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Toolbox Saturday: How to Create a Posting Schedule For Your Blog

So let’s talk about how often you should post to your blog, and when you should post. This is one of the most important aspects of your blog and content strategy.

First, define what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. How often should you post to meet your objectives?

Who are you trying to reach?  Who are these people, what type of information would they want from your posts and when would they be most likely to read them?

How much time do you have to write posts? This area should come with the caveat that generally, the more often you write, the easier the process becomes. So if you start writing daily, after two months you might be able to write several posts in the same amount of time that it used to take you to write just one.

For me, when I decided to relaunch my blog at the first of the month, I wanted to use my blog in two main ways: As a channel to create thought leadership articles, but more importantly, to raise awareness for who I am and what services I provide.

Many companies that blog want to use their blog as a way to build awareness of their business. The cold, hard reality is that the best way to build awareness with a blog is to write as much useful content as possible. More content simply accelerates the building of awareness. So you want to write as much as you can. Now you see why I committed to writing 6 posts a week!

You may not have time to write 6 posts a week, you may have to hustle to make time to write one. So you want to figure out which days are the most important for you to publish new content. If you could only publish a new post one day a week, which day would you pick?  Which day would be the most likely for your audience to read your blog?

Rank the days in order of most valuable to least. If you really aren’t sure, think about who your audience is, and when they would have time to read your blog. If you are trying to reach a professional audience, you would likely want to pick times during their typical workday.  Probably in the morning an hour or two before lunch, then in the afternoon an hour or two after lunch.

Here’s a general schedule I use:  If I can only post once a week, I pick Wednesday.  If I can only post twice a week, I pick Tuesday and Thursday.  Three times a week?  Tuesday-Thursday.  Four times?  Monday-Thursday.  Five times a week?  Monday-Friday.

Now this is NOT a one-size-fits-all schedule. For instance, some business bloggers only post on Saturdays, with the theory being that Saturdays is when their audience is off work and more likely to have some leisure time to read blogs.

So when you are creating a posting schedule for your blog, go through these steps:

1 – Write down why you are blogging. Think about what you are trying to accomplish with your blog.

2 – Write down who your audience is. What do they do for a living? How will your blog content help them? When will they likely have time to read your blog?

3 – How much time do you have for creating blog content?  Your answer to the first question will play a big role in determining how much time you will need to spend writing to achieve your blogging goals.

4 – Once you know why you are blogging, who you are trying to reach with your content and how much time you have, decide when you will blog. Figure out how many days every week or month you will blog and keep that same schedule. For instance, if you will blog two days a week, pick the same two days every week. This helps train your readers to know when there will be new content on your blog.

5 – Re-evaluate regularly. Give your new schedule a month, and see what your results are. Did you have enough time to stick to your schedule? Do you see that you could blog more often? Are you hitting the metrics you need to hit?

6 – Stay with it. Blogging is like a big rock rolling down a hill, it takes a LOT of effort at first to get it moving, but once it starts rolling, it goes FAST! You likely won’t see a lot of momentum at first with your blogging, so you want to stick with it for a few weeks or even months. Eventually, you’ll start to see the needle move.  Over time, the growth will accelerate and it will likely take you less effort to get the same results.

 

Good luck!

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The Magic of Being Second and the Spontaneous Hillside Dance

Years ago I saw a video from an outdoor music festival. The video showed a crowd of fans sitting on a hillside enjoying the concert. After a few seconds, one guy stood up and started dancing. By himself. He continued dancing, awkwardly, by himself for a minute or so. A few people nearby watched him but for the most part he was ignored.

Then after about a minute, a nearby person stood up and ran over to him and started dancing, awkwardly, next to him. When this happened, everyone around them started looking around at each other like “what is happening?” After a few seconds, a third person jumped up to join them, then a fourth, then a fifth. Within a minute or so, the entire hillside was dancing, awkwardly, together and enjoying themselves.

