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by Michael Stuart

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Attracting Audience Attention

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How to Attract an Audience with Creating Captivating Content

 
 

To be successful, every business has to tell its stories.

These days, such stories are usually told through posting content online in blogs, articles and social media.
  • But just pushing content onto the web is meaningless if it doesn’t interest the audience. In an online world bursting with billions and billions of pages of content — with new content being added every minute.
  • how do you ensure you’re creating compelling content that generates views?
  • Whether it’s defining the details that will capture interest, timing your posts to grab the most views or choosing the right venue for your message, there are strategies that will help your online voice be heard.

1. Cater Content To Customers

As a printing company, our target companies are other businesses that need printed collateral, as well as individuals that have a specific need. Content about our latest printer is not effective. However, design tips or examples for wedding invitations, how-tos, or graphic design tips for other businesses will create value that organically leads to sales. Your content does not have to revolve specifically around your goods or services. Rather, cross-pollenating your content into the desired industries you would like to sell to is an effective way to create value and sales. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs
 

2. Choose The Best Platform For Each Message

Different channels accomplish different types of engagement. Facebook is great for showing company culture. We find images and behind-the-scenes videos get the most likes and shares. For Twitter, we’re testing tweets that are story driven; you create a thread, and each tweet links to different content that threads up around a point. This is a great way to repurpose multiple pieces of content, and it drives conversation with people commenting on tweets. Instagram is obviously image and video driven. The trick with Instagram is choosing the right hashtag to get the right visibility. If you’re looking for leads, you’ll need users to download an asset that’s useful. We’ve been doing checklists on how to do something accompanied by a case study that proves it works. – Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing
 

3. Write Step-By-Step Guides

I’ve noticed that some of our best content is how-to guides that show users a step-by-step process on how to implement something on their own website. This has helped gear us to becoming more of a resource-based blog where customers can find information on how to make their own sites better. Find out what guides your customers want and write a detailed, step-by-step process that will help them. You can even turn some of your most popular ones into content upgrades in exchange for email addresses. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
 

4. Round Up The Experts

When producing content, a helpful strategy is to include experts with relevant experience on the particular topic you are producing content around. By including these experts and their take on a specific issue, you’re providing them with a platform to share their thoughts and ideas and increasing your chances of them sharing your content with their audience — “seeding” the content with additional readers. If the content is well-received, the results will compound from there. – Brandon Pindulic, OpGen Media
 

5. Answer The Questions You’re Always Asked

Answering tough questions about our industry has been a boon for traffic to our site. Some of our top-performing pieces are articles on how much an app costs to build and on how much money an app can make. Think about the questions clients or potential clients ask you all the time, and then go and create blog posts to answer those questions. – Ryan D Matzner, Fueled
 

6. Take On Trending Topics In Your Industry

I’ve noticed that the content that tends to get the most engagement on my company’s blog and my social media channels is around topics that are disruptive to the industry. For example, in the digital marketing industry, some of my most shared and engaging content dealt with new trends, such as voice search and mobile AMP (accelerated mobile pages). The keys for greater engagement and cultivating thought leadership are to provide helpful context and actionable information that empowers your readers. Don’t be a journalist, be a thought leader instead! – Kristopher Brian Jones, LSEO.com

7. Pitch Solutions, Not Products

No one wants to hear your sales pitch. No one is as excited about your product as you are. What they want to see is someone like them who’s struggling with the same issues. Then they want to see you fix those issues. Case study marketing is the way to go. It’s organic, it’s not just about you and others want to share it. At Enlighten we spend a remarkable amount of time working with clients after the sale to follow up and document the successes. These successes become inspiration for others that see them. Case studies have people asking you for help rather than you asking them for business. – Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten

8. Integrate Insightful Interviews

Interviews are a great way to generate traffic to your site. Find people in your industry to interview and send them a few questions. You can then post your article in a question-answer format and optimize it for SEO. The trick is to find people that your audience is interested in learning from and asking them questions the audience would like to know. You can create a poll on your site to find out who your audience would like featured on your site. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
 

9. Livestream For Authenticity

Content that receives the most engagement for us is livestreaming on Instagram. For instance, after I released my most recent book, I did a handful of Instagram livestreams with other entrepreneurs, and each segment received more engagement than any other type of content marketing we produced. Livestreaming is the most transparent way to showcase your knowledge and expertise without sounding scripted or rehearsed. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

