t nobody wanna see that.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Keep your camera at eye-level or above. Nobody wants to look up your nose. #Periscope.” quote=”#ProTip: Keep your camera at eye-level or above. Nobody wants to look up your nose. #Periscope.”]

    Post-Broadcast

    Resist the temptation to go about your business and do a little follow up. It can go a long way with your audience.

    Firstly, grab your stats

    saving your periscope broadcast stats

    When you end your broadcast you’ll be presented with the stats. What I like to do is scroll them up into full view and then take a screenshot. This way it shows up right next to the video in my phone’s camera roll and I have a record for future reference.

    Once you’ve done that…

    Upload to Google Photos (or cloud storage of your choice)

    saving periscope broadcasts in Google Photos

    Since video takes up a lot of space on your phone, you’ll want to upload these videos to the cloud storage platform of your choice immediately. I like Google Photos, but you can also use Dropbox, iCloud or whatever else works for you.

    I take it a step further and I add both the broadcast and the screenshot that I took afterwards to an album called Periscope Broadcasts. I can then go back and chronologically see what I broadcasted about and how my stats have improved.

    Follow-up with commenters

    follow up with periscope comments

    The people who are engaging on your broadcasts are crucial in growing your platform further. You need to treat every single commenter as a valuable advocate and do all you can to develop an on-going relationship with them.

    Take note of some of your most engaged commenters and be sure to follow them and pop in on some of their live videos.

    Follow-up is a must if you really want to cultivate a community of people who love and share your stuff.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Follow your commenters on #Periscope. These relationships matter!” quote=”#ProTip: Follow your commenters on #Periscope. These relationships matter!”]

    Schedule out your replay

    Your broadcast will live on Periscope for 24hrs. This adds a bit of urgency to anyone who might want to hear what you had to say. So what you can do is use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule out a reshare of that link from your initial broadcast letting people know it will only be available for X more hours.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ProTip: Use the time-sensitive urgency of #Periscope to reshare your broadcasts via @buffer. ” quote=”#ProTip: Use the time-sensitive urgency of #Periscope to reshare your broadcasts via @buffer. “]

    Learn, Rinse and Repeat

    You should always be learning— nobody is perfect and there’s always room to improve. Pay attention to:

    • What broadcasts tend to do really well?
    • What times of day seems more active?
    • What type of content resonates most with your audience?
    • Who are the people showing up again and again to your broadcasts? (Reward them!)

    This live streaming revolution that is taking place offers a huge opportunity to those who get started right away and learn everything they can. You may be awful at first, but that’s okay— just get started and get better.

    For further reading, my buddy @RyanSteinolfson has a great video about the tools he uses to get more followers on Periscope.

    If you focus on delivering valuable, interesting and/or entertaining content you will thrive!

    Did I miss anything? What would you add to this list of pro-tips? Leave a comment below!

  • Official Google+ Logos, Icons and Templates [Free Download]

    Official Google Plus logo assets along with all the prominent icons of Google Plus. Oh, and bonus templates as well!

    If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s outdated icons, knock-off logos and flat-out poor-looking visuals. So I’ve set out on a mission to give people access to the best of the best.

    Today I’m taking it a step further.

    Because Google+ is my favorite network and I love seeing my fellow plussers thrive, I’ve giving away all my Google+ goodies for free.

    • Logos
    • Icons
    • Templates

    The hope is that this will save you time searching for the right logos or icons and allow you to have the best, most current and accurate versions. Additionally, my templates cover all of your visual needs on Google+.

    Let’s dive in!

    Google+ Logos

    The official Google+ logo in its current form is one of great misuse. Even some of the best Google+ pros can sometimes mistakenly use the outdated version of the official Google+ logo.

    Here is what the official, current logo looks like:

    updated google plus logo 2016

    The official Google+ logo is a solid red square with Google’s signature lower-case ‘g’ and a plus sign that is centered on the ‘g’. Notice how the square is a flat color as opposed to a gradient and the ‘g’ is in full view as opposed to being in the corner, cut off. The plus sign is not at the top of the ‘g’ but (again) in the center of it.

    For the sake of versatility I’ve compiled for you a few different versions to suit a multitude of use cases.

    Included in this download are:

    • Full official Google+ logo (written out)
    • Official Google+ logo (icon)
    • G+ icon isolated without the square
    • All versions in full-color and white

    I’ve also made sure they are large enough for you to use on any of your social media images. Better to start too big and scale down than to have it be too small and scale up.