This spontaneous hillside dance wasn’t triggered by the first guy that got up. It was triggered by the SECOND person. When there was just one guy dancing, it was easy to dismiss them as simply being that weird awkward-dancing guy. But when the second person joined, then they were a group. Suddenly it became much easier to join them if you wanted to. Then when a few people started joining, the dynamic flipped from being weird to being cool.

I was remembering this spontaneous hillside dance yesterday when I re-watched Simon Sinek’s brilliant TED talk on the power of why. You have likely seen this talk, but even if you have, it’s worth another view:

If you think about how most companies can tell you what they do but struggle to talk about why they do it, it seems to be rooted in this desire we all have to promote ourselves or talk about ourselves. This is what’s important to me.

But the ‘why’ gets to the heart of why your idea can hold importance for OTHER PEOPLE. That’s where the magic happens. When other people see the value in your idea, they become invested shareholders of that idea. They help nuture it, they help grow it. They share it with likeminded people and invite them to nuture and care for it as well.

When you think about companies, who they are and what they do and WHY they do it, can you more easily describe the WHY or the WHAT?

I can describe the WHY for Red Bull, but only the WHAT for Monster Energy Drinks.

I can describe the WHY for Patagonia, but only the WHAT for Columbia Sportswear.

I can describe the WHY for Pedigree, but only the WHAT for Alpo.

 

But at the heart of all this, we are talking about what’s important to the customer, and putting that first, and putting ourselves second. As Sinek has said “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

Which goes against human nature. We want to tell others how they can help US first, and after they do, we then ask “Ok how can we help you?” But the magic lies in putting yourself in second place and putting the person whose money or attention or time you want, putting them first.

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We Are the News Now

This morning I saw this tweet about the fall of newspapers in the US:

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1306529824383668225

This graph apparently includes digital as well as print, which is key. Note that growth across all metrics seemed to stall out around 2000, and around 2005-2006, everything started going downhill very quickly.

I think there are two key contributors to this decline. First, remember that in 2005 or so is when blogs started becoming popular. I started blogging in 2005 and there was already a decent community of bloggers out there. I don’t think usage was mainstream yet, but you could tell that it was heading in that direction. I also remember in those early blogging years how journalists looked down on blogs, how they said anyone could blog, but you had to be a professional to be a journalist! Over the years as blogs became more influential, journalists began to source bloggers more often, and many media sites added their own ‘blogs’ to gain a semblance of credibility. Times had definitely changed.

But another factor happening at the same time is worth noting. As blogs and social media use exploded, it meant more viewpoints and more discussion of the news. It also meant more discussion of the coverage given to news stories by journalists. We began to notice that a lot of the news was, quite frankly, biased. Some of it was outright dishonest. We see this today and it’s only getting worse:

https://twitter.com/LD25_GOP/status/1306224239783981057

The reality is, mainstream media sources such as newspapers are struggling in great part because most of us simply do not trust the information they publish. That’s why we are increasingly turning to other sources for our information. I believe this distrust of mainstream media is also bleeding over into social media platforms. For instance there is a popular saying on Twitter that ‘Twitter is not real life’, to speak to how users and media reference opinions that are popular among the Twitter user community, but disconnected from what the larger population thinks or feels.

I think all of this is working to the advantage of those of us who are leveraging blogs as a publishing platform. I also think every company should think of themselves as a publisher. In fact, it might be more useful to think of it in terms of being your Publishing Strategy instead of your Social Media or Digital Strategy. By creating and publishing a steady flow of content, you not only help educate current and potential customers about what your company does and what its values are, but you help differentiate yourself from competitors.

But perhaps most importantly of all, publishing regular content gives you a voice and the ability to reach others. On August 31st, I relaunched this blog, and began publishing 6 new posts a week. I’m two weeks into this new publishing schedule. My traffic is already up over 30% in just two weeks. Granted, we still talking small numbers, less than 100 visitors a day, but that still shows the power of creating content to drive awareness and generate interest.

