How I Built a 4 Figure Monthly Blog in 3 Months – Part 1

I started a new blog last year, and the blog was resulting in four figures monthly for me within 3 months of starting it.

I will be sharing how I did this in a series of blog posts on Zac’s blog (also check out Zac’s blogging successes), with examples and resources to make this series really practical.

Here are some interesting things about the blog I started:

• It started as challenge to myself on my blog to show my readers what is possible through blogging
• I started the blog in a different niche from my blog’s niche
• I maintained the blog under a pseudonym
• It was a “success” within 3 months of my starting it, according to my plans when I started it; my definition of success was for it to generate 4 figures monthly,
• I documented my progress publicly on my blog in a series of posts

What will be covered in this series?

• Part 1: How I Planned My Blog and Chose a Niche
• Part 2: How I Chose My Domain Name, Set Up My Blog, and Created Key Pages
• Part 3: My Process for Writing Key Posts that Drive Income
• Part 4: How I Market My Blog

Since today’s post will be kick-starting the series, I’ll start by going into how I planned my blog.

Why Plan Your Blog?

Most of us are used to viewing blogging as something really simple, and we feel there are really no life-changing decisions when blogging so there’s no need to plan. Why not avoid “procrastination” and just get started?!

How I realized the importance of planning a blog

I used to share the opinion that planning isn’t necessary when blogging but the blog I’m featuring in this series isn’t my first blog; I started my first blog carelessly, without any real plan on what to write about, and not only did I struggle to figure out the purpose of my blog for a very long time, it also took me a whole year to generate any real income from it.

Once I started to generate income from my first blog, I realized I could have shortcut the process if I was initially well-informed about what I am doing, and if I had planned everything before I started. My knowledge and experience with my first blog helped me plan my new blog. In retrospect, I’m glad I did.

When it comes to planning a blog, there are 3 things I believe are key, and that this article will be covering. They are:

• Choosing a niche
• Determining your blog’s purpose
• Deciding on a content and marketing plan for your blog
• Planning how to make money from my blog

The ultimate aim is to get results and the above 3 things must be taken seriously; they might evolve once you start your blog but it is important to start with them in mind.

How I Chose My Niche

When it comes to blogging, you can’t afford to be a jack of all trades.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs all over the world and thousands in almost any niche you can imagine; with so many blogs that specialize on topics they care about, and the increasingly limited time we have as human beings, readers can’t afford to read your blog if you’re a generalist.

I learned this the hard way with my first blog; I struggled for a long time and couldn’t build an audience when I was writing about everything. However, the moment I shifted gears to start talking about writing, especially the kind of writing that helps you get paid online, readers started paying attention and I started to build a real audience.

I wasn’t ready to make this mistake with my new blog so I decided to choose a niche and stick to it. This time, the niche I chose was the “guest blogging” niche, which can be classified under thecontent/inbound marketingniche, which can also be classified under themarketingniche.

If you carefully analyze how I chose my niche, you will notice how specific I was. Here are some tips when choosing your niche:

1. Make Sure it’s Something You Have Experience in: In my case, I have years of experience with guest blogging. I have written guest posts promoting my blog, and guest posts promoting my clients; I’ve written around a thousand guest posts over a span of 3 years, and I’ve written guest posts to get traffic, subscribers, backlinks, etc., so I know how guest blogging works inside out.

Your blog topic could be about your experience, what you studied in school, your hobby, or a subject you are passionate about. Just make sure you know enough about your subject to be able to blog about it.

2. Make it Specific: I needed to get results quickly, and this is a one man operation. I’m not a mega corporation with millions to invest, so I can’t afford to choose a niche too broad.

I could have gone with “marketing” or with “inbound/content marketing” but I went with “guest blogging” because it was more specific and I feel I could achieve success much sooner in that niche.

3. Make Sure it Has Potential: If there are a lot of businesses offering services relevant to your niche, it is a good sign it has potential. There are a lot of people offering guest blogging services, people doing case studies about it, and I’ve made money in the past doing it, so I know it has potential.

With these 3 things in place, you are well-equipped to succeed in a niche.

How I Determined My Blog’s Purpose

Since your blog can’t be about everything, it is important to also work on its niche; what will you discuss, and what will be the main aim of your blog? The more specific your blog is, the clearer its purpose.

Part of my blog’s purpose is to inform people about guest blogging and teach them how to get results doing it; this was automatically established when I chose my niche.

