MackCollier.com

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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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

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 ones from a lot of people that were supposed to be smarter than I was.

Wait, why are you calling this a newsletter?

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.

Then there’s Ann Handley. Ann has a biweekly newsletter called Total Annarchy.  It’s delightful. Everyone loves Ann’s emails.  Everyone raves about Ann’s newsletter, so I subscribed. Ann’s emails were different, she didn’t just re-link to her latest blog post, she wrote a new ‘post’ for her 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.

A blog and a newsletter serve different audiences

Then 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 Ann’s emails seemed more like letters she was writing to a friend, because she’s writing to an audience (her newsletter audience) that already knows her!

 

Two content channels, two content strategies

Many content creators use a blog as a tool to build awareness for themselves or their employer. Once people are aware of you and your content, you want to build a deeper relationship with them. A newsletter, is one of the forms of content you can create and provide to deepen a relationship with people who know who you are.

If you think about it, this makes complete sense. If someone isn’t aware of who you are or what you do, asking for their email address to sign up for your newsletter isn’t the smart play. But if someone is a regular reader of your blog, then you offer them the opportunity to get a different type of content via your newsletter, then that can be an appealing offer!

If you have a newsletter, how are you using it differently than your blog?  Do you have a different content strategy for both, or do you tailor your strategy for each?

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Social Media Demands Perfection and Punishes Mediocrity

I have a small list of political reporters that I follow on Twitter. I avoid political coverage on mainstream media at all costs since I know most of it is propaganda, but I follow a few trusted sources for actual political news. One of the reporters I follow is a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. She tweets almost daily about their exploits, the home runs, the clutch wins, everything. I haven’t watched a pro baseball game in probably 20 years, and know nothing about the league. But from her tweets alone, I assumed the Cardinals must be one of the best teams. Yesterday she tweeted that the team had fired their manager.

For years, I was a big Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan. I promoted him on all my social media accounts, including here and even on my podcast. Last year after a frustrating race in a frustrating season, I left a rare critical tweet about Dale, which earned my first and only response from him:

To be fair, I took his advice. The whole episode reminded me of this scene from A Christmas Story, and I had pretty much the same reaction that Ralphie did:

Years ago, I was added to a private group on Facebook for frequent business travelers. At first, the group was incredible, several professional travelers sharing advice and tips on how to make business travel more convenient and efficient. I loved it, and the advice of the group led to my making several travel-related purchases (Social Media ROI). Unfortunately, the group quickly devolved into a game of social media one-upmanship as people began to use the group to brag about their first class travel or the upgrades and perks they were getting. The utility and value of the group decreased as the bragging increased.

A few weeks ago I was watching a particular Twitch streamer who constantly creates YouTube videos of his game-playing, which are very popular, mainly because of how well he plays in the videos. This particular streamer had just completed a game where he didn’t perform very well, and one of his followers asked him if he would be posting that game to YouTube later. “Hell no!”, he replied. “I didn’t get enough kills!”

There’s a common thread running through all these stories. The promise of social media was always in its ability to connect everyone to everyone. Everyone gets the chance to have a voice and we all get to see the world as it really is.

Social media has delivered spectacularly as a way to foster connections, and it has failed miserably as a way to show the world, and our lives, as they really are. To be fair, much of the sharing problem is of our own making. We are trained to only share our ‘highlights’ on social media. We brag about our ‘wins’ and never mention our ‘losses’. Every moment is viewed through the lens of “will this make a good picture on IG?’ instead of simply living IN the moment.

The problem with the ‘perfection’ of social media is that it’s too easy to compare yourself to a completely warped view of other people’s lives. I especially worry about the impact this can have on teenagers and millenials. In fact, many studies now suggest there could be a link between the rise of social media usage and the stark increase in teenage suicides over the last decade or so.

Ironically, when social media first began to take off on a widespread scale about 10 years ago, one of the unwritten ‘rules’ for brands using social media was ‘be authentic’. It seems like that’s a great rule for the rest of us to follow as well.

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Macy’s Brand Ambassador Program Leverages its Employees as Influencers

Last year, Macy’s launched an employee brand ambassador program called #MacysStyleCrew with 20 associates. The idea was to let Macy’s employees turn to social media to promote and sell the store’s clothing and other items. Employees are incentivized by additional pay for sales they generate via social media.