Do this experiment; Think of your company as being a publisher. What would you talk about? What messages would you want to communicate to your customers? What would you want them to know about you? What areas would you cover? You could even view the publishing as creating sections of a newspaper. You could have a business section, a news section, a leisure section, an editorial section, etc.

We are all the news now. Make sure your company is sharing its voice, don’t settle for opting out of the conversation happening around and about your company. Take an active role in it.

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Marketing and Movies: Moneyball

I am a sucker for shows or documentaries that detail how a business started from nothing and became a success. I’m also a big fan of sports movies. Moneyball is both, so of course it’s one of my favorite movies.

Moneyball follows the 2001 offseason and 2002 season that saw the Oakland Athletics overcome massive budget constraints and the loss of its star players to set the American League record for consecutive wins, and make the postseason. I think the story of Moneyball will resonate with a lot of business owners who are having to take a long, hard look at its direction given the economic and business uncertainty we are all facing heading into 2021.

In the 2001 offseason, Oakland lost its two ‘star’ players, Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi to rivals who could afford to pay far richer salaries than the Athletics could. General Manager Bill Beane went to the Athletics owner and told him he needed more money to make the Athletics competitive. The owner said there was no more money for Beane and that he should do the best he can. Beane then went to his scouts who were focused on trying to replace Giambi and Damon. Beane became frustrated with this mentality because he knew that the Athletics couldn’t afford players that could hit the same number of HRs and who had the same batting average as Giambi and Damon. And even if they could find a couple of players that could put up similar stats to Giambi and Damon, the Athletics would lose them in a year or two when a richer ballclub offered them a higher salary that the Athletics couldn’t match.

Beane knew that the Athletics needed to change the way they viewed acquiring players. At first he tried to get the best players the Athletics could afford. He visited the Indians, and proposed several trades or player acquisitions, but Beane noticed that these offers were all rejected after advisor Peter Brand spoke to management. Beane left the meeting frustrated, and decided to speak to Brand directly to find out what he told Indians management to get them to kill his player offers.

Brand then explained to Beane that many baseball teams were making a grave mistake in evaluating players. Most teams at the time were focusing on stats like home runs, runs batted in and batting average. Brand explained “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, it should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” Beane was impressed by Brand’s new approach to player evaluation and hired him from the Indians to help him rebuild the Athletics team.

In part of doing that, Beane and Brand began evaluating offensive players based not on HRs, RBIs or BA, but instead on whether or not they got on base. In this scene, Beane meets with the Athletics’ scouts and explains the change in philosophy when it comes to evaluating players:

As you can see, the scouts were confused by this approach as soon as they heard it. As Beane and Brand continued to acquire players who didn’t have flashy stats (but who did get on base), the fans and rest of the league scratched their heads at what the Athletics were doing. Then, the team began to struggle mightily, resulting in huge pressure being put on Beane to change his ‘moneyball’ approach to building his team in order to save his job. Beane decided to see the season through, even trading Carlos Pena, who was projected as a future All-Star, simply because he wasn’t the best fit for his new ‘moneyball’ system. That decision led to Brand asking him to please reconsider, and Beane told him that if they believed in their ‘moneyball’ approach, that they needed to commit to it:

Over time, Beane and Brand worked with the players to help educate them on how to get on base more often and how to play smart once they did. In one scene, Beane explains to a player that he wants him to focus on getting on base, not on stealing bases.  The player replies “but you pay me to steal bases, that’s what I do”, to which Beane replies “I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second.”

They worked with the players to stress to them the importance of waiting for their perfect pitch. Brand used analytics to show the players when to take pitches and when to swing, based on their hitting history. The play of the team improved dramatically, as the Athletics went from one of the worst teams in baseball to one of the best. Along the way, the Athletics won 20-straight games, setting an American League record that would stand for 15 years.