However, to take things to the next level and establish my blog’s purpose, I decided I wanted it to be different from other blogs that talk about guest blogging. I want the tips to be practical, informative and easy to use; as a result, it will be rare to see my blog focus on “10 tips to do this guest blogging, etc.” Of course, I could write about topics like these once in a while but the focus of my blog is on offering practical information like the ones below:

• The Ultimate List of Blogs that Accept Guest Posts
• Case Study: How I Used Guest Blogging to Increase My Search Traffic by 342.35% in One Year
• The Ultimate Guide to Building Backlinks with Guest Blogging

As you can see from the above 3 posts, which are the kind my blog focused on, the main aim of my blog is to provide useful information that readers can act on, not just another filler “tips” post.

How I Created a Content and Marketing Plan for My Blog

I knew my blog won’t succeed just because I have the perfect niche, and that I had to create a real plan for marketing it. This plan had to include how I approach content on the site as well as how I market it.

Here was my plan for my blog:

Blog content: 3 blog posts a week on average

Marketing: 20 guest posts monthly and regular activity on community sites like Quora

I was being unrealistic with these goals because I had another well-established blog that required my attention, I freelance for a living, and I had other plans, so I couldn’t commit to meeting the above goals without focusing on my new blog full-time; and I can’t afford to work on it full-time yet. However, having the above goals as my plan helped a lot.

I didn’t meet up with these goals but using it as a guide, my blog started to generate income soon. It has been making me an average of four figures monthly for at least 9 months now, and it now gets an average of 4,000 visitors monthly.

I also evolved some of my plan, like being active on Quora, when I didn’t see any results from doing them after sometime. So, instead, I changed my focus to only publishing posts on my blog and guest blogging on other blogs. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to do a lot of these to get results; with just 6 quality posts on my blog and around 5 guest posts published on other blogs, I had my first month where I made over $500 income as a result of the blog.

How I Planned to Make Money from My Blog

It is important to discuss this to put things in perspective. How I planned to make money from my blog is an important piece of the puzzle and it is something I needed to decide on before I started my blog.

Based on my experience, of 2 years, building my first blog, I had realized that one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money from my blog is by offering my services. I was a freelance writer; this time around, I decided to offer my services as a professional guest blogger, and occasionally a content marketer.

With this kind of plan to make money from my blog, I only needed to get a few clients every month and income will be consistent.

I did. I got my first client exactly 1 month and 10 days after I started my blog; when my blog hasn’t gotten up to 500 visitors; I still work with the client today, and I’ve made five figures working with him.

What I realized in the process is that, by offering my services, I don’t need thousands of monthly visitors to make money from my blog; with just hundreds of visitors monthly, I was getting clients consistently and soon started having four figure income months.

Watch Out for Part 2

This post is already very long so I have to stop here. In part two of this post, I will be talking about how I created my blog, chose my domain name, and how I went about creating key pages that influenced the success of my blog.

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If you love this post, you will also love my free ecourse on how to blog for clients. Make sure you check it out!

Social Media and Work Experience - How can you stand out?

When it comes to looking for a job in social media marketing, work experience is invaluable. As a current undergraduate marketing student I know how important it is to have relevant work experience, especially when it comes down to looking for that first move onto the career ladder - however, I also realise just how hard is can be to get this experiences.

I have been fortunate enough to carry out work experience that has included social media marketing as part of the role. Whilst at university I have had the opportunity to do a year out in industry - which gave me an invaluable insight into how social media marketing works in the Engineering industry. This allowed me to adapt a social media strategy, work on Twitter, Facebook and a blog from a B2B perspective, and attempt to get internal staff on board with getting social!

If you have the passion and drive on social media, and social media marketing is something that you have the ambition to get into, then why not use it to get work experience? My philosophy in life is "If you don't ask you won't get" - so put it out there on your personal social media channels that you want to get work experience! Work for free, offer to work for a few days, who knows who might be interested! I used this tactic and managed to get some additional work experience with a communications and PR company - absolutely perfect! Reaching out to social media companies via social media surely makes sense?! Research the type of companies you would like to get experience with and make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of those few days working - be honest and let the company know exactly where you want to get experience. If you want to find out how to tweet for a company then let them know! Social media marketing is all about being just that - social!

If you are going to use social media to get work experience there are many different ways to achieve this. Why not do some research and find out what hashtags you can use on Twitter? There might be one to bring lots of small companies from your local area together, or #JobHour to see if there are any companies who are interested. It is all about selling yourself as a passionate individual! My recommendation here would be to target smaller companies - they are more likely to be able to give you time and really value what you can offer them.

Social media marketing is continuously changing - new aspects are developing all the time - so do your reading, read blogs, articles, journals, and keep up to date! Why not start your own blog? This is a great way to keep your social media going and will give you an insight into social media marketing. Think of it as marketing yourself via social media! You can use this to reach out to potential companies that might offer work experience, and direct them back to your blog as a portfolio.

