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The Key Difference Between Your Blog and Other Social Media Channels That Most Companies Miss

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8469030267_83837249f7_zYour blog is where people meet you.

Your social media channels are where they seek you out.

It’s important to understand these differences because they necessitate adjusting your social media strategy accordingly.

Let’s use Twitter as our social example.  On Twitter, people are sharing your content and it’s where people are going if they have a customer service issue or a question for you.  They are more likely to want to connect with you on the sites they are already using, like Twitter, versus coming to your blog or site.  They are also more likely to know you because how would they know to connect with you at all?

On your blog, a good portion of your traffic is coming from search engines.  So many people are clicking on a link from Google, and then being sent to your blog, probably for the first time.  This is where people meet you.

So if you think about how people are interacting with you via social and your blog, you can see that you are dealing with slightly different audiences.  And you can even expand this to include newsletters, where people already know you, and want to develop a deeper connection with you.

Let’s think about how we are talking about slightly different audiences:

Social – People that are aware of you, that are following you or seeking you out.

Blog – Some people that also follow you on social, but also people coming from search who are likely being introduced to you (and your content) for the first time.

Newsletter – People that know who you are, and who enjoy your content so much that they will give you access to their inbox in order to get it as soon as its available.

Or put more simply:

Social – People that know of you.

Blog – Strangers.

Newsletter – Friends and fans.

Granted, that’s not a perfect representation and I can already hear some of you howling “But my friends all read my blog!”  True, but look at your blog’s traffic from search.  Almost all of that is coming from people that have never visited your blog before, and if your blog is older than 6 months, the odds are that at least half its traffic is coming from search.  For older blogs like this one, that percentage can go over 75%.

So each channel is a slightly different audience and requires slightly different approaches to your content.  Here’s how I tweak my content strategy for each channel:

Blog – This is where I create content based on the topics I want to be known for.  I assume that you are visiting here for the first time, so I am sharing what I know and more importantly, what I want to be known for.  It’s also used as my best channel for establishing thought leadership, since blog content will stay seeded in search engines.

Social – This is where I interact with people that know of me around topics that I am passionate about.  It helps us develop deeper connections plus to some extent it drives traffic back to my blog.

Newsletter – This is where I interact with people that know me and trust me enough with access to their inbox.  This is often people I know, and have met.  So my newsletter subscribers are far more likely to be friends that I love.  So I share my best content with my newsletter audience.  I give them first access to any new tools or tricks I come across, and try to be as helpful as possible to them.

Now it’s worth noting how your social media strategy would change if you didn’t use each of these channels.  For example, let’s say you only have a blog, and you are trying to use that blog to generate sales.  You can see how your job is going to be more difficult because your main audience at your blog will be strangers, and it’s typically more difficult to see to strangers than it is people that know you and value your work.

Blog – I don’t know you. (Content – Here’s who I am)

Social – I know of you. (Content – How can I help you?)

Newsletter – I know you and I like you.  (Content – This will help you, my friend)

Also, if you are trying to generate sales, those sales would likely come from Social and your Newsletter.  But at the same time, these are the audiences that know you and that you know.  So you don’t want to sell too much to your friends, right?  Instead, you give them your best and most helpful content, and make sure they are AWARE of how they can help you.  Friends don’t just sell to friends, right?

At least that’s how I do it.  How do you balance your content for different audiences?

Pic via Flickr user mkhmarketing

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Long-Form Content or Short Posts; Which Is More Important?

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3347658610_bd6daf9b57_zFor years, there’s been a raging debate among both personal and business bloggers over what’s the ideal length for posts.  In general, most bloggers settle in on a post length of a few hundred words, but there are definitely exceptions to the rule.

There’s actually a lot of research that shows that the longer your blog post is, the more social shares, on average, it will get.  In fact, some studies suggest that blog posts can be up to 10,000 words (you read that right) in order to maximize social shares.  The logic is actually sound, as any post with over 2,000 words is likely going to be a deep-dive into a particular topic, and those posts tend to create more value, and as a result, they attract more of those coveted social shares.  I’ve seen this with my own content, as my most shared posts tend to be between 1,500 and 2,000 words.

Here’s the problem: The amount of time it takes to create a post with 1,500 or more words is much more than it does for a shorter post of 500 words or less.  In fact, for the two posts I just linked to (Both of which have between 500 and 1,000 social shares), it took approximately 20 hours total to write both posts.  Think about that for a minute: If you knew that it would take you 10 hours to write a post, how many posts could you write in a month?  1?  2?  None?

So if you commit to writing only long-form content, or posts over 1,500 words, you are also committing to creating far fewer posts.  This creates another problem: It’s harder to build readership if you publish only a few times a month.  Which means your 1 or 2 longer posts you publish a month are going to be seen by fewer people, which means they will gather fewer social shares.