10. Tap Into Holiday Spirit

Is there an important date or popular holiday coming up? Injecting your brand (in an authentic way) allows you to take advantage of its popularity. Posting content that taps into the interest of a given date almost always guarantees fantastic engagement. Holidays such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day are obviously days you want to take advantage of. You can also time your content to coincide with the release of a popular movie or more niche holidays, such as “National French Fry Day” or “Star Wars Day.” Timing your content to highlight special days allows for predictability. It’s simple, and you can easily track results. It also allows you to tap into niche or international audiences that you may not otherwise reach. – Shu Saito, Fact Retriever
 
 
 
mike stuart, 1stonline.us
 

The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

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In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”

 
 
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
 
  • Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
  • HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
  • So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
 
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
 
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations.  But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
 
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
  • Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
  • The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
  • During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
 
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
  1. Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding. 
  2. Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future. 
  3. Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
  4. Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
 
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
 
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
 
  1. First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare. 
  2. Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
  3. Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
 
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
 
 
 

Top Content Creators use the title “How a Brand Does Something”

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Top Content Creators often use articles with a title similar to the following template:

How (Brand) Is Doing (Something) to Achieve (Result) to Draw a Bigger Audience 

 
 
 
Why this content model works | (name-jacking)
  • Brand name recognition
    Nielsen wanted to determine why people purchased specific products. What did it find? Brand!

  • Influencer involvement
    These articles are, by definition, exploring how awesome these companies are. They’re literally saying, “If (brand) does it, it must be worth trying.” The brand gets external links, a huge trust boost, and an increased brand awareness it probably doesn’t need (but never hurts).

     

 

5 steps to use this article model

To create your own content using this article model, follow these five steps.

1. Identify an innovative company or thought leader

The most challenging part is determining what business to target. Once you get that down, the rest of the article follows a path set by them, not you.
Here are a few guidelines:
  • Identify a business that doesn’t feel too out of reach. Avoid megabrands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Salesforce, as it’ll be tough for your reader to relate to the strategies they’re implementing.
  • Identify a business implementing innovative or interesting strategies. It should be doing something worth writing about. Your article will be harder to write (and less interesting) if you pick a big brand name that isn’t doing something exciting.
  • Target a business doing something interesting related to your business. There’s no point in getting people excited about a strategy that doesn’t relate to your business.

2. Start your research

Explore the company’s sales funnel. Start with the first possible touch-point. Try a search or display advertisement, a blog article, a press release, etc.
As you proceed through the funnel – from ad or article to lead generation to email marketing to sales prompt, take screenshots. Your article will be framed by that funnel.
 

3. Reach out to a representative

You want the company on your side before you publish your insight and observations about what it does. And, if possible, you want information from the company. Try something like this:
Hey [first name of contact],
Hope this finds you well. I am (your name) and was talking to your colleague, (name), and she mentioned you were the one behind (specific strategy you’re writing about). I’d like to congratulate you on putting together one of the most innovative marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.
Your (specific strategy) would be an awesome topic for an article I would like to write. I would appreciate it if you would have the time for an interview to walk through what you’ve done and inspire other marketers to do something similar. Would you have 15 minutes this week to jump on a call so I can ask you a few questions about the thinking behind the strategy and if it’s performing for you guys?
I look forward to hearing from you!
If they don’t have time for a call, send over a few questions and ask if they have time to respond that way. And if they don’t have time for that, write the article without their involvement, but share the link once it’s done. You’ll still get the bump from a recognizable brand name in your title and the brand will have been made aware your article is being published.
 

4. Go a step above with design

Your article ideally will be at least 2,000 words and broken into several sections. As a result, a table of contents will help readers navigate.
You can format an automated table of contents within your article..
 

5. Promote to specific influencers

If you need help creating an influencer list, use a tool like BuzzSumo.
  • Research the influencers before you reach out to them to better
  • Learn if they are interested in content similar to what you’re doing.
  • Follow them on social media.
  • Then reach out to the influencer and Personalize the outreach.
This is a form of name-jacking!
 
Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
 
 

Influencer Marketing Tools used by industry experts

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A list of the favorite Influencer Marketing tools used by Industry Leading Experts

Over 40 experts reveal the best Influencer Marketing tools to build and manage a campaign, an expert roundup of the top most Influencer’s in the Industry.
Buzzsumo is among the most popular tools and is used to identify influencers in a niche or category.