We are in an age now where social media marketing is huge. Personally I use social media to communicate with companies, and with my experience I know that most companies now have a social media strategy to communicate with their customers. Social media marketing is a powerful tool, and companies are going to want to employ someone who has experience in this. If you are able to get some experience in this area, you really are setting yourself apart in the job market.

Best of luck to anyone who is looking for work experience - it's tough but worth it!

Helen Chick

I am a final year Business and Marketing student, who loves all things social media. Blog about "My Life as a Student" and love to tweet! Currently looking for a graduate role.

Contact us on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below.

How to Grow your Brand on Twitter

With Twitter now eclipsing 200 million active users and on the verge of an IPO, there can no longer be any doubt that Twitter will become a regular feature on the docket of marketing executives. The company Twitter will be on a prolonged offensive to develop its business and monetize its base.  The question then becomes, from a brand’s perspective, how to grow your brand on Twitter?

Objectives first

The first point of call is to figure out what are the overall business objectives and to understand how social media — and in this case Twitter — will be a contributing factor in the overall strategy.  With these objectives clearly in mind, the next consideration is to figure out what you will be measuring against.  For example, where is it that you want the Twitter users to go (i.e. create a funnel)?  What actions do you want to stimulate (e.g. subscribe to a newsletter)?   Once the objectives and measuring sticks have been identified, then a strategy and implementation plan comes into focus.

Twitter Options

Having established the objectives, the question remains as to how to grow your brand using Twitter.  Below are several typical usages for Twitter.  These are arguably transfers of traditional business functions onto another channel.  Only the first is demonstrably about hitting the top line.

• Sales Channel (e.g. DellOutlet, SteamyDeals [Steam video games]).  Other brands use their Twitter to announce deals or offer coupons within their stream.  Whole Foods is one of the more recent ones to join this bandwagon.  With pure players and/or those with eCommerce sites, this avenue is easy to control and measure.  However, it is a more complex affair in a cross-channel environment.
• PR or Corporate Communications - To broadcast corporate messages, for example press releases and/or shareholder information (e.g. LOrealUSACorp)
• HR Recruitment / Careers - To speak to and hire new recruits (e.g. Nestle USA Careers)
• Customer Service (e.g. JetBlue, NikeSupport,ComcastCares…).  According to an infographic produced by Sentiment Metrics, 30% of top brands now have a dedicated customer service on Twitter.

Unlike on a Facebook page or in LinkedIn Groups or Forums, a brand’s Twitter followers are not a tight knit community.  {Click to Tweet} Each person or account has chosen to follow the brand, but does not necessarily interact with other followers.  After all, 80% of all Twitter accounts do not actively tweet.  Moreover, the notion of unfollowing on Twitter is done with little friction.

What counts on Twitter?

Twitter has unique differences to the traditional media channels and we have seen some very original and different ways of using Twitter to help drive the business.  A healthy Twitter account should typically have a combination of the four components below:

• Conversation - Procter & Gamble uses their principal handle with a declared intent to “keep the conversation going.”  Conversation is the part that makes Twitter social.  Accounts that are uniquely one-way broadcasts can quickly become stale or viewed as a kind of spam.
• Content creation and distribution - Twitter can be suitable to distribute content that is being created within the organization.  An example is IBM.  The key is creating valuable content for one’s follower base.
• Curation - Rather than focusing on one’s own content, brands can use Twitter to uncover and dispatch the most relevant news out there.  According to a recent Livefyre study, 93% of respondents said that they used Twitter for social curation.  As Livefyre’s CEO, Jordan Kretchmer, said, “[p]eople are talking about your brand every day. Social curation enables marketers to tap into what people are already saying about your brand on social networks and then use it to promote their products in an effective, authentic way.”
• News - Especially when it’s hot.  The bakery, Albion’s Oven, in London has been using Twitter since 2009 to great effect, announcing when the latest baked items were hot out of the oven.
• Customer Service (e.g. JetBlue, NikeSupport, ComcastCares…).  According to an infographic produced by SentimentMetrics, 30% of top brands now have a dedicated customer service on Twitter.

6 keys to grow your brand on Twitter

Notwithstanding all the above usages, there are several key ways how to grow your brand on Twitter.