Given all this, it seems there IS a role for shorter content, despite what the ‘experts’ will claim.  The bottom line is that while creating good content is important, creating MORE content is as well.  There needs to be a compromise between quality of content, and quantity.  Both are pivotal for building a readership.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a hybrid approach.  I’ve been writing shorter posts, sometimes as short as 200 words, sprinkling in 1 or so longer posts of 1,000 words or more a week.  This strategy has allowed me to significantly increase the number of posts I write here, and has resulted in a sharp increase in Social as well as Referral traffic.  This makes sense, because increasingly, traffic from Social is coming from social shares, and those visitors are likely to either know you already, or engage you on Twitter or Facebook AFTER sharing your post.  And as I talked about in the last post, it creates a nice way for your blog content to help you get noticed by others, then you can expand on that relationship via your newsletter, or during those social interactions that come after the sharing.

So if you’ve been on the fence about how long your posts should be, consider letting yourself off the hook and writing shorter posts.  Shorter posts still can be quite valuable for your readers, and creating more content also helps you build readership.  And more readers means when you do write that longer post, it will be seen (and shared!) by more people.

Pic via Flickr user 10Ch

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What’s the Difference Between a Blog and a Newsletter?

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CoffeeCupPadFor years I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the difference between a blog and a newsletter.  I keep seeing smart people saying that I need to have a newsletter, that a blog alone isn’t enough.  A few years ago when I was planning for Think Like a Rock Star to come out, I started seriously investigating this whole newsletter thing.  I started subscribing to a lot of newsletters from a lot of people that were supposed to be smarter than I was.

What I noticed (and this really confused me) is that 99% of these supposedly smart people were using their newsletters just to resend their latest blog post.  Seriously, I subscribed to one newsletter from a guy that has hundred of thousands of ‘followers’ on Twitter, and each newsletter email I got from him was little more than ‘Hey check out this post I wrote on…I think you’ll like it! (Link Here).’

So if you were already subscribed to his blog via email and getting his new posts directly straight to your inbox already, why would you also subscribe to his newsletter, which was just linking to his latest blog post (Which you had already read)?

See?  Confusion.  It seemed like most of the ‘smart’ people were using their newsletters to replicate their blog subscriptions, and that didn’t seem very ‘smart’ to me.

But, there was always this Chris Brogan guy.  Everyone loved Chris’ emails.  Everyone raved about Chris’ emails, so I subscribed to them. Chris’ emails were different, he didn’t just re-link to his latest blog post, he wrote a new ‘post’ for his emails.  Actually, they were like letters, and everyone seemed to love them because they were.  So I thought that was interesting…but I still wasn’t getting the importance of a newsletter vs a blog.

Then earlier this morning I ran across a site that explained the difference perfectly for me:

A blog is a tool you use to meet new people, whereas a newsletter is a tool you use to make a deeper connection with people you already know.

Perfect!  This really helped me understand the difference not only between the two tools, but also the difference in the two audiences.  This explained why Chris’ emails seemed more like letters he was writing to a friend, because he’s writing to an audience (his newsletter audience) that already knows him!

If you have a newsletter, how are you using it differently than your blog?  Do you have a different content strategy for both, or does your newsletter get the same content as your blog?

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Building Your Blog For 2016

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23409777699_7332a88c97_zEvery year I use the month of December to do a bit of an audit of how my blogging year went, and then plan out how I want to leverage the blog in the coming year.  I pick December since it’s the last month of the year, plus traffic is typically down the first 2 weeks of the year anyway as we all get knee-deep into Holiday shopping and planning.  So it’s the perfect time to take a step back and examine where you’ve been and re-assess where you are going.

When you’re planning for the coming year, it’s best to start with this question: Who is our desired blogging audience?  In other words, what type of person do you want to read your blog?  For your business blog, you’ll have answers like:

  • We want readers who are current or potential customers
  • We want readers who are current or potential donors or partners
  • We want readers who are current or potential clients

This is a good start, but the more specific your answers, the better your results.  And it’s a process, you want to drill down with your answer because the more specific your focus, the more efficient your content creation efforts.  Here’s how I would drill down if I were deciding exactly who I wanted to reach with my blog in 2016:

Q – Who is your desired audience?

A – Potential clients.

Q – Potential clients for what service(s)?

A – Potential clients for my speaking and consulting services, as well as companies looking for sponsorship opportunities.

Q – Which area; speaking, consulting or sponsorships is most important to you?

A – Hmmmm…probably speaking first, consulting close behind, then sponsorships.