    Download all

    Google+ Interface Icons

    I spent a lot of time finding all the different icons used across Google+. Then I meticulously recreated all of them in a vector format so that I could use them on mine and client projects.

    My Insiders have had access to these for some time now. Many have emailed me to personally thank me for them and show me how they’ve put them to use. I’ve just updated the set with a few new icons just for this post.

    Here’s what’s included:

    updated google plus icons 2016

    There are 28 icons in total covering Circles, Photos, Google+ for Business, Stream, Google+ Pages, Notification icon, post-type icons and every major feature (such as Hangouts, Communities and Local pages).

    Download all assets

    Google+ Templates

    One of the reasons Google+ is such a powerful platform is highly visual and many different ways of expressing your brand through visuals.

    In this set I’ve Created a template for every possible visual you might create for your Google+ presence and activity:

    google plus templates
    • Profile photo template: Pretty simple square at 500×500 but with a circle in the center to show you where your photo will be cropped in the Google+ interface.
    • Cover photo template: Because you want to take advantage of that big beautiful cover photo area on your profile since it shows up as part of your Google+ card. (I’ve also previously released cover photo templates for every major social network.)
    • Event page template: Sized exactly right with proper guidelines to make sure you’re not cramming too close to the edges.
    • Hangouts On Air Thumbnail template: For use with Hangouts On Air Trailers. Can actually be used as a thumbnail template for any YouTube video. Also doubles as the ideal image dimensions for a Google+ post.
    • Lower-third template: Use this to create lower-thirds for your Hangouts. Optimized to make sure proper spacing and sizing is already figured out for you.
    • Community Photo template: Because it’s not exactly a square but they want you to upload a square, but it’s not obvious where it’s going to get cropped. Problem simplified.
    • Poll template: Making sure you know where to place your content so that it’s not covered up by any of the interface.

    Each of these templates has been measured out and optimized for placement of your content with framing guidelines. You may want to take a quick read of my visual content design principles to see why framing is important.

    Download all assets

    All Assets, One Download

    I’ve bundled all of these Google+ assets into one single download for your convenience. Simply add your email below and click the download button.

     

    One Last Thing

    All of the logos, icons and templates made available here are in either JPEG or PNG format. They should be more that sufficient for all your Google+ content needs.

    However, I’m going to do something crazy and give full access to Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files to my Insiders this weekend. Once I finish making all the files super tidy and organize, my Insiders list will see them on their private downloads page along with every other downloadable resource I’ve ever shared.

    So if you’re not on my Insiders list yet— get on that thing asap by clicking the button below:

    Join the Insiders!

    And once you finish downloading all your goodies, please let me know where I can see the awesome things you end up creating with them!

  • How to Increase Pinterest Traffic by 2,000%

    Could you use an extra 1,937% increase in traffic from Pinterest?

    Yeah, you read that right. Almost two-thousand percent increase in Pinterest traffic. How the heck did I do that?

    Let me start by first showing you where I started with Pinterest and then show you how I got to where I am today.

    My Pinterest Story

    In 2013 Pinterest was getting a lot of buzz. It was a hot new social network (even though it had been around since 2009) that was turning into a referral traffic machine. And lots of people were talking about it.

    Meanwhile, over on Google+, I was having a blast and wasn’t paying much attention to Pinterest. Mostly because Google+ was sending me a crap-ton of traffic and Pinterest wasn’t even a blip on my Google Analytics radar.

    not that there's anything wrong with that

    I saw Pinterest as something that my wife and her friends used and it seemed like a female-dominant network. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

    So when my friend Jeremy Smith started writing about how Pinterest was a goldmine for bloggers, I didn’t really believe him. He then showed me his stats and I immediately became determined to figure it out.

    Curiosity turned into complete outrage quickly because something was very apparent about Pinterest: it was extremely visual. As someone who is known for their ability to create visual content, I was dumbfounded as to why my posts weren’t doing better on Pinterest.

    Here’s where my Pinterest traffic stood as of December 2013:

    pinterest referral traffic 2013

    Not very good. Pinterest referral traffic was a laughable 3% of total social network traffic for Dustn.tv.

    I had to figure out why my articles and visuals weren’t getting the attention I felt they deserved on Pinterest. So I started studying. Here’s what I found.