The program has shown promise, and was later expanded to over 300 employees. Now, the program is being opened to all Macy’s employees. The success of the Macy’s Style Crew has also allowed Macy’s to shift budgets away from external influencer marketing, and instead leverage its employees as social media influencers.

Notice that with this video, there is an instructional element as the employee is trying to teach viewers about how to select colors for their wardrobe based on the season. The clothing is promoted as well, but it’s more about teaching potential customers a skill and how to stay stylish. And yes, the audio is way too low and the background music is overshadowing it. That almost works, as it makes the video seem more ‘authentic’ and less ‘corporate’.

Of course, many of the updates are like this one, strictly promotional:

Still, I think this initiative has a lot of potential, and Macy’s must be seeing results they like, as they continue to grow and expand the program. Also, I love that Macy’s started with a small group of 20, and scaled later. I always advise clients to follow this format, to start with a smaller group, and then grow. Any time you launch a new initiative like an employee brand ambassador program, there will be plenty of mistakes made through simple trial and error. It’s better to make those mistakes with a smaller group, then iron out the issues and scale growth.

I do think that this initiative will show more fruit in the future if the employees are trained to focus more on creative instructional content versus promotional content. However, since employees are being encouraged to sell items with their content, this can be a confusing and tricky line for employees to walk. Just remember that brands like Patagonia, Red Bull and Nike sell an awful lot of products by rarely promoting the products directly.

I think the #MacysStyleCrew program is a great idea and if you work for a retail brand it gives you a chance to see what’s possible by unleashing your employees to serve as influencers to online customers. I do think that Macy’s will find an unexpected benefit from this program: It will help Macy’s hire better employees. As the #MacysStyleCrew grows, it can become a recruitment tool for new employees, seeing that they will be given the freedom to leverage their social media skills to bring in new customers.

If you’re a retailer, could you see a program like #MacysStyleCrew working with your employees? These efforts are still in their infancy, but over time I think you will see more retailers move in the direction of leveraging its employees as social media influencers rather than working with outside sources. It’s a notable shift and both retailers and those marketing themselves as ‘influencers’ will need to adjust.

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Whole Foods Wipes Out Its Instagram Feed to Raise Awareness of Declining Bee Populations

Corporate storytelling can be a tricky thing to master. Brands often interject political and social news into its content, with mixed results. If the views are consistent with the company’s values, they will ultimately benefit the brand and strengthen ties to its core customer base.

Whole Foods gave us a great example last week of letting corporate values drive its storytelling. The brand deleted all its previous posts on Instagram, unfollowed everyone, and then posted this cryptic image:

Which, as you can see, is an image of…nothing. This immediately got people talking; was Whole Foods hacked? Then the brand followed Beyonce…was there a collaboration coming?  Then Sting, Jon Bon Jovi, Jerry Seinfeld.

Eventually, a few smart people noticed a ‘bee’ connection to the few people that Whole Foods had followed.  Then a ‘bee’ emoji was added to Whole Foods’ Instagram profile. Then after 4 more ‘blank’ images were posted on IG, Whole Foods posted this:

Which confirmed that the account hadn’t been hacked, but that there was a ‘bee’ connection here. Then, Whole Foods started posting videos of some of the common (and delicious) foods that we might lose without bees.

The goal of this campaign on Instagram was to raise awareness of the declining bee population around the world, and to support the Whole Kids Foundation in helping bring beekeeping materials and education to 50 schools and nonprofits around the country. Declining bee populations can have a huge impact on agriculture around the world, and Whole Foods is also helping to raise awareness of how “one of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest.”

Some of the most engaging content that brands can create is content that’s focused on the brand’s core values and those of its customers.  Whole Foods sells healthy food and is concerned about the ingredients in those foods and how they are sourced and grown. This campaign helps educate customers and followers on how the food it sells is created, while also being true to the brand and its values.

If your brand wants to do compelling storytelling like Whole Foods did on Instagram, here’s what to keep in mind:

1 – Have a compelling story to tell that’s focused on ideas/themes/beliefs that are associated with the brand, but not about the brand. There are always exceptions to every rule, but in most cases, the most engaging content is related to the brand but not about the brand. Here, Whole Foods focused on the declining bee population and how that could impact the supply of healthy food. The potential impact on food supplies is the focus that’s related to the brand, but not about the brand. The topic is important to Whole Foods’ customers as well, which is why they paid attention. Patagonia creates content focused on protecting the environment, not its clothing. Red Bull creates content focused on extreme sports and athletes, not its energy drink. Pedigree creates content focused on happy and healthy dogs, not its dog food. All of these examples show the value of creating content that’s focused on the connection between the brand and its customers.