Now there’s several themes from Moneyball that I think tie nicely to successful marketing and business. First, there’s having the courage to try something new if your current strategy has proven not to work. Beane faced a ton of resistance to his Moneyball approach both within the Athletics organization, and in the sport of baseball. He was trying something new, and quite honestly a lot of people wanted to see him fail. That leads to the second key lesson, to commit to your strategy and give it a chance. When the Athletics actually did start losing, that just increased the pressure on Beane to drop the ‘moneyball’ approach. But Beane trusted in the strategy that he and Brand had developed, and committed to seeing it through.

But what really resonated for me personally was the idea of evaluating players based on whether or not they get on base versus if they have flashy stats. Getting on base can be done in some very unsexy ways, like taking 12 pitches and a walk, or getting hit by a pitch. Beane just wanted to see his players get on base, he didn’t care how they did it. At the time, many teams wanted a player that would hit 40 HRs, and didn’t really care if his on-base percentage was .250.

For years, I approached blogging and content creation as if I was constantly chasing home runs. Or in terms of blogging, a home run would be an ‘awesome post’. So every post was supposed to be a home run, or ‘awesome’. And we constantly hear this, don’t we?  ‘It’s about quality, not quantity!’ or ‘If you can’t write a great post, wait till you can!’

The reality is, no blogger writes a great post every time. But for years, that was my goal, write a great post every time. And write a lot of them.

I used to love Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users. Kathy was a very infrequent blogger. She would typically blog once, maybe twice a month at most. But almost every post she wrote, was incredible. Whenever a new Kathy Sierra post was published, it would create an immediate ripple throughout the blogging and tech community.

Kathy hit a home run every time she posted. I thought that was the standard. That’s what I wanted to do.

So every time I would start out to blog, I wanted to make every post be an awesome one. By the 3rd or 4th day, I had typically run out of ‘awesome’ ideas for posts. So I would tell myself ‘if you can’t write an awesome blog post today, then don’t write anything’. So I wouldn’t. Then the next day I would try again. Before I knew it, I was blogging once a week, then once every other week.

This process repeated itself over the years. This year, I decided to try something different. Before, I told myself “Your job is to write an awesome blog post today”.  Now, I tell myself “Your job is to write a blog post today”.

See the difference? Before I was shooting to hit a ‘home run’ at every at bat, which is completely unrealistic.  Now, I focus on getting on base.  Just writing a blog post.

Because the reality is, the more you write, the better you become at writing.  The more often you blog, the better you become at blogging, the better you become at writing awesome posts.

So that’s my ‘moneyball’ approach to blogging; Don’t worry about hitting a home run, just get on base.

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The Value of Showing Up

Recently I saw a speaker announce on Twitter that event organizers shouldn’t expect her to stay at an event past her speaking slot. Years ago I saw a speaker bragging and posting a selfie from his seat on a plane. He said he flew in this morning, an hour ago he was on stage, now he’s flying home.

Is that really something to brag about?

Sure, you were paid to speak, and unless it’s worked out beforehand, you weren’t paid to stick around and participate any further in the event. But why wouldn’t you? I’ve always felt my job as a speaker is to make the event a smashing success. It seems like common sense; The more successful the event is, the better it looks that I spoke there. And it leads to speaking referrals for future events, which any professional speaker will tell you is the lifeblood of their profession.

Years ago I was asked to speak at a tourism event. I’d never spoken at a tourism industry event at the time, and I will admit my plan was to leave as soon as I was finished. But the organizer asked me to please stay if I could, and I really liked her, so I decided to do so. I’m so glad I did, the event was incredibly interesting, the organizer was kind enough to make it known to attendees that I would be staying and she invited me to participate in Q&A sessions at the end of the event, which I happily did. All this led to a better event for the organizers, and several speaking referrals for me. I’ve gone on to speak at several tourism events since, and they are honestly my favorite industry events to present at.