Ways to use BuzzSumo:
  • Sort results by their reply ratio and average retweets, plus highest domain authority if they have a website
  • View the recent links they shared so you get a sense of what interests them
  • Use the advanced search function similar to how you would in Google
  • Click the ‘View Links Shared’ button to see the influencer’s most popular shared content

Buzzsumo can do many things, like surface highly-shared content, but in regards to influencers, it can help you search any topic area (Google keyword phrase) for influencers to discover the most influential people by niche. You can choose to narrow your search results by bloggers, journalists, companies or regular people.
  • Then you can save and organize these influencers into any number of outreach lists. They have another feature to help you build an audience of Twitter users who’ve shared content from your domain, which you can then use for targeting in a Twitter ad campaign, if you want to stay visible to people who’ve already been influential for you- these people have retweeted once, so they’re much more likely to again than any other random person, which makes that ad money well-spent.
  • This latter helps you reach both medium and lower-degree influencers. The influencers with the most power are the hardest for companies to enlist and influence themselves, so it’s very important to also have a plan for accessing and working with medium and lower-power influencers.
  • It also sheds light on quite a few things including domain authority and several metrics regarding influence on Twitter.

Buzzsumo is easy to use, straightforward, and saves time, for example visit https://app.buzzsumo.com/research/most-shared to find the most shared content for a keyword phrase.


Best Social Media Automation Tools to Boost Traffic

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What are the Best Social Media Automation Tools to Better Reach My Audience?

The internet is chalk full of tools that are useful in this arena. Many sites exist to make your life easier by taking some of the burdensome work off of your shoulders. We’ve compiled a list of the nine best social media automation tools (in no particular order) to help you make a decision as to which tool is ideal for your needs. We asked the following two questions:
  • What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
  • What should I be concerned about?
Here are the nine best social media automation tools:
1 – dlvr.it
dlvr.it offers many options to automate posting to social media. From automating your blog within minutes of publishing – to scheduling posting – to repeating posts automatically, dlvr.it has a full arsenal of tools to make your life easier.
dlvr.it blog screenshot 2What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
dlvr.it offers the ability to post multiple posts per day from an RSS Feed to Socials. On the basic plan, users have the option to post to three different socials from different platforms. Free users can also use content filters to exclude any posts that do not meet criteria automatically. dlvr.it also offers Instagram integration as an input, as well as Twitter and Pinterest. This platform integrates into many different social media platforms. dlvr.it also offers the ability to either schedule posts, or post automatically.
The Pro plan is reasonably priced for most users. At $9.99 per month, users can expect to be able to use up to 10 social media accounts and up to 50 sources of input. The price tag of the Pro plan also provides access to the Echo feature. This power packed feature allows automated reposting of content from your input source up to two additional times without you having to do any further scheduling. dlvr.it also offers a free trial, which does not require additional credit card information.
What should I be concerned about?
Analytics for dlvr.it offer just click stats and follower stats. However, you can add Google analytics tags with additional parameters attached to your social media accounts. dlvr.it also does not provide in-depth demographics of followers.
2 – Hootsuite
Hootsuite has built a platform that is attractive to marketers because of its built-in analytics.
best social media automation tools hootsuite
What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Hootsuite’s software packs a punch using Analytics. Hootsuite provides in-depth, detailed analytics that can help you to determine your audience engagement, metric performance, and real-time feedback. Hootsuite offers basic analytics for their free users, as well as enhanced analytics for its Pro users. For its free users, RSS integrations are free and unlimited. Upgrade to their Pro plan, and you can schedule bulk messages. Hootsuite also offers its users support through free social media classes.
What should I be concerned about?
Hootsuite does offer all of these features but prevents its free users from using more than three profiles. Hootsuite also does not allow image posting for its free users. Their analytics provide a lot of power, but for the novice user, this can be very confusing and difficult to understand. The front dashboard can be a bit confusing if you are not used to looking at so much information.
3 – Buffer
Buffer is a tool that works with input sources and social media accounts to publish your content quickly and easily.