2 – Let the story develop on its own. By deleting its feed and only following a few people and then only posting a few blank images, Whole Foods left people speculating on what was happening with its Instagram account. That speculation led to a lot of extra media coverage and….’buzz’ about its bee-related content. It also led to people on Instagram trying to solve the mystery on its own.  Here’s some of the comments IG users left:

“but who has enough time and patience to hack into a supermarket’s social media and delete every single post one by one and unfollow people one by one ?”

“If you look up Beyoncé Whole Foods, you’ll see there’s a pic of her on their website”

“Bees!! Check out the 5 people WF follows! This is genius!”

“They are following Beyoncé and Sting. Bee emoji. You’re supposed to read between the lines. There are no posts about food anymore because WITHOUT BEES, WE WILL HAVE NOTHING.”

“None of the food they sell would be possible without the bees! The bee emoji, only following queen bee. Did I solve this ?!??‍♂️”

By letting the story play out or ‘breathe’ for a couple of days, followers on IG got more interested and invested in the developing story.  They engaged more, they speculated more, and they created more ‘buzz’ for what Whole Foods was doing.

3 – Let the benefits be obvious to the customer. If we lose the bees, then we lose our food. That was the simple message from this campaign, and everyone can immediately see the significance. This also communicates to Whole Foods’ customers that Whole Foods cares about how its food is grown, even down to protecting the insects that may play a role in the growth of the foods we all love. This helps build loyalty and brand advocacy among Whole Foods’ customers for the brand.

 

All in all, I thought this was a great campaign by Whole Foods and if you pay close attention to how this campaign was structured and executed, you can improve your own corporate storytelling efforts.

BTW, if you want to donate to the Whole Kids Foundation to support the Give Bees a Chance campaign, click here. As of this writing, the current sum donated is just over $64k, with a goal of $100,000.

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Make Your Event Sponsorships Better By Making the Event Itself Better

Event sponsorships

A few years ago a conference approached me about doing a Live #Blogchat session during their event, and I agreed. I told the event that if they wanted to, they could sell a sponsorship to the Live #Blogchat to recoup some or all of the costs that they were paying me for the session. I added that if they decided to go this route that I would be happy to work with the sponsor before and during the Live #Blogchat to make sure they got their money’s worth, and made the session better.

The event said great, and I never heard from them again. I showed up at the conference and was surprised to learn from the event organizers that they had sold a sponsorship to my Live #Blogchat. I was told this minutes before the Live #Blogchat was to start, when I was introduced to the sponsor representative. A bit taken aback, I quickly huddled with the sponsor representative to ask them if they would like to be involved with the discussion as the Live #Blogchat unfolded.  “Nope, this is your event, we are just happy to be here!”

This is why the concept of event sponsorships is interesting to me, because there’s so much unlocked potential. With many event sponsorships, there’s little more involvement from the sponsor than this.  There’s typically some signage, maybe some free swag for attendees, maybe a comped booth at a trade show.

Smart sponsors know that the best way to truly make an impression on attendees is to leverage your sponsorship to make the event better for those attendees. Too many sponsors try to ‘be seen’ at the events they partner with.  Your goal isn’t to be seen, it’s to be remembered.

When you are considering working with an event on a sponsorship package, ask yourself these questions:

  • Who is attending the event?
  • Why are they there?
  • What are they hoping to accomplish?

Your sponsorship should factor in the answers to each of these questions, especially the third question. Then once you’ve answered these questions, then think about how your sponsorship can help the attendees reach their goals for the event.

For example, let’s say that the attendees at the event you want to sponsor are there to learn about digital marketing. Your sponsorship could then be tied to something that helps the attendee take home as much useful information as possible about the event.  Maybe you could do something as simple as sponsoring a notebook for each attendee to during each session.  Or maybe sponsor a free jump drive with the presentation slides from each track.  Or maybe your company could sponsor a few bloggers doing recaps of each session and then at the end of the day you could provide these recaps as handouts to attendees so they could learn about the sessions that they missed.

All of these ideas are rooted in sponsorships that are structured in a way that takes into account what the attendee is trying to accomplish, and makes it easier for them to reach their goals for the event.