The reality is, it will be a while before in-person conferences are a regular occurrence again. I’m hopeful we will start to see some industry events return in late Spring/Early Summer of 2021, with many more coming back by Fall of 2021. Speakers need to think about how they can add as much value as possible to every event they present for. I always tell organizers when I agree to present at their event that I have just become their promotional partner. That it’s my job to help the event become as successful as possible. I’ve even worked with many events to help bring on additional speakers that I trust to help make the event even better.

We all know to focus on the value we can create for our clients in 2020 and beyond. We need to show up, and we need to stay until the job is done. Leaving early and cutting corners is nothing to brag about.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Tik Tok Partners with Oracle, Digital Body Language, How Gen Zers View Brands

Hey y’all! Let’s get cracking with another week of business and marketing goodness!

 

Tik Tok rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy the company then an hour or so later turned around and agreed to partner with Oracle as a ‘trusted tech partner’. This is not a sale (at least not yet), and it appears Oracle will help manage US operations for Tik Tok, likely lending its cloud computing technology.

 

Digital body language is a wonderful topic that too few marketers think about.  My dear friend Kelly shared this fabulous article that breaks down what can be happening on your site and how you can convince the visitor to become a buyer:

 

 

Now this graph in this tweet immediately caught my attention:

First, it’s ridiculous to combine Gen Xers with our Boomer parents as we are completely different groups, but whatevs. But what really caught my attention was note the percentage that choose brands based on friend/family recommendations falls with every age group. Now I checked the fine print and the results are coming from a survey of Snapchat users, so that will likely skew the results some.

But I found this quote from the article about how Gen Zers view recommendations from friends and family to be fascinating:

“Part of that, of course, is that such recommendations are now much easier to come by, as you can see what people like and advocate for via social media. Past generations didn’t always have this as a reference point, so it makes sense that they’re less instinctively reliant on the same.

But Gen Z has adapted to the modern communications environment, which underlines the importance of facilitating advocacy through influencers and regular customers on social networks.”

This tends to suggest that who Gen Zers consider to be ‘friends’ could be much broader than their older counterparts. In fact, could this even be suggesting that Gen Zers view influencers they like as their ‘friends’? I think this is a very interesting area to explore and research further. Perhaps the definition of who a ‘friend’ is more abstract for the youngest digital natives, and becomes more literal as we age? Again, I find this fascinating and worthy of further research.

 

Oh Twitter…you just can’t help yourself, can you? It appears that Twitter is now positioning itself to be in a position to censor any election day tweets that discuss who has won or lost any of the races on Election Day in November:

This is so scary for so many reasons. Here’s a hypothetical; Let’s say a group of hardcore Trump supporters were put in charge of monitoring tweets on election day. And let’s say these Trump supporters are ACTIVIST supporters, who are put in charge of monitoring. In theory, they could delete any tweet that contains phrases like ‘Biden will win’ or ‘I think Biden will win’ and claim it is ‘unverified election results’. That would result in there appearing to be almost no excitement for the Biden campaign, which could easily influence undecided independent voters. Moves like this are why we are likely headed toward a day when big social media sites are regulated by the government as publishers, not platforms.

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Red Bull Creates Better Content Than You Do, Here’s How They Do It

Red Bull’s marketing is one of my favorite case studies from Think Like a Rock Star.  In the book I call them this generation’s Nike, and they really are.  What separates Red Bull from most brands is its customer-centric marketing.  Everything about the brand’s content, marketing and communication efforts is about its customers and what’s important to them.  The product itself is secondary to the activities that the customer engages in, and cherishes. Red Bull’s content marketing follows a simple formula; Don’t sell the product, sell what the product allows you to do.

First. watch this Red Bull video:

There’s a couple of things you need to know about that video:

1 – It’s a 30-second broadcast commercial.

2 – It currently has over 2 million views on YouTube.

 

But notice something else; the product (Red Bull energy drinks) is barely shown. Instead, the majority of the commercial focuses on the athletes and the amazing activities they are engaged in.