    Knowing and Optimizing for Pinterest Culture

    After browsing Pinterest for a while you’ll notice that the most predominant type of pins are the ones that are tall.

    The width of pins are fixed in the Pinterest stream but the height is not. So if your image is taller, it will automatically take up more screen real estate, giving you more exposure.

    This became a visual norm for Pinterest and the users really seemed to love these types of tall images.

    Taking note of this, I ended up speaking with Peg Fitzpatrick and she gave me what she believed to be the golden size ratio for Pinterest. I then began to strategize how I might create a Pinterest-specific image for every blog post I wrote in the coming months.

    Armed also with some advice from Cynthia Sanchez at Social Media Marketing World, I was ready to attack this new Pinterest strategy head on.

    It just so happened that at the time I was in the middle of my 2014 redesign process. As part of that process, an idea was born.

    Getting Content Shared More, Better

    Here was my problem— I didn’t really like any of the social sharing plugins on the market. I wanted a way to have beautiful, attractive and responsive social sharing buttons on my blog and I wanted to be able to customize what happened when people hit those buttons.

    Nothing like that existed. So, I got together with my buddies and we decided to build the best social sharing plugin on the market. We named it Social Warfare.

    I’ll spare you the full story, but we used the first part of 2014 as a testing ground for how well the plugin worked.

    One of the features we were very specific about building into it was the ability to upload a custom Pinterest image that would automatically load when someone hit the Pin button.

    I didn’t want to have to shove a vertical graphic into my blog post like most people were doing. It ends up squashing the text and hurting the reading experience.

    squashed-text

    I didn’t like that. So we built the custom Pinterest image option into the premium version of our social sharing plugin.

    So Now to Create the Images

    Once I had the beautiful sharing buttons and custom Pinterest upload option available, it was time to just start creating the images.

    I’ve share my social media image templates previously but here’s the Pinterest specific template I use:

    optimal pinterest image template

    The size is 735px wide and 1102px tall.

    For every blog post I wrote I created both a standard headline image and a Pinterest image.

    In the first month of using Social Warfare and Pinterest images my Pinterest traffic jumped 361%.

    Fast forward 1 year later and the overall amount of traffic dustinstout.com is getting from Pinterest is up +1,937% year-over-year. Pinterest traffic is now over 50% of the total social network traffic sent to dustinstout.com.

    using pinterest strategy and social warfare chart

    The big kicker here— I actually blogged less in 2014 than I did in 2013.

    Let that sink in. I blogged less. My traffic skyrocketed.

    How Can You Boost Your Own Pinterest Traffic?

    That’s great Dustin, good for you. Yay. So how do I do what you did?

    I’m glad you asked.

    1. Create the visuals

    The first thing you need to do is commit to creating a Pinterest-specific image for every blog post. You can steal my template above (or better yet, steal all my social image templates).

    Choose a graphic design software that works for you such as:

    I’ve compiled a full list of my most highly recommended desktop apps and mobile apps for creating visual content. Find the one that works best for you and stick to it.

    Also be sure that your visuals are:

    • Easy to read. You want to tell people what to expect when they click-through.
    • Brightly colored. Warmer colored images tend to do better.
    • High quality. No cheap stock photography or images that have clearly been distorted and/or pixellated.

    Even if you’re not a graphic designer, you can create visuals that don’t suck if you follow my three visual content design principles.

    2. Make sharing easy

    You can grab a copy of Social Warfare for yourself and you then have everything you need. But if you would prefer some free alternatives I recommend (all WordPress plugins):

    • Genesis Simple Share
    • AddThis
    • ShareThis
    • DiggDigg
    • Jetpack Sharing
    • Sharaholic

    None of the above options will allow you to upload a custom Pinterest image like Social Warfare does. You will just have to place your Pinterest image somewhere on the page and hope people share that one. If you find any plugin besides Social Warfare that does allow for custom Pinterest image sharing, let me know.

    3. Get active on Pinterest

    One of the greatest things about Pinterest is that it’s not complicated. You don’t have to spend hours figuring it out and sharing things.

    A few minutes invested every day can go a long way:

    • Start some relevant boards
    • Pin 5-10 times per day
    • Follow people who pin things similar to you
    • Be consistent

    I recommend starting out by following some of the Pinterest pros such as Peg Fitzpatrick, Rebekah Radice, and Jeff Sieh. Oh, and I guess you can follow me to.