Remember, the idea isn’t to be seen, it’s to be memorable. If you provide utility for the attendees, that makes you useful to them, and memorable.

Besides, with most event sponsorships, ‘being seen’ is the quickest way to be ignored.

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How I Increased One Post’s Traffic by 255% in One Year

As content creators, there’s always a push on to create more content. Bloggers know that on average, the more often they create content, the quicker their traffic and readership grows.

But one of the best ways to grow your traffic is to actually improve your existing content. For the past year, I’ve been ‘remastering’ my posts by following the process outlined here. I wanted to walk you through the results I’ve seen for one of my posts.

The post is this one: Want to Create a Brand Ambassador Program? Here’s 10 Things to Remember When You Do. By improving this post over the last year, it’s traffic has increased by 255% this year versus the same period last year.

 On the above graph, the orange line is the post’s weekly traffic from last year for Jan 1st – June 19th.  The blue line is this year’s weekly traffic.  You can see that traffic for this year is much higher than last year, and growing.  You can also see that the orange line for last year was already starting to increase in April, which is when I first started working to improve this post.

So what did I do? First, let me address the elephant in the room: Probably the biggest improvement you can make in the traffic to an old post is to change the date.  Simply giving an old post a new date typically results in a lift in traffic. However, I would advise that you never change the date of a post without also changing the content of that post. If you get in the habit of simply giving your old posts a new date to get more traffic, you run the risk of alienating your readers and possibly risk the wrath of Google if they start to penalize publishers for using this practice.

If I can’t improve the post, I don’t get to change the date. This is the rule I go by when applying this process. This post was first published in 2011. Over the years I’d made minor changes to the post, maybe correcting a typo or the like. But last year for the first time I went through and significantly changed and improved the post. That was when I first changed the date to 2017. Then earlier this year, I changed it again, and updated the date again.

Here’s the process I followed:

1 – Proofread the existing post. I go through and see if there’s anything I need to change or improve about the post as is. Any typos that need to be corrected, or grammar that needs to be addressed.

2 – Can I do a better job of explaining the topic or flesh out my ideas more completely? This makes the post more in-depth and comprehensive, which also increases social sharing.

3 – Is there any new research or case studies on the topic that I can reference and add to the post? This also makes the post more valuable to readers, and a better resource on the topic.

4 – Can any new visual elements be added that are relevant to the topic? It’s great to improve and expand an existing post, but you don’t want to risk turning the post into the dreaded ‘wall of text’. A good way to avoid this is by adding additionally images to break up the flow and make the post more engaging. There are several sites that offer free images, such as Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels.

5 – What questions does this post answer? Think about how someone would find your post if they did a google search. What search query would your post answer?  For my post, questions like ‘What is a Brand Ambassador?’ or ‘What is a Brand Ambassador Program?” might be questions someone would ask before finding my post in search results. In fact, I recently edited the post to add definitions for both terms at the start of the post. If you want to apply this same methodology to your own post, the site Answer the Public is a good place to start generating ideas.

 

For this particular post, I also used the Headline Optimizer plugin from Thrive Themes (affiliate link) to give the post a new headline.  The old headline for the post was 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program. The new headline, Want to Create a Brand Ambassador Program? Here’s 10 Things to Remember When You Do drew a 19% increase in engagement. Plus, I liked the fact that the post’s main keyword phrase, ‘brand ambassador program’ was closer to the start of the headline. It’s been shown to improve search rankings if the post’s keyword phrase is at the start of the headline.

In fact, this post typically ranks first or second in Google search results for the term ‘brand ambassador program’. A big reason why is because I continually improve and expand the post. When I first published this post in 2011, it had 1230 words. Today’s version has 1600, along with additional images and links.

Seven years ago when I first published this post, up till 2016, this post averaged around 100 pageviews a week. Today, it’s the 2nd most popular post on this blog, and last week it had its best week ever with 461 pageviews. I expect it to have close to 500 pageviews this week.

All of this shows that by consistently improving a post, you can see big gains, over time.

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Sears Turns its Twitter Account Over to Five Dads for Father’s Day

One of the things companies struggle with how to build engagement with their social media accounts. The cold reality is that most people don’t engage with a company on Twitter until there’s a problem. The majority of current or potential customers aren’t following a given brand’s Twitter account on a given day.