The product has become secondary to the activities that Red Bull’s customers enjoy.  

Red Bull understands that its customers are young and active.  The brand is targeting the younger end of the highly desirable 18-34 demographic, and they understand that customers in this age range are extremely savvy when it comes to advertising.  So instead of trying to market its product to these customers (which would be a turnoff to them), Red Bull focuses its content on the activities they love.

Red Bull is a Giant on YouTube

In fact, Red Bull does a fabulous job of re-purposing (or as my friend Ann would say ‘re-imaging’) its content.  Red Bull creates long-form content and videos chronicling how these amazing athletes prepare to engage in their activities.  This is for the hardcore extreme sports fans that want to learn more about these athletes and how they train for and perform these amazing jumps, stunts and tricks.

Then Red Bull takes the actual footage from the event and shows it by itself, and also works it into its commercials as well.  Red Bull got a ton of publicity from Felix Baumgartner’s ‘freefall from space’.  The brand divided footage from that amazing event into a highlight video that currently has over 40 MILLION views.  Additionally it posted videos from test jumps Baumgartner made, and of course his successful space freefall closes out the broadcast commercial above.

 Red Bull's YouTube engagement

We’ve got your Facebook engagement right here!

With over 40 Million ‘fans’ on Facebook, Red Bull is one of the most popular brands on the world’s largest social networking site.  And consistent with the content it creates on other online channel, the product itself is almost never promoted or even mentioned.  Instead, the focus is on the athletes and the amazing feats they are engaging in.  Most of the content is delivered via stunning visuals with text to describe what’s happening.  But the brand is promoting the activities and athletes directly, and the brand itself very indirectly.

In 2012, Facebook did a study into how its most popular brands drive engagement via its Pages.  Specifically, Facebook found that brands create three types of content on its brand pages:

Messages about the product or service

  • Travel brand example: Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.

Messages related to the brand

  • Travel brand example: I decided to go on my first cruise because______.

Messages unrelated to the brand

  • Travel brand example: Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!

Of these three, updates related to the brand but not about the brand were the only type of updates that “were the sole universally significant predictor of all types of engagement.”  Those three types of engagement are Likes, Shares and Comments.

This is the exact type of content that Red Bull nails on all its social media channels, but especially on Facebook.  In fact Facebook clarified in the study that if a brand’s goal was to generate Shares that the brand should “Use photos, photos albums and videos”.

RedBullFB

Sponsor the Love

One of the ways that a brand can create passionate fans and brand advocates is to help facilitate and align itself with events, communities and functions that its customers are passionate about. You see this often at conferences and events, where a company will sponsor a ‘recharge’ area where attendees can recharge their smartphones and laptops, and refreshments might be present as well. Or another example could be a crafting company that builds an online community for crafters, the idea being that the brand is creating something of value for its customers and associating itself with events. functions and communities that the customer is already passionate about.

Red Bull does this with extreme sports.  The brand has long been heavily invested in extreme sports, helping to fund the events themselves, then later funding teams for major events such as ESPN’s X-Games.  Red Bull has even been a sponsor in NASCAR for several years.

These sponsorships communicate to its customers that Red Bull loves these events as much as they do.  Which gives its customers another reason to love the brand itself.

 

Telling a Compelling Story and Making the Customer the Hero  

Red Bull’s content marketing is all about telling a story.  It’s about personal achievement, about pushing the envelope and going farther than you thought you could.  These ideals speak to the heart of extreme sports and these special and fearless athletes.

Yet what makes this content marketing so compelling is that Red Bull is telling a story where the customer is the hero.  The content is positioned so that the customer sees these athletes performing these amazing activities yet feels inspired to push themselves to go farther.

Consider the final line of Red Bull’s broadcast commercials:

“If you believe in it, then anything is possible.”

“The only limit, is the one you set yourself.”

“You can dream about it, or you can go out and make it happen.”

The content inspires you to do more and to accomplish more than you thought you could.