1. Integrating.  On the very basic level, it is important that your Twitter account have a well thought through bio, replete with a pertinent link.  Moreover, your Twitter presence should be fully integrated into all other marketing materials, including substantively the home page of your main website.  The Twitter handle (aka username) can also be farmed out throughout events, on business cards and more.
2. Listening.  Twitter is a vibrant space and, considering the volume of tweets, it is likely that there are people talking at anytime about you, your competitors and/or your environment.  By listening intently to existing and potential customers, there are inevitably opportunities that open up, whether in the B2B or B2C space.  I highly encourage C-suite executives to use Twitter just to listen to what is going on in the street, thereby side-stepping the internal hierarchies that can often obscure the truth.  A great example of such behavior is the CEO of O2 in England, Ronan Dunne, who as he says uses his account to “walk the aisles.”
3. Demonstrating expertise.  To the extent Twitter is a micro-blogging service (where blogs are a long form way of highlighting one’s expertise), it can be a good vehicle to establish one’s authority in a certain field.  The key point here is to think of one’s brand as a media or publishing company.  Twitter can be a useful part of the arsenal in creating a sense of authority in a chosen sector.
4. Providing offers.  Twitter can be a way to distribute offers, coupons or straight discounts.  Whether the offers are separated into a dedicated “sales” channel or integrated into the stream of the main account, Twitter’s particularity is the rapid decay of Tweets.  Typically, this makes it an ideal channel for flash sale sites.  However, it can also be applied for other offline stores.  The key is figuring out the association between the tweet and the cash register — and making sure the staff are appropriately trained and equipped.
5. Identifying leads.  The search function is an effective way to find interesting contacts.  Sometimes finding leads can be done the soft route, by answering questions of people in need (relative to your area of expertise).  Otherwise, there are many people asking questions and looking for goods/services.  Fixing up some automated searches (using a client such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck to set up columns) can be an effective way to monitor these requests.  Meanwhile, as of end of August 2013, Twitter has rolled out Lead Generation Cards which can only be used with promoted tweets.  As published in a Mashable article,“[i]n a case study quoted on Twitter’s blog, outdoor gear and apparel company Rock/Creek saw a 4.6% engagement rate and generated more than 1,700 new email contacts in one week by using a Card within a Promoted Tweet.”
6. Creating contests / white papers / webinars.  By formulating exclusive contests on Twitter, one can add names to a mailing list and/or establish new leads.  An alternative might be to offer free white papers or webinars.

Conclusions

The key point in using Twitter to grow your brand is to know what you want to achieve, to set out some measurable goals and then test and learn.  It is essential to find an editorial line that respects the followers, because they can very quickly and easily unsubscribe.  Secondly, it’s important to think of this as a longer-term project, without concerning oneself with immediate results.  Buying followers via any of the quick fix services (eg SocialKik, FanBullet) is not prescribed,even at the beginning.  Thirdly, a Twitter feed must be managed.  If you are in start-up mode, training and guidelines are vital.  Members of a team managing the accounts need to play off each other and are ideally identified in the bio (e.g. for ComcastCares) or are recognized in the individual tweets (e.g. via ^initials).    Finally, Twitter cannot be a standalone.  For example, when creating a Customer Service line via Twitter, there usually needs to be other channels to cater to different audiences.

Parting tips: If you are going to be serious about building your brand on Twitter, here are three guiding principles:

• (a) Consider carefully the objective of the account(s) and allocate the right resources (including people, tools and time)
• (b) Listen, test and learn
• (c) Give before expecting in return

Your thoughts and comments are, as ever, welcome.

DEMYSTIFYING MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT

I’ve been evangelizing measurement in social media since 2009. I’ve started to sound a bit like a broken record to myself in that time, but the reality is that for me, it isn’t really about measuring social media. It’s about measuring marketing activity and social media is just one piece of the pie. I truly believe that measurement is the difference between being just another marketer and being a business rock star.

I know I’m not alone in that thinking. The Fournaise Report stated that “just 20 percent of CEO’s consider their top marketers to be ROI marketers but those that do believe they have ‘solid influence’ within their organization and could go on to senior management.” At the end of the day, “80% of CEOs admit they do not really trust and are not very impressed by the work done by Marketers – while in comparison, 90% of the same CEOs do trust and value the opinion and work of CFOs and CIOs.”  (Source) Measuring marketing activity isn’t a nice to have anymore; it’s a critical piece in every marketer’s career trajectory.

As important as it is, measurement still seems elusive and hard. I mean, if it were so easy wouldn’t marketers just do it? Wouldn’t measurement be a standard practice and not a differentiator? You would think so. I’m here to tell you that measurement doesn’t have to be hard. It’s actually simpler than most CMO’s realize, so I’ll let you in on a few secrets of ROI marketers.

MEASURING ROI COMES DOWN TO TRACKING CAMPAIGN HISTORY

In order to get to ROI, the first step is to start tracking every campaign that a prospect engages with before they become a customer. I’m not talking about the first campaign or the last campaign. I’m talking about EVERYTHING. I mean full campaign history, which entails having a database that is updated every time a prospect or customer touches a marketing campaign even if they don’t convert or take action. You’re right. That is a big database with a lot of data storage, but it’s the only way to know what is and what isn’t working. It’s the only way to know everything that contributed to a sale. And it’s the only way to truly measure the company’s real acquisition costs because let me tell you they are far higher than you think.