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Buffer has a wealth of tools that help their users stay connected to social media wherever they are. They employ the use of a mobile app to make it quick and easy to schedule a post from anywhere. Buffer has also created a system that will work to find the best times to post your content. Possibly the most attractive feature that Buffer offers is the option to create infographics inside the tool. Buffer offers a tool called “Pablo” that allows you to create graphics within the app and will allow scheduling of this post also within the app. With access to the Pro plan, you will gain access to use RSS feeds as inputs as well as the Calendar feature.
What should I be concerned about?
Buffer offers some Instagram integration, but this integration is a tad misleading. Buffer reminds users to log into Instagram to post content. Essentially, the only automated function of these reminders is the reminder itself. Also, if you are a basic plan user, Buffer significantly limits the functionality of their app. For their basic users, they will only allow one social media account per platform, and will only allow you to schedule ten posts at a time. There is also a significant limit for their next step plan. This plan allows you to schedule 100 posts for ten profiles.
Social Oomph offers management of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
best social media automation tools social oomph
What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Social Oomph integrates with a few different platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The most powerful feature that Social Oomph provides is to track Twitter followers and keywords. These platform analytics provide quite a bit of information about your audience so that you can tailor your content to your audience. Social Oomph also allows your employees to submit content via email, which will allow you to avoid needing to add team members to your account. You will instead be able to review and approve content from your own login information.
What should I be concerned about?
Social Oomph severely limits its free users, only allowing connection with Twitter at the basic level. Complete automation only occurs at the professional plan level, which is a higher price point than many on this list. The professional plan runs $17.97 every two weeks.
5 – IFTTT
IFTTT is a platform that allows you to set up a number of triggers. The acronym stands for If This Then That. This means if a certain condition is met, then an action is performed.
best social media automation tools ifttt
Why is it one of the best social media automation tools?
IFTTT works on the formula of recipes. You set a trigger, whether it be a YouTube video published, a Tweet sent, or a new blog post on WordPress, and then set a result. The result indicates where this content moves. IFTTT has a huge variety of triggers and resulting actions. Recipes on IFTTT are extremely varied, and possibilities are endless with the trigger options.
What should I be concerned about?
Costs can start to get steep with this platform. There are only two levels of the plan, which start at about $1,200/year and do include unlimited triggers and actions. The only other option is to pay around $6,000 per year to customize your plan.
Sprout Social helps business users manage and analyze social media impacts across platforms.
best social media automation tools sprout social
Why is this one of the best social media automation tools?
Sprout Social follows the analytics protocol, providing its users with many different types of analytics and interactions. Google Analytics are an essential feature of what Sprout provides. They integrate this into their dashboard so that you don’t have to run to Google to find out why your traffic may have dropped. Team members may also be added to all plan levels. They also have options to automate your social media content via a Social Content Calendar. Sprout also can decide the optimal times to deliver your content if you have trouble deciding when to publish.
What should I be concerned about?
Sprout is one of those platforms that is on the more expensive side. While they do offer a 30-day free trial, they also start their pricing at $99 per user per month for their most basic plan without adding additional users. Sprout also lacks Pinterest, Instagram, and multiple Google+ page interfaces. These features may be available on one of the other tools mentioned previously.
CoSchedule is a more robust platform that allows for posting and scheduling in a drag and drop calendar format.
best social media marketing tools coschedule
Why is this one of the best tools for social media automation?
CoSchedule offers a drag and drop format calendar that allows you to categorize your posting. This tool also allows you to select evergreen content, which can be posted indefinitely. The tool will also select the most popular posts in your history and repost them for you. CoSchedule also has integration options with Buffer.
Why should I be concerned?
CoSchedule is similar to Sprout Social in that there is no option for a Free plan. The lowest cost plan offered by CoSchedule is $30 per month for 10 Social Profiles and one user account. In our experience, CoSchedule does require a lot of initial setup. There is a significant time investment up front in setting up the account and calendar. However, once set up, only minor alterations are required.


Should I be using Third Party content?
  • First, third party content is not content that you have to write yourself. You may be pressed for time in coming up with original content, but want to make sure that you are maintaining a consistent social media presence. That’s where third- party content comes in. Well curated third party content can reinforce your messages in your original content. B2B Marketing Solutions suggests that you make this a part of your marketing strategy because you want to be a trusted source of valuable information. Not all of this information has to come from content that you generate.
  • Second, third party content can add valuable information to your social media walls without you needing to write it. Social-tribe suggests that third party content can add value as long as it holds relevance to your target audience. Sharing someone else’s article can help you publish this valuable information for your readers, increase your credibility and also increase your followers.
  • Third, this falls into the category of making sure that your content isn’t just bombarding your followers with sales pitches. Neil Patel recommends that when sharing content to your social media accounts, 80% should be social, rather than sales.
  • The social content draws in your audience and makes sure that they’re not exhausted by a constant sales pitch, leading you to see more audience attrition.

Source: blog.dlvrit.com