So how do you get people to pay attention to you, when they don’t want to? One way that companies have been testing is allowing a customer or fan to have temporary access to their Twitter account. During Alabama basketball’s NCAA tournament run in March, the Tuscaloosa News turned its Twitter account over to Bama super-fan Hunter Johnson. The move was wildly popular, it drove a lot of attention to the @TideSports account, and gave @HunterLJohnson a lot more attention as well.

Last week leading up to Father’s Day, Sears applied a similar strategy:

Sears picked five dads, and let each one have a different day, and a different topic:

One day the topic was favorite tools, another it was travel ideas, another it was cooking. All topics relating back to fathers and ideas for Father’s Day. This is a great example of focusing on customer-centric content. Instead of promoting Father’s Day sales, Sears brings in real dads all week to discuss their fathers and fatherhood. Naturally, shopping for Father’s Day will come up, but it’s not the focus of the strategy. The focus is to bring together five dads and their communities for a vibrant discussion, that Sears hosts.

Overall, I think this is a great idea and I think you’ll see more brands doing this moving forward. Sears can now improve similar efforts moving forward. Maybe bring in cooks to discuss baking for Thanksgiving, or parents to discuss shopping for children around Christmas.

I do have a couple of suggestions for Sears. If I were helping Sears with this effort, I would have stressed the need to leverage the new exposure Sears had to the communities of these five dads that took over the Sears Twitter account. The reality is, a lot of people will check out the Sears account while the dad they are following is running the account, but after that most of them will leave when the dad does. A good way to capitalize would have been for Sears to promote a special discount code for #AskDad participants, maybe give them the code ASKDAD to get a 20% discount.  This would also be a great way to track a lift in sales directly back to the #AskDad Twitter chats.  I would have also encouraged Sears to promote either its newsletter, or maybe a ‘Gift Buying Guide for Dads’, or something similar.

But overall, I thought turning #AskDad over to real dads for a week was a great idea by Sears, and will be interested in seeing how the brand builds on this idea!

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Why is Red Bull Blogging About Video Games?

Red Bull Blogging About Video Games

I was doing some research for a new post (right) and came across this post for tips on how to win at PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, one of the hottest mobile games right now.

What’s interesting is the post was on RedBull.com.  Red Bull sells energy drinks, they don’t sell video games.

So why is Red Bull blogging about video games? There’s actually a few very good reasons why they would:

  • Red Bull’s core customer base is male millennials. Male millennials like video games, so Red Bull figures if their customers are going to be looking for content about video games anyway, why not give it to them so they can stay on RedBull.com? PUBG Mobile is one of the hottest mobile games right now, so why not create the content that its customers will be looking for?  There’s plenty of content about Fortnite as well, so Red Bull has all the video game bases covered.
  • I’ve blogged about this before, but Red Bull is involved in the events, topics and themes that are important to its customers. Red Bull’s focus on video games could be part of a larger move to develop a greater presence in the eSports space.
  • Not only has eSports seen spectacular growth over the last few years, but there’s a potential sponsorship play to be had. Emerging competitor G-Fuel has made a name for itself by sponsoring top eSports athletes, including top Twitch streamer DrDisRespect (who I blogged about here). Red Bull has been dipping its toes in the eSports space for a while, the next step could be to start sponsoring eSports athletes or streamers, and help facilitate larger events. It’s a formula that worked incredibly well for Red Bull with the X-Games.

The larger content lesson is that Red Bull is focusing on customer-centric content. This is content that really doesn’t promote the product or brand, it promotes the information that its customers want, that can also relate back to the brand. So there needs to be some synergies in place for this approach to work.  For example, Red Bull could also write an article on “What You Need to Know to Get Accepted to College”, and it probably wouldn’t work as well, because while it’s also a topic that’s important to male millennials, the brand synergy isn’t as apparent.

Go back to the 3rd bullet point above.  G-Fuel has started sponsoring eSports athletes and Twitch streamers because they claim that their energy drink keeps you sharp, and mentally focused so you can do better while playing video games. If you’re a Twitch streamer, this has real appeal to you, because if an energy drink can keep you alert and let you play video games better, it literally means more money for you in the form of subs and donations. Red Bull could be making a lot of these same pitches to streamers and perhaps they’ve already started working on securing some sponsorships in this space.

Just remember that some of the best and most effective content you can create often has nothing to do with your brand or its products and services. When you create content that’s focused on your customers and more importantly on how your brand relates to your customers, that’s content that’s top of the sales funnel and does a great job of building brand awareness.