Just imagine the type of data you could get if you wanted to be able to measure every prospect who touched social media somewhere in their prospect life cycle? Or the performance of any customer who ever subscribed to the corporate blog? The depth of the types of analysis that is possible is frankly, mind-blowing. Once you have this type of data you’ll be calling me asking what is the most important thing to look at, instead of asking how to get the data. That is a great problem to have, so start setting yourself up to deal with an overload of data instead of not having enough.

CAMPAIGN HISTORY MUST CONNECT TO REVENUE

A big part of tracking campaign history is being able to overlay prospect and customer performance in terms of revenue. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you can tell me every prospect who touched social media if you can’t then tell me how much revenue they generated. The reason CFO’s have so much influence and respect from CEO’s is because they present financial data. CEO’s live, eat, and breathe financial data because it’s what makes or breaks their career. If you can put yourself into a position of providing data that makes the difference in a CEO’s career trajectory you will put yourself in the circle of trust. Therefore, make sure that wherever you store campaign history can be cross-referenced against the revenue performance of each individual. Notice that I said each individual. You must be able to store campaign history on an individual person’s data record, but then be able to pull and aggregate data efficiently and effectively.

CAMPAIGN HISTORY MUST BE REPORTABLE

For many companies this means it is critical to get campaign history into a business data warehouse because frankly a lot of CRM systems aren’t set up to store this type of data in a way that can easily be referenced in reporting. So don’t think it’s as simple as setting up a database to store the data. That’s the first step. The second step is making sure it can be referenced against revenue. The third step is to ensure that you can quickly and efficiently do your own analysis of the data. I wish I could tell you that tracking A or B was going to be the golden nugget of awesome, however when you actually get into the data you’ll find things that are not only unexpected, but that are equally unpredictable. For example, you might find things like people who touch social typically convert in organic search. Or you might find that the prospect lifecycle to customer is longer when they touch social media, but they convert at ridiculously higher rates. If you want to see some of the types of data I’ve found check out this case study article that Jason wrote about me back when I was brand-side. The analysis started with a few questions around things like, “I wonder if there is any relationship between x and y.” Before I knew it, I had a list of relationship possibilities that went far beyond the alphabet. There were a lot of data points that weren’t super interesting, but there were some that were shocking and extremely positive that I never would’ve guessed until after I pulled the data. In fact, the ones that were the most positive were the ones I initially thought had very little chance of showing success.

INCLUDE THE MARKETING CHANNEL AS A FACTOR IN CAMPAIGN HISTORY

To make reporting easy, make sure you include the marketing channel as one of the data points that can be referenced in campaign history. When it comes to social, you will want to know that an activity happened on Twitter, but it would be really nice to simply be able to check the box that says you want all social media data and then have the option for drilling down when the data is interesting. Your company probably has a variety of marketing channels that are used for demand generation and customer retention; make sure you include them in the data set in a way that makes reporting super easy. I also can’t stress enough that being able to pull the data yourself without having to involve other departments or make “requests” for data is critical. Because you won’t know which data is going to tell the most interesting story, you will need to pull a lot of reports in the beginning. Cutting out the middle man makes this a much more realistic process because after all, no one will care about the data or the reporting more than you will.

THINK THROUGH WHAT DATA WILL PASS INTO CAMPAIGN HISTORY

One of the key factors in making reporting easy is to seriously think through what types of fields you want to track in your campaigns. In Google Analytics we typically use source, medium, and campaign for social media. You want to create a framework for how you use these tracking fields that is consistent and maintains data integrity. For example, in many systems little things like using a big T or a little t in Twitter will separate your data into two different groups. When you go pull reports if you don’t pull both you could be missing a bunch of the data you are looking for. Therefore, it’s important to create a system for how you will use campaign fields to pass the data you are looking for.

DO A SYSTEMS AUDIT

At the end of the day, you won’t be able to get around completing a systems audit so that you understand where data is stored and how you can start passing social data. The goal is to get the data from social associated with a record in your customer relationship management system. A good place to start is by looking at your web analytics system and see if there is already an integration built that is passing data. If there is, the good news is that you can probably tap into it. If there isn’t, there are simple ways to address it. This audit will likely require conversations with IT, Marketing, Customer Service and any other group who currently tracks data related to customers. The good news is, now you know what data you need to pass. The question becomes, what is the easiest way to tap into an existing integration to pass it?