Yet the secret is, Red Bull isn’t selling an energy drink, it’s selling what happens after you drink it.

Do you want to learn how Mack can create a world-class content strategy for your company like Red Bull has? Contact Mack with this form and he'll be in touch with you shortly!

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Toolbox Saturday: The Google Analytics Mobile App

Google Analytics has always been one of my go-to tools for maintaining and growing my blog. What I’ve always liked about it is that I can quickly easily get key information about what’s happening with my blog’s traffic at any moment.

And that level of convenience has been taken to the next level with the Google Analytics Mobile App. Thanks to this app, I’ve now got that information right with me on my phone. And these days, I have my phone with me almost every every waking moment, whereas I’m often away from my laptop for hours at a time. I also have the WordPress mobile app on my phone and with Jetpack enabled it also gives me some basic traffic information and between the two apps I can pretty much tell what’s happening with my blog traffic in a few seconds. Which is just what I need.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the basic traffic information that’s available to me when I open the app:

This is the information I look at the most. I want to see how many people are online right now, and what traffic is looking like so far today. Whenever I track traffic, I always track it hourly, versus the same day a week ago. This gives me a useful way to see how traffic is doing today versus the same day a week ago. Basically, I’m looking for spikes up or down.  If traffic is way off, I want to know why.  If it’s way down, was there a connection issue or was the site down?  If it’s way up, was there a post that was getting shared a lot, or was I getting some spam traffic?

Here’s another graph found as soon as I open the app, a sort of ‘heat map’ of how traffic did throughout the day:

I like the way the traffic levels are represented as colors, that helps me easily understand what times of the day had the most traffic, and which ones had the least. This can help me adjust when I promote content and when I publish new content.

Overall, I really like having this information available to me at a glance and right as soon as I open the app. Now the one thing I wish was available as soon as I open the app would be a list of the most viewed posts for that day. I get that with the WordPress app, but it would be nice to have that with the Google Analytics app all in the same place. There’s probably a very easy way to add that report that I simply can’t figure out.

You’re probably already using Google Analytics to track your blog’s traffic, so why not grab the mobile app as well?

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The Blank Space on the Calendar

I talked last week about how I’m enjoying using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help organize and plan my content here. It’s helped me plan out my content this week and last as I rededicated to blogging 6 times a week.

Well all last week and all this week, there’s been a blank spot on Friday, Sept 11th. I simply couldn’t decide on a topic for today’s post. Now in the past, my blogging philosophy has always been if I can’t write something awesome, don’t write anything at all. Which sounds like a good idea. The problem I would often run into was, if I missed one day, it seemed to increase the pressure to make sure I got a post out the next day. But it also had to be an ‘awesome’ post. So if I couldn’t come up with an idea for an ‘awesome’ post on that 2nd day, just wait till the 3rd.  After I had gone 2-3 days without blogging, it was very easy to justify not blogging again till I had that ‘awesome’ idea.

As you can imagine, that often led to gaps of a week or two between posts.  Sometimes longer.

When I was planning out the ‘relaunch’ of my blog over the last few weeks, it came after I saw this wonderful interview given by Kobe Bryant. What really struck me was this portion here Kobe talked about how he had to show up every day:

Kobe’s comments about showing up every day and being faithful to the people who were paying to see him resonated with me.  I was thinking of two separate stories that relate to the value of showing up, and what happens when you don’t.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I had no idea what I was doing, and I wanted to study how other people were blogging in order to improve my craft. I would use Technorati’s blog search (remember them?) to find new blogs, and I wanted to find great blogs that weren’t yet ‘known’, but I also wanted to see how other new bloggers were growing their blogs. I found this one blog, and I started with the first post on the blog. For the first couple of weeks, the blogger had a new post every day like clockwork. Then starting on the third week, the posts came every other day. Then one post the fourth week.  Then a couple of weeks later, the title was the post “Why isn’t anyone commenting on this blog???”