    Go Be Pintastic!

    If you follow these steps I guarantee you’ll start seeing the Pinterest traffic on your site go up, and up, and up!

    social media image templates

    Bonus Social Media Image Templates

    Simply add your email below and click the Download button and I’ll email you all four of my social media image templates which will allow you to create every kind of image for every social network!

    Once you build your momentum on Pinterest you will start to see that Pinterest also has some great long-term benefits. Pins have a lot of evergreen value and can continue seeing action long after they were first pinned.

    So what are you waiting for? Go get your pin on!

    And don’t forget to pin this post using the Pin button below to see the Pinterest image for this post!

  • This is How You Crush a Content Marketing Strategy

    A simple editorial calendar strategy can greatly increase your productivity and effectiveness.

    A great man once said that “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” While I don’t fear failure I never plan on failing. Nobody does. But the hard fact is most people don’t take the time to put together a solid plan when it comes to their social media efforts.

    Is it a lack of focus? A lack of clear-cut goals? Or is it just not knowing where to start?

    Well I’m effectively taking that last option off the table for you. If you have trouble with the other two, you are always welcome to schedule some time with me to help you work through focus and goals.

    In the meantime, let’s start with a plan.

    FYI this post was actually shared with my Insiders months before I shared it publicly. If you want to be one of those awesome people to get my best content first, join the list by adding your email below:

    I’m going to give you at least a basic idea of how to plan your content (social and/or blogging) calendar. It’s not rocket science.

    Some of you may even think, “that’s too simple, give me something more.” Well before you ask that, let me as you this— are you doing the simple work?

    Are you getting it done already? Or are you just letting procrastination, inaction and laziness hide behind the mask of “I need something ‘deeper’ to feed off of.”

    Okay, I won’t go into a rant about procrastination and excuses— let’s just do this. Deal?

    Let’s Do This!

    liz lemon says let's do this!

    Sit down, put away the distractions and map this out for yourself. The planning flow will look like this:

    • Monthly
    • Weekly
    • Daily

    Before we get started though, I wanted to state that the first step should always be identifying your audience and topics. To keep this post simple and to-the-point, I’m assuming you’ve already done that work.

    Fair enough? Cool, let’s get started.

    Monthly

    Start with a calendar, any calendar will do. If you’re a pen and paper kind of person (like my wife) then do that. If you’re a digitalist like myself, use your digital calendar of choice. You might actually want to take a look at Coschedule, one of the newest additions to My Toolbox.

    my content editorial calendar

    There’s also a number of great content calendar templates out there. Here’s a few I recommend:

    Next, identify all the holidays or special events happening in the calendar month ahead (or the one you’re currently in). If there are any special days in that month, be aware of them and create or curate content that will be relevant/trending on that day.

    Weekly

    On any given week there are a number of trends that you may be able to tag onto in order to gain some great exposure. There are hashtags that are specific for particular days of the week or even weekly social media events that you can tap into. For example:

    • Tuesdays = #StarWarsTuesday. People post interesting/funny things about Star Wars and use the hashtag.
    • Wednesdays = #BufferChat. Buffer does a weekly twitter chat.
    • Fridays = #TGIF or #FridayDanceParty. I’m determined to make that a thing.
    • Saturdays = #Caturday. People post interesting/funny pictures/videos of cats… yeah, I know, but it’s a thing.

    Find those weekly trends that people in your target audience will be participating in and/or interested in and put them on the calendar. Twitter chats, trending topics, weekly events (such as TV shows) are great ways to join in on a conversation that is already thriving and be exposed to a larger audience.

    Bonus Reading: Learn everything you need to know about Twitter to maximize your content marketing potential on that platform.

    Remember though– be relevant, not just a trend-jacker.

    Daily

    Now here’s where the real work is. Day in, day out– feeding the content monster (as my friend Justin Wise once put it).

    I’m convinced that no matter who your audience is, they crave 3 types of content:

    • Informational: Things that feed their knowledge.
    • Inspirational: Things that fuel their fire.
    • Entertaining: Things that make them smile.

    Make it your daily goal to fill all three content types.

    This goes back to understanding the psychology behind why people share things. I’ve shared about this in one of my Insider newsletters, but to save some reading time on this one I’ll just recommend you go look up Contagious by Jonah Berger. It’s a fantastic book with incredible insights.