Instead of spending time wondering which metrics are important to measure, start by getting marketing and social data into your core systems. Then we can debate which metrics are the best metrics, but I can tell you this. If you aren’t passing campaign data into your CRM, it’s unlikely you are measuring anything meaningful to your executive management team today. It’s time to fix it.

What are your thoughts about campaign history? Are you capturing full campaign history today? If not, what’s holding you back? Leave a comment and join the discussion on the value of campaign history.

Pinterest Introduces New Article Pinning Feature

Pinterest is already being used as a great tool to discover and collect articles in the form of an online scrapbook, with more than 5 million articles being pinned every day. Pinterest has recently decided to expand on this use, creating a new look for article pins, which allows them to have more information – including the headline, author, story description and link all on the pin. This allows articles to be pinned, saved and organised more efficiently.

Image - Pinterest blog

This follows a similar move which Pinterest introduced back in May with its ‘Rich pins’. This development allowed pins to feature a greater amount of detail on them, particularly useful for pins that feature recipes, films or products purchasable online as they could enrich the pins with updated details like ingredients, movie reviews or the availability of goods and prices. This was a valuable move making Pinterest more useful for business and not just for personal use. The article pinning feature will also help aid Pinterest for business because it provides "a great way for writers and publications to reach new and existing audiences" according to Sarah Bush, the newly appointed UK country manager for Pinterest. These latest developments therefore seem to suggest that Pinterest is trying to make its platform more useful to business users as well as to those who use the site for personal reasons.

The new feature for pinning articles better will help to make the pinned articles look more relevant at a first glance. Pinterest users will now be able to see the headline, author, story description and link when they come across an article that has been pinned on the site. The Pinterest blog has also commented that this feature will soon be rolling out to mobile phone users as well as those on computers. In addition to showing similarities to the new ‘Rich pins’ which Pinterest introduced, it is also shows a likeness to Twitter’s introduction of “expanded Tweets” which they introduced last year. This offers a similar feature, showing an article preview with a headline, image thumbnail and article introduction.

The new feature also helps people to take a ‘pin now, read later’ approach, as they can save articles which they have come across online and choose to read them at a later date when it is more convenient to them. This allows users to create their own reading room on Pinterest by adding the Pin It button to their own browser so that they can start creating a collection of articles that they want to read. The Pinterest reading room also helps you to find interesting new content to read as there are a number of high-profile names who are already using the feature. For instance, Arianna Huffington who has an article board to give an insight into what she is reading at the moment.

This new feature can be particularly useful for publishers who are trying to reach a target audience composed mainly of women, as women are the most common user of the site, making up around 72% of the total users. Pinterest has already proved to be a major referral source of traffic and a study by Yieldbot, has found that Pinterest dominated referral traffic across leading publisher websites, representing 85.2% of referral traffic compared to just 8.3% for Facebook.

A number of sites have already signed up for the service including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable and the Guardian to name a few. For now, it looks like Pinterest Article pins will be a successful new addition to the site, adding a new dimension to the website which has until now been known mainly for its visual content.

What do you think?

Do you think that the addition of Pinterest article pins will benefit the site and increase its use?

The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly Truths About Online Reviews

This past week, New York’s Attorney General announced that it would be fining 19 businesses over $350,000 each for posting fake positive reviews to the popular online review site, Yelp. The businesses, which ranged anywhere from strip clubs to a laser hair removal service, would pay freelance writers up to $10 per positive review, even though none of them had ever used their products or service. This problem isn’t just exclusive to New York either. Today, Yelp estimates that up to 25% of all reviews are fraudulent compared to just 5% in 2006.

As the use of online reviews has grown over the years, so has its importance to businesses. In a recent survey, researchers found that 87% of consumers say positive reviews online have reinforced their decision to purchase a product or service. On the flipside, 80% of consumers have also changed their mind about purchases based on negative information they found online. With online reviews having such a major impact, it’s no wonder businesses are concerned with what’s being said about them online. Warren Buffett described the situation perfectly when he said, “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.”

With that being said, through the rest of this post we’ll walk you through some of the most popular online review websites, the impact those sites have on businesses, and what business owners can do to protect and build their reputation.

Yelp

Founded in 2004 to connect consumers in San Francisco with local businesses, Yelp has since grown to become the home of over 42 million user reviews and over 100 million visitors per month. The site has even expanded internationally to more than 11 different countries, including the UK, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Germany to name a few. On Yelp, reviews range across all industries from restaurants, to doctors offices, and even to tire shops. To post a review, users simply login to their Yelp account, search for a business, and write a short review, complete with a 5-star rating scale. Reviews can be written by anyone with a Yelp account (a.k.a. “yelpers”), and the more reviews a user makes, the more credibility they earn. To monitor fake reviews, the site has its very own review filter that hides posts it deems fraudulent. However, this tool has been known to be imperfect and sometimes hides legitimate reviews while keeping fake ones visible.