That was the last post on the blog. I knew at that point I’d just seen this blog die. Anyone that’s started a new blog knows that it typically takes months if not years to build a decent and engaged readership. Especially in 2020.

Here’s the second story that Kobe’s comments reminded me of. I talked yesterday about how Twitch content creator Nickmercs is using YouTube to create new content. Nick regularly gets over 100,000 viewers for his Twitch streams. That’s in 2020, so keep that in mind when you see this tweet from 2014:

Here’s Nick in 2014, 6 years ago, happy that he had 170 viewers for that day’s stream. From 170 to 100,000 in 6 years. Not bad.

So I think there’s value in creating the best possible content you can, but it’s also important to show up as often as you can.

Or as Seth Godin likes to say “Done is better than perfect.”

Well today’s post is Done. The blank space on the calendar is filled. On to tomorrow.

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Case Study: Creating Different Video Content For Different Audiences

I’ve talked before about how you can create different types of content based on the Buyer’s Journey, or where they are in the purchase process.

There are four different stages in general:

1 – Unaware and I don’t care.  This person doesn’t know who you are or why they should care about you. So in order to connect with this person, you don’t talk about your company AT ALL. You talk about the potential customer.  That will get their attention and give you a chance to move to the next stages.

2 – Slightly Aware. At this stage the customer has some idea of who your company is and what it does. At this stage you want to create content that helps the customer understand how your products or services fit into their lives, or relate to them. This will help them understand how your company’s products and services can help them, and will grow their interest in your company.

3 – Interested. At this stage the customer knows who you are, knows why your products or services are valuable to them, and is considering making a purchase. At this stage you want to focus almost completely on the product or service you are selling. You have to keep in mind that at this stage, the customer is doing research in anticipation of making a purchase. So give them detailed information on what you have to offer.

4 – Ready to buy, take my money! Pretty self-explanatory, the customer is ready to make a purchase. At this stage you simply complete the transaction, no need to continue to sell to them, they are ready to buy.

 

To give you an idea of how you can create different types of video content, I wanted to go back to the example of how Twitch content creator @nickmercs is creating content for his YouTube channel. I talked about Nick’s video content before, he will stream several hours a day on Twitch, then condense this gameplay down to 15-20 minutes of his ‘best’ content, and post that to YouTube. Nick monetizes his YouTube channel so he gets paid by views, but if we were thinking about where this content would typically fall in the above categories, it would go under the Aware stage. People that watch Nick’s videos are typically aware of who he is, and want to see his content.

But a few weeks ago, Nick did something a bit different with his content on his YouTube channel. He and two teammates won a $100,000 Call of Duty: Warzone tournament. He then created a video where he walks the audience through exactly what he and his team did in the final game that led to them winning the tournament. He breaks down every movement, why they did what they did (or what the ‘strat’ was, as the kids say), and talks about how viewers can replicate his success as they are playing the game. This type of content is much more in depth than a simple highlight video, and as such is aimed at a slightly different audience:

Now, Nick is monetizing his YouTube channel so the content he creates is all about maximizing views. This particular video was done as a bit of an experiment, it seems, just to see how the audience would react. This video currently has over 600,000 views, which is huge, but many of Nick’s Warzone videos have more views. It makes sense that this video would have fewer views, because it would appeal to a smaller audience than his typical ‘highlight’ video. If you were to place this video into one of the above four categories, it would fall under the Interested category for customers who are in the research phase. Now Nick is making money off his YouTube channel via monetization, but if he wanted to sell personal coaching services where he mentored players to perform well in eSports tournaments like Warzone, a video such as this would be a perfect way to sell such services.

Just keep in mind that the type of content you create at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey transcends the content channel. If they are Unaware and just entering your sales or marketing funnel, you create content focused solely on the customer. When they are near the bottom of the funnel in the Interested stage, you talk about what it is that you are selling. Doesn’t matter if you are creating blog posts, videos, podcasts, whatever.