    Every day you’ll want to fill your content queue with all three types of content. Shoot for a ratio of 25/25/50.

    • 25% Informational
    • 25% Inspirational
    • 50% Entertaining

    Or maybe your audience is more of the data-head or the learned type so you’d want to give them:

    • 50% Informational
    • 25% Inspirational
    • 25% Entertaining

    Or maybe your audience is more into being inspired and you’d want to make the 50% portion inspiration and the other two 25%.

    The point is to give your audience enough variety that they wont get bored, with an emphasis on what they really want most.

    content marketing quote from dustin w. stout

    Now how many posts a day does this mean?

    Well, I’ll let you decide. Maybe it’s an easy 4 times a day. Maybe it’s 12. Gauge the volume tolerance of your audience and go from there. Whatever number you choose, try to keep it constant and realistic because you need to feed that content monster every single day.

    To feed this content monster you either need to be both creating content and curating.

    Curating is the art of finding, organizing and/or presenting things. Much like the museum curator or the art gallery curator:

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#ContentMarketing tip: It’s your job to find stuff that your audience will love most. Be a curator.” quote=”It’s your job to find stuff that your audience will love most. Be a curator.”]

    So first decide how much you can create and how much you need to curate. Or maybe you want to start by seeing how much you can curate and then create the rest.

    Either way, fill that daily quota. Some days will be easier than others and the weekly events/trends and monthly holidays/events will definitely help, but the idea is to create a content plan that will become a routine.

    Once you’ve got a plan and a routine you can expand, refine and experiment.

    For further reading on the subject my friend Peg Fitzpatrick has shared her thoughts on How to Get Organized with an Editorial Calendar, Buffer has a great piece about Choosing a Content Calendar, and Matthew Kaboomis Loomis has shared some great thoughts on why bloggers need a content calendar.

    One Last Thing

    Never trade quality for quantity. More than anything else I believe you should lead with quality over quantity.

    There’s no shortage of content out there. The problem is sorting through it all to find the real gems. If you can position yourself as a maker and curator of quality content you will stand out among the crowd of link-litterers and auto-posters.

    You can do better. You will do better. Now go to work.

    Bonus Reading: Take a look at my other productivity tools that help me stay efficient day in and day out.

    What do you think? Simple enough to act upon? Are you already working an editorial calendar? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

  • How to Use Twitter & Google+ in Your Content Marketing

    The power of social and SEO combined can give you a huge boost in getting discovered online.

    Big news. Google and Twitter are seeing each other again. And that means Twitter just became a lot more valuable to every content producer’s strategy.

    Combining the power of social media and search engine optimization, you can greatly enhance your content marketing strategy and your ability to get found online. This post will take you through what you need to know about the new Twitter and Google deal and some creative ways to take advantage of it.

    Before we dive in, did you know that some of my best stuff only gets shared with my Insiders list? Join this group of awesome people below:

    Brief History of SEO and Social

    In case you haven’t been following this complicated relationship between the search giant (Google) and the 280 character social network (Twitter) allow me to give you a brief history.

    Firstly, you have to understand that before social media, there was search.

    The best way to be discovered online was through people finding you in search engine results. Before long, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born.

    Google became (and still remains) the king of online search. However, with the social media revolution a new way of being discovered arose. Word-of-mouth found it’s way into the online world like never before.

    Getting discovered and growing your online reach found new life.

    That’s not to say though that SEO dropped off – not in the least bit. However what did happen is that SEO was no longer the only game in town. Social Media lowered the barrier for entry into online discovery.

    Google understood the growing popularity of social media and decided to begin looking at indexing social networks for their search results.

    Facebook initially wouldn’t give Google proper access to index it’s site. After a while though what was once a completely walled garden was now beginning to make a small leak into Google search. But so insignificant that it wasn’t worth writing home about.

    Then there was Twitter. It was hot. It was great at real-time relevance. And Google saw that.

    So Google struck a deal with Twitter in 2009 to gain access to it’s data. But for some reason in 2011 that deal was broken.

    Maybe it was because the inception of Google+ became a threat. Or maybe it was because Twitter just got a little overconfident and didn’t feel it needed a partnership with Google anymore.

    We may never know what happened.

    With the introduction of Google+, social media activity now worked for you twofold— on the network itself and in Google search. This is why a lot of us early adopters took to Google+ so fiercely— we saw the potential for compounded efforts.