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How Much Money Will You Make From Writing a Book?

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Note from Mack: ‘How much money will I make from writing a book?’ is a question I hear often. This post was written while I was writing my book Think Like a Rock Star. After I had finished the book, I wanted to share what I had learned about the process when it comes to securing advances for your book, royalty payouts after publication, etc. The goal of this post was to provide helpful advice for others, especially my many friends in consulting that were curious about the entire process of writing their own book.

However, I am not in the publishing business, I am not in contact with literary agents, and I really can’t help you secure publication of your book other than what I’ve shared in this post. I work as a digital and content strategist to help companies with their content and digital marketing as well as helping them build programs that better connect my client with their customers. These can include blogger or influencer outreach or brand ambassador programs.  Here’s where you can learn more about what I do and some of the results I’ve achieved for my clients.  Thanks for reading and good luck with your writing! 

I’ve always tried to be brutally honest with y’all when it come to money in this space because:

1 – It helps you trust the content I create here

2 – Being transparent is more comfortable for me than being vague

3 – Too many people in this space have wild misconceptions about how much money is or is not being made here, which leads to gossip and bitterness that’s a complete waste of time

Since I first mentioned that I was writing a book and then more so when it was published, people have been curious about the process.  How long did it take?  How do they get started?  And yes, how much money can they make?

I wanted to address the money part here, because again, I believe there are some big misconceptions.  There are three ways that an author makes money directly from their book(This assumes you go with a traditional publisher, as I did):

1 – The advance

2 – Royalties off book sales

3 – Reselling the book themselves (typically you can buy your book for at least half off cover price, and sell it anywhere your publisher isn’t.  Such as on your website, but not on Amazon)

The Advance  

In most cases, if you are writing your first business book, you can expect to get an advance of $4,000 to $10,000.  The key thing to remember about that advance is that it’s an advance, so you have to pay that money back.  And remember that if it’s your first book, you are largely an unproven commodity to publishers, so they are less likely to give you a bigger advance.

Royalties off books sales

In most cases, publishers will offer you a contract where you get 10-15% royalties off each sale.  Now there is a big qualification to this number.  Some publishers will offer you that rate off list price (Gross royalties), and some will offer you that rate off the amount of profit they make off the book (net royalties).  The net amount is typically 50% of the book’s price.

So for example, if a book as a list price of $25.00, that means that if your contract says you get 10% royalties off list, then you will get $2.50 per book.  If you are getting 10% of net profits, then you’d get around $1.25 per book.  From my experience talking to other authors and receiving multiple contract offers for Think Like A Rock Star, it seems that most publishers in this space prefer to offer net royalties.

Additionally, you will likely get a higher royalty rate for ebooks, plus you may be offered a higher royalty rate as your sales of the book increase.  You should ask the publisher for both.

So let’s do some quick math here:  Let’s say you get a $5,000 advance for your book and you get 10% royalties net profit, and the book’s list price is $25.00.  That means you are making $1.25 per book, and that you will need to sell 4,000 copies of your book just to break even.  Thus the averages say that you will never make a penny from royalties off sales of your book (earn out).  The average US non-fiction book sells about 250 copies a year and around 3,000 copies over its lifetime.

Scared yet?  We haven’t even covered the time commitment involved.

 

So how long does it take to write a book?

Publishers vary in how long they will give you to write a book.  Wiley and Que/Pearson seem to want most authors to spend 3-4 months on the actual writing process, then move to editing, etc (UPDATE:  Make sure you check the comments as QUE’s Katherine Bull chimes in with more information on how the writing process works for them).  One of the reasons I decided to go with McGraw-Hill was because they were willing to give me a bit more time to write TLARS, I actually ended up getting about 6 months to work on the writing until we moved to the editing process.  All told, the editing and writing of Think Like a Rock Star took nine months.

Here’s the big problem: The amount of your advance will not come close to covering the amount of time it will take you to write the book.  Let’s assume that you spend just 10 hours a week on writing your book, and that it takes you a total of 8 months to finish it.  That’s 320 hours you have invested in writing this book.  Assuming you get a $5,000 advance, that means your hourly rate for writing the book was $15.63.  For reference, I spent around 25 hours a week on TLARS, for 9 months.

So this brings up the obvious question: When are you going to find time to write this book?  If you already have a full-time job, then your nights and weekends are probably going to disappear for a few months.  If you work for yourself as I do, then you may have to make the tough decision to turn down some work in order to work on your book.  This is what I did.