Q – So it looks like potential clients for speaking and consulting are where you want to devote most of your energy.  Will you be focused on speaking on the same areas where you would like to consult?

A – For the most part, yes.  I want to speak on topics related to brand advocacy, customer engagement, and helping companies create more customer-centric content and marketing.  These are also the same areas where I want to focus my consulting.

 

Notice how just by asking a couple of more specific questions that I’m already narrowing down my focus a bit.  At first I was just thinking about wanting readers who are potential clients, now I know I need to focus more on potential clients who need speakers and consulting services, moreso than sponsorship opportunities.  Additionally, I know that I typically will be speaking on the same topics that I want to consult on, so there’s a lot of overlapping there.  This is already helping me better define my blogging focus in 2016.

A Hypothetical Example of How This Could Work For Your Company

Let’s do this exercise for you.  Let’s say you blog for a company that sells website security services.  You charge customers a monthly fee to manage their basic website security.  You’ve noticed that customers will typically contact you when they have an existing issue with their website (it’s been hacked, there’s a malware issue, etc), and they will continue to buy your services for 2-3 months after the problem has been solved, then they will typically stop buying and won’t contact you again until there’s another issue that they need help with.  So there seems to be a lot of churn starting at the 3-4 month mark, so one of the focus points for the entire company is trying to reduce that churn rate and increase the time that customers stay on.  Let’s go through the same Q&A process for this example company:

Q – Who is your desired audience?

A – Current and potential customers.

Q – Which one is more important to you in 2016?

A – Well we need both, but a business focus in 2016 will be ensuring that current customers stay with us for a longer period of time.

Q – What would typically be reasons why customers would leave?

A – Typically, companies will contact us when they’ve encountered a security issue with their website that requires immediate attention.  They will sign up for our service and then after we’ve fixed the issue, they will typically stay with us for a few months and if the issue doesn’t flare up again, often they will discontinue the service and only come back if something else happens in the future.

 

With just 3 questions, we now have a much clearer sense of the direction of our content in 2016.  We know we need to focus more on connecting with current customers and giving them a reason to stay with us longer.  This helps drive our content strategy for 2016, and gives us an idea of the types of content we need to create, such as:

  • Blog posts that talk about how customers do more business with companies that have a secure website.
  • Blog posts that talk about the potential damage to a brand’s reputation if their website is repeatedly down due to poor website security.

Blog posts such as this help make the case to current customers that it’s better for their business to stay with your company and let them continue to handle their website security.  By taking a few minutes to think through your content goals for 2016, it not only helps you better connect with your exact target audience, but it means you will spend less time on your content and that it will be more efficient.

Pic via Flickr user Giuseppe Milo

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For September

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For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience.  The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December.  Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned.  The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.

First, here were my goals for September:

Blog – At least 85,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 5,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For September

My blog’s traffic in September was 35,862 versus 36,154 in August, a decrease of less than 1%.  I got way behind on both the blog and podcast in September, only writing 3 posts in September.

I made a couple of changes last month to my blog that I think has at least improved my issue with falling search traffic.  The first is I went into my robots.txt file and made sure it including the path to my sitemap.  As soon as I made this update, I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that Google immediately started indexing an additional 200 pages from my site.  Also, I noticed a slight uptick in search traffic from that point forward.  Not huge, but definitely noticeable.  So much so that I believe search traffic will actually go up for October vs September.  So this might be something for you to explore, I had manually submitted my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools before, and that didn’t seem to register, but adding the sitemap URL into my robots.txt file seemed to do the trick.

Here’s how traffic broke down by channels in September vs August:

Organic Search – Down 2%

Direct – Up 11.65%

Referral – Down 7.71%

Social – Down 14.93%

Other – Down 12.33%

Email – Down 81.43%

Referral, Social and Email being down is directly related to writing fewer posts in September, as I only wrote 3 posts for the month.  I got too caught up with client work and didn’t devote enough time to regular posting and it bit me.  Case in point, I published more posts this week than I did all of last month.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for September

The goal for September was at least 5,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show had 3,924 downloads in September. The drop was due to only having 1 new episode in September, and that didn’t publish until the last day of the month.  Given that, the number of downloads is actually pretty remarkable.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLJan-Sept

Strong growth throughout the year but it did start to tail off the last couple of weeks of September due to no new episodes going up.  On Wednesday I published the first episode of #FanDamnShow for this month and daily downloads had continued to fall this month up till that point.  A good reminder for me to make the time to create regular content for both my blog and podcast in order to build or even sustain an audience.

Here’s the blog audience and podcast download goals for October:

Blog Traffic – At least 90,000 visitors

Podcast Downloads – At least 6,500 downloads

This are the goals I set at the start of the year.  I’ll check back in next month and let you know how I did!

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