    At that point though, most social media activity (apart from Google+ activity) had very little chance at making it into search engine results. This meant that your SEO and your Social Media were two completely separate strategies.

    Problem: Two Separate Strategies

    Though you could do very well focusing on SEO alone, it often required a lot of time, technical know-how and could be a longer-term payoff. Whereas with social, it was faster, easier and for most of us it was just more fun.

    SEO and Social seemed to be two completely separate strategies, that didn’t have much to do with each other.

    With Google+ we began to see just how beneficial it could be when your social activity pays off in search results. It’s as if you’re killing two birds with one stone.

    Your social strategy can benefit your search engine discoverability and your search engine discoverability can help your social strategy. A perfect harmony.

    Well finally, Twitter came to their senses and renewed their relationship with Google to give access to real-time activity, via the API,  a.k.a. “the firehose”.

    Jay Baer does a great job of explaining why this move is so important for both Google and Twitter:

    So What Does This Mean?

    Your Twitter activity is now working for you twofold. Not only is it helping you gain exposure within the Twitter network, but it’s helping you break into search results. Just like Google+!

    That’s huge.

    You can now have 3 channels working to help you get discovered through Google search:

    • Your website’s own content and pages.
    • Your Google+ activity.
    • Your Twitter activity.

    The beauty of that? You can make all three channels work together in harmony with the right workflow.

    How to Get Your Tweets Indexed

    Before anything else, make sure you know how to use Twitter like a pro, first and foremost.

    At this point there’s still only a small percentage of Tweets being indexed into Google search. But it’s getting better. The guys over at Stone Temple Consulting have put together a couple great studies that you need to read:

    Based on these studies there are a few things that we can pick up about getting your tweets indexed by Google:

    1. Having more followers definitely helps.
    2. Images and Hashtags are more likely to be indexed.
    3. Having at least 10 inbound links to a tweet can significantly increase the likelihood that your tweet gets indexed.

    See the Bonus Pin Graphic

    Now it is important to remember that these studies aren’t absolute. The results are not guaranteed if you follow them. They’re merely a way of increasing your odds of getting indexed. This isn’t digital wizardry, just well educated tacticry. (New words are fun.)

    And because I know you love infographics, here’s an easy, visual reminder of these tips.

    twitter tips for getting indexed by google infographic
    Pin this Infographic
    Copy and paste the code below to embed this infographic to your website.

    How to Get Your Google+ Posts Indexed

    Since Google owns Google+ the public posts shared on Google+ are indexed almost immediately. They’re already a part of Google’s database so almost instantly you have the potential to surface in search results.

    So, getting your posts indexed isn’t the challenge. The challenge is getting them to surface in search results.

    While I’m no SEO expert, I can tell you this— it would seem that more engagement (consistently) can tell Google that your post is more relevant and/or popular, and that definitely can’t hurt from an SEO standpoint.

    So here’s a few tips to boost engagement on your Google+ Posts:

    • Use a bold headline for your posts using an * at the beginning and end (no spaces between the asterisks)
    • Write at least a few sentences, don’t just dump a headline and a link.
    • Include an image or be sure to include a link that has a large image preview.
    • Make sure you post to “Public” rather than just to your circles or “Extended Circles”.

    If you want to dive a little deeper on squeezing the most engagement out of your Google+ posts, I’ve written a more extensive post titled The Anatomy of a Perfect Google+ Post. It’s also got a visual breakdown as an example.

    There’s also been a few cool articles about Google+ engagement written by Rebekah Radice and also my friends over at Steady Demand. Definitely worth the reading time.

    Benchmark How You’re Doing

    Right now you can go over to Google search and see how you’re doing so far at getting indexed in each social network. Simply go to google.com and use the following search queries:

    • For Twitter search > site:https://twitter.com/USERNAME
    • For Google+ search > site:https://plus.google.com/+NAME

    These two search results will show you how many of your posts from each network have been indexed by Google. Here’s what mine look like:

    number of tweets indexed

    Currently it appears that I have 1,220 of my tweets indexed by Google. Not a bad starting point I guess.

    number of google+ posts indexed

    Roughly 6,290 of my Google+ posts seem to have been indexed so far. I was expecting more, but hey I’m not complaining. I guess it just means I’m not nearly as cool as I think I am.