Google+ Local

Google+ Local is a review system used with businesses listed on Google Maps through Google’s Places for Businesses. Confused? In a nutshell, when searching for a business using Google Maps, users are able to click on a business’ map icon and read/write user reviews, read Zagat summaries, and connect to the business’ Google+ page. To post a review, users login to their Google+ account, click on the map icon, and go to the business’ reviews to leave their own. Like Yelp, Google+ Local reviews also have a spam/fraudulent review filter system, but like Yelp again, it isn’t very foolproof.

Angie’s List

Compared to the other 2 sites on this list, Angie’s List is much different. As opposed to reviewing restaurants and retailers, Angie’s List focuses solely on consumer reviews of service companies. However, to access reviews users have to pay a small subscription fee. In return, Angie’s List offers the guarantee that all reviews are personally checked for fraudulency before being posted (hence the slogan, “reviews you can trust”). In the U.S. and Canada, Angie’s List has over 1.5 million subscribers who contribute about 40,000 reviews each month.

As I mentioned earlier, consumers are heavily influenced by the reviews they read online. In fact, 85% of U.S. consumers read online reviews for local businesses, and 50% of those consumers are more likely to use those same businesses after reading positive reviews. For businesses with a healthy online reputation, this means that online reviews can help generate more foot traffic and revenue. On the flipside, however, businesses with a poor online reputation will surely see their sales suffer. According to one Harvard Business School study, a one-star rating increase on Yelp lead to a 5-9% increase in revenue. That’s thousands of dollars potentially lost or gained due to free consumer reviews!

So, now comes the big question: What can you do to help grow, maintain, or fix your business’ online reputation? (other than being the best damn business out there, of course)

For starters, business owners need to know where their customers are writing reviews. While only a small percentage of your customer base will write a review, a much larger percentage will be impacted by it. Find out which online review sites your consumers are using and monitor what they’re saying. From here, you can personally respond and demonstrate your appreciation of any feedback. Remember, your response is a direct reflection of your business’ customer service so it’s important that ALL responses are handled in a professional manner.

Now that you’ve found out where your consumers are leaving reviews, it’s important that you take charge and start managing your reputation there. The best, most effective way to start getting positive reviews for your business is to simply ask satisfied customers for them. If you notice a customer really enjoyed their experience, take a couple seconds and ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing it online. It doesn’t take much effort, and most will be happy to do so.

Since you can’t monitor every customer interaction and ask for reviews, it’s important that your customers know where they can leave reviews online. Once a customer completes a purchase, send a follow-up email asking them to share their opinions. Do you have links to other social networks in your email signature? Include one for your business’ review page. If most of your selling is done face-to-face, not online, then set up a small display at the point of purchase letting customers know where they can leave feedback online. You can also include a note on your receipts and invoices.

Apart from monitoring engagement, responding to reviews, and encouraging customers to leave feedback, the best way to earn positive reviews (and avoid negative ones) is to simply show your customers that you care about them. If it’s in your brand’s culture to go the extra mile for your customers, you’ll be surprised at the extra miles they’ll go for you. For example, did you know 95% of unhappy customers say they’ll return to a business if their issue is solved quickly and efficiently? However, if the unresolved issue leads to the customer leaving a negative review, there’s a 90% chance they will NEVER do business with you again (let alone the new customers lost due to reading that negative review).

That being said, with online review sites like Yelp, Google+, and Angie’s List now established as “go-to” sources for information about businesses and their products/services, protecting your reputation online can be crucial to the success of your business. Keep these tips in mind as you work towards that 5-star rating and both your customers and bottom line will thank you for it.

Why Most Social Strategies Fail

When I ask people what their social business strategy looks like, I usually get the following response, ”Oh yeah, we’re on Facebook.” The conversation continues apace:


- Twitter account…check.

- YouTube videos….yup.

- People who seem to know what they doing with those accounts…kinda.

- Metrics….Likes.


But that isn’t a strategy – it’s a series of tactics. Having a Facebook page is like having a telephone — it’s a tool that needs a purpose. What you DO with Facebook to meet customer expectations and attain business goals lies at the center of a coherent social business strategy.


My colleague Brian Solis and I are in the midst of conducting research on what makes a good social business strategy and a key finding is that as companies evolve their social initiatives, the efforts get disconnected from business goals. So while the company grows in its social media efforts, strategic focus, with a clear goal in mind, falls to the wayside.