Now another option is to bring on a co-author.  This halves the work for you, but of course it also halves the amount of the advance you get, and the amount you make from any royalties in the future.

 

But wait, what about marketing and promoting the book?

Yep, after the writing and editing is done (really it starts months before that), you then have to start marketing and promoting the book.  One thing I wanted to touch on is the quest to hit the bestseller lists that a lot of authors get excited about when writing a book.

The idea is this:  If you can sell enough copies of the book in one week (typically launch week is your best bet), then the book may qualify for bestseller lists.  How many copies you need to sell is a very vague and floating number, and can depend on several factors such as what other books are coming out during the same week. Medical books are generally difficult to sell now because there is a lot of information on the Internet on quality websites. In general it seems that at least 2,000-3,000 copies sold during one week is needed.   Since we’ve already established that the average non-fiction book doesn’t sell 3,000 copies over it’s lifetime, then you can work out the odds of your book hitting the bestsellers list.  IOW, if you don’t have 100,000 people on your mailing list, good luck.

This is where I really screwed up.  Now I started planning out my marketing for TLARS as soon as I started working on it a year ago.  I realized early in the process that this book likely wasn’t going to make any bestseller lists.  Again, I just don’t have a big enough platform to drive the needed sales in a concentrated period.  But, what I thought I would do is sell as many pre-orders as possible in the year leading up to the book’s launch.  Based on my research, I realized that Amazon will count all the pre-orders as ‘new sales’ during the launch week (or when they officially begin offering the book for sale).  So what I started doing last year was speaking and working in exchange for pre-orders!  For example, I might waive my speaking fee for this event, if they agree to pre-order 100 copies of TLARS.

My thinking was this:  Let’s say I sell 500 pre-orders of TLARS, and when the book launches in April, those 500 pre-orders will count as ‘new’ sales of the book, and push TLARS way up the sales rankings.  Unfortunately, it turns out I as dead wrong about how Amazon calculates sales.  The research on all of this seemed to be unclear about a few things, and one of them was how Amazon handles bulk sales.  So after months of accepting pre-orders instead of $$$, I finally found out that Amazon counts bulk orders as one sale.  For example, if you pre-order 100 copies of my book, Amazon will view it as if you only pre-ordered ONE copy, since the order is being placed on ONE credit card.

Which essentially meant in Amazon’s eyes I sold several hundred fewer copies than I actually did.  For reference, the book’s sales rank peaked at 20,600 on April 1st.  If the per-orders had each been counted as individual sales, the sales rank for the book would have likely been around 500 or less on launch.  Which would have driven many additional sales because it would have been featured far more prominently on the site, on the hot new releases lists, etc etc.  But live and learn.  The main reason I wanted to talk about trying to make the bestseller list is that it is really hard to do on your first book unless you have a huge promotional platform.

 

So then why in the world would anyone want to write a book?    

In my mind you don’t write a book to make money, you write a book to start a conversation.  You write a book because you have an idea that you are passionate about, that you want to share with the world.  If others find value in that idea, then you can make money indirectly off your book. I wrote Think Like a Rock Star because I wanted brands to learn how they could better create happy customers by learning how to be better marketers from rock stars. I wanted to give companies a complete blueprint for creating and launching a robust brand ambassador program, because there wasn’t a lot of information available on that topic.

The best way to approach writing a book is that you want to create something of value for others that will enable them to do something positive.  A book that will be a tool for them to help them reach their goals and have greater accomplishments.

If you can do all that, then the money will take care of itself.

UPDATE:  Getting some comments from others pointing out how a book gives you credibility and builds your awareness and how THAT leads to money for you.  All of this is completely correct BUT how you position your book is crucial.  If you are writing your book and at the same time thinking about how it will lead to bigger speaking fees and higher consulting rates for you, then it can easily impact your writing.  As Kathy was telling me when I was working on TLARS, ‘most of the things that authors add to their books to make them sound smart, makes the reader feel stupid’.  The point is if you are writing your book consciously as a tool to make more money, it’s probably going to make the book less valuable to the reader because it won’t be as focused on what’s best and valuable for the reader.

So write the book that helps the reader kick-ass at whatever they are doing, (like creating healthy meals for busy moms, or helping companies create amazing brand ambassador programs) and the money will take care of itself!