    Benchmark your own current results and take another look every now and again to see how quickly you’re growing. You can easily do this through a spreadsheet.

    A Workable, Simple Strategy

    So now the question is, “okay, Dustin, I get it. Twitter and Google+ can help me get discovered in search. So how the heck do I do it?!”

    Calm down sparky— I’m getting there.

    This is a very simple strategy to use Google+ and Twitter seamlessly into your current content creation efforts.

    Here’s what you will need:

    1. Sign up for a Friends+Me account. [Affiliate Link]
    2. Sign up for a Buffer account.
    3. Grab a copy of Social Warfare (if you have a WordPress Powered site).

    With these tools in hand (figuratively speaking) you will have all you need to start attacking your content marketing strategy.  Now, here’s what you need to do with them…

    Cross-Posting

    Signing up for a Friends+Me account will allow you to connect your Google+ account to your Twitter profile. You can then easily cross-post from Google+ to Twitter, cutting down your time significantly.

    Do this— in Friends+Me connect your Google+ profile to your Twitter profile. You will then be given four options:

    • Grow – This will share every public Google+ post to Twitter with a link back to the Google+ post.
    • Mirror – This will share every public Google+ post to Twitter as it’s own tweet (not connected to the Google+ post).
    • Grow# – This will share only public Google+ posts with a specific hashtag to Twitter with a link back to the original Google+ post.
    • Mirror# – This will share only public Google+ post with a specific hashtag to Twitter as it’s own tweet (not connected to the Google+ post).
    friends plus me screenshot

    I recommend using the Mirror# strategy. This allows you to control which Google+ posts get tweeted and you keep your Twitter followers from getting annoyed at you constantly promoting a different social platform than they’re on.

    You shouldn’t cross-post everything anyways as some content just doesn’t fit some networks. Be considerate of the audience and what they want to see when determining whether or not to cross post.

    Cross-Pollinating

    Every now and again it’s good to get creative with what’s known as cross-pollinating (something I took from my interview with Peg Fitzpatrick) your social accounts. Here’s an example:

     

    So I’ve taken a screenshot of my tweet and uploaded it to Google+ as an image and shared some additional commentary and a link back to the original tweet.

    You can do this with Twitter as well.

    You can tweet out links to your Google+ posts in a more non-automated way. It feels more organic this way. You’re showing your Twitter audience that you’re not just phoning it in.

    If you do this consistently you will not only be encouraging your followers to follow you across multiple networks, but you’ll be leveraging one profile to boost the authority of the other.

    Remember, inbound links to social posts can boost their SEO value. This technique helps you build those inbound links.

    Getting Your Blog Content Shared

    Best way to get more people to share your content quote

    Now here’s where you can not only have your tweets work harder for you, but you can have other people’s tweets work harder for you!

    Last year I got together with a couple of friends and we ended up building the perfect social sharing WordPress plugin. Since including it in my blogging arsenal, I’ve seen significant growth in both social shares and blog traffic.

    One of the features we focused on was being able to customize the content of the social shares. You can write the tweet that is populated when a reader clicks on your tweet button.

    Additionally we wanted bloggers(publishers?) to be able to place social calls-to-action within the blog post. These are commonly known as “Click-to-tweet” boxes. Like this:

    [clickToTweet tweet=”#Twitter just became a lot more valuable to your #ContentMarketing strategy.” quote=”Twitter just became a lot more valuable to your content marketing strategy.”]

    With the Social Warfare plugin you can easily create these click-to-tweet quotes without having to leave your WordPress editor.

    There are several free alternatives that will allow you to create click-to-tweet quotes for your blog posts, but they don’t include the higher level customization for the social sharing buttons.

    If you want to explore the free options first you can take a look at:

    In addition to the customized tweets, the Social Warfare plugin also allows you to customize the Google+/Facebook/LinkedIn share title and description as well as the image preview that the networks pull in. There’s also a separate customization for Pinterest descriptions and images.

    And that’s only part of the reason I believe it’s the best social sharing WordPress plugin on the market. There’s a ton more reasons, but for the sake of this article I’ll leave it at that.

    Now to Get to Work

    If you’ve made it through this posts so far you will have a great understanding of how Twitter and Google+ can add significant value to your content marketing efforts.

    Without knowing very much about search engine optimization you can still grow your search discoverability through these two powerful social media channels.

    So go do it.