This isn’t about waiting until companies have reached a stage of “maturity” before they are deemed to be successful. Rather, we found companies thriving at every stage of social strategy evolution. The key is coherence, where the business goals, executive support, social business capabilities, and the value created by both internal and external social initiatives all work together in harmony.


Here’s an example: one company we spoke with focuses most of their social efforts on developing their Facebook presence. The company rarely replies or engages with people who post on their page. On the surface, you might dismiss this company as not “getting” social media because they don’t actively engage in a two-way dialog.


But in so many ways, their strategy is far more coherent than companies that blindly engage for the sake of engagement. That’s because they are very clear about the purpose of their Facebook presence, which is to showcase the personality of the company. While they enjoy having millions of fans, the key business metric they track is reputation, which is used across all aspects of the business. On a daily basis, they ask their Facebook fans, as well as people in other channels, how they are doing on delivering their products, and if they are doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. They can then compare which channels are effective at driving their goal of improving reputation.


So how can you tell if your social business strategy is successful or failing? One way is to look across the elements of your social strategy and see if they align with each other in such a way that supports clear business goals. Are your capabilities in line with what you are trying to achieve, or have you bitten off too much and are not realizing the full potential of your efforts? Do you have the organizational governance in place to allow disparate business units to align their social efforts against a common enterprise goals, or is each line of business pulling in separate directions?


Another way to gauge where you are with your social business strategy is to take Altimeter’s Social Business Strategy Survey at http://svy.mk/QkcYRH. The aggregated results will appear in an upcoming report, and as a thank you for sharing, you’ll receive a data cut that you can use to benchmark your company against other organizations of the same size. You will receive this benchmark data after the research report is published.


The survey looks at the following topics:
Strategy: What are common goals and objectives? How do you measure the value of your social business efforts?
Organization: How are your social business efforts organized? How many people are dedicated to social business?
Budget: How much are you spending on external and internal social business efforts? What are you planning to spend on technologies and services in 2013?
Social Media Policies: What policies do you have in place? How well do employees understand those policies?


Please note that we plan to end the survey in the next week or so, so please take it as soon as possible! Also, please forward to others who may be interested or share with your social networks.


Lastly, please share why you think your social business strategy is successful — or on the flip side, what is dysfunctional about it. We’d all love to learn from your experiences!

The Ultimate Guide for Blog Post Promotion

If you have been blogging for a little while or have been involved in any type of content marketing, you know Content is not king if nobody can see it.

If you surf around the blogosphere a little, you’ve probably noticed 2 types of bloggers, one that believes in publishing content everyday and one that believes in spending less time producing and more time promoting.

Well, I know very successful bloggers on both sides of the spectrum (so I’m not going to start a debate on that), but you can always count on one thing: they promote the hell out of each piece of content.

But what exactly does that mean?

Bloggers usually ask these questions:

• How do I get attention?
• How do I get more traffic?
• How do I get my posts shared?

We often talk about content promotion but, what does that mean exactly? I mean, what do you do? where? when?

Say hello to Kristi Hines…

I don’t exaggerate when I say that I stumble into Kristi’s content every week, not always from her own blog, but I always do.

Before I continue I’ll say this because 1) I believe in being transparent with you, and 2) I do NOT review products in this blog. EVER. The reason I want to tell you about this is because I truly believe you will benefit.

I’m about to tell you about Kristi’s new course “Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide“, and why you need to enroll today.

Hear me out!

Why Kristi

I never met Kristi in person but I’ve been following her for a few years. Not in a creepy way, I mean her content… and this is what I’ve observed during this time:

• She gets published in several major blogs in her industry
• No matter where, the content always gets massively shared
• Her content always feels more like a guide than a blog post
• I always feel the information is super organized in the way is being delivered to you
• I see how the content has been optimized for SEO but it still makes sense for the human being reading
• She always gets tons of comments

But this is the most important thing I’ve noticed: There is a formula behind Kristi’s content production and promotion. I can see that.

Why you need this course

I spent this week digging through the course and, between discovering things I didn’t know and going back to basics on others, I realized the amount of value delivered in this course. This is not a course that was put together in the last 3 months, this has been developing for much longer.

I know this because I remember when it all started as an Ebook 3 years ago. Now it has been launched as an online course with the latest techniques and everything you need to know to successfully promote your content on the Internet of today, which is not the same as 3 years ago.

The reason you need to get Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide (affiliate link) is because Kristi has put all her knowledge and experience about how to produce and promote content to get traffic, engagement and social media love in this course.

I’m not going to talk about the modules, the resources, or the private community for members on Facebook. I’ll keep it simple: If you want to learn how Kristi Hines from Kikolani produces and promotes content, consider investing in this course.

Here is that link again: Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide (affiliate link)