MackCollier.com

by

Introducing #ContentCircus!

Starting one week from today on December 8th, I will be launching a new Twitter chat called #ContentCircus! #ContentCircus will be focused on three areas:

  • Content Creation
  • Content Strategy
  • Content Execution

#ContentCircus will be every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. We will have a topic related to each of these three areas every month, and the last Tuesday of every month will be OPEN MIC, just like we had with #Blogchat!

Helping companies improve their content strategies and creation efforts is the work I love. I love teaching companies how to create content that resonates with customers, while also achieving desired business outcomes. And while I will always be partial to content created on blogs, content in 2020 takes on so many forms across so many tools and platforms. I think there’s an opportunity to create a robust Twitter chat with content as a focus that can benefit both content creators as well as the companies that hire and work with them.

So why not just bring back #Blogchat? 

I started #Blogchat on a whim in 2009 as a way to better catalog a Twitter conversation around a blogging question I asked on Twitter. It quickly grew into one of the first chats on Twitter. It WAS the first Twitter chat to monetize with a sponsor, and ended up being live at events like South By Southwest, Content Marketing World and Blogworld and New Media Expo. Companies such as Dell, Adobe, Club Med, Pilot Pen and others have sponsored #Blogchat. Every important thought leader in the blogging and digital space co-hosted #Blogchat during it’s 10-year run and at its height, #Blogchat was generating 25 Million impressions in one hour on Sunday nights!

#Blogchat soon took on a life of its own, and was a wonderful way to connect with new and emerging bloggers, and give them valuable guidance on how to improve their craft. You sense the ‘but’ is coming, right? But…my clients weren’t individual bloggers. So over time, the audience for #Blogchat and my desired audience began to become fractured. But I loved doing #Blogchat so much, and I felt an obligation to give back and do all I could to help bloggers become better bloggers. But over time, #Blogchat began to become a big time sink and other than sponsorships, I really could get enough money back from it to justify the time I needed to spend with the chat to continue its success.

So in 2019 I finally decided to end #Blogchat. But I didn’t end my love of Twitter chats. I still believe that chats are the best source of value on Twitter. And I always had in the back of my mind maybe I could bring #Blogchat back, at least for a one-shot.

Then one day it hit me: Why not do a Twitter chat focused on content? Boom! That would allow me to cover a topic that’s more in line with my desired client base and which would let me better promote my business services. Additionally, we could cover content creation using tools other than just blogs. So since the topic would be more closely aligned with my business, I could justify spending more time with the chat, to help it grow and be more valuable to as many content creators as possible.

What will be the focus of #ContentCircus?

The topics for #ContentCircus will all fall into 3 buckets; Content Strategy, Content Creation and Content Execution. In most months, we will have 4 Tuesdays, so 4 topics.  We will pick one topic from each of these buckets, and the 4th topic will be OPEN MIC, held on the last Tuesday of the month. OPEN MIC is something I started with #Blogchat. During OPEN MIC there is no set topic, everyone can discuss anything they want related to content. It’s a great chance for anyone to ask questions on content topics that we haven’t yet touched on.

We will also be focusing on these buckets as they relate to content tools and platforms as well.  For instance, we might talk about how to create more engagement on Twitter one month, and how to take better photos for Instagram the next month.

Over time, as the community grows, we will bring in co-hosts who are subject matter experts. One of the things I loved about seeing the #Blogchat community grow was that it gave me the opportunity to bring in popular thought leaders who could not only offer valuable insights to the #Blogchat community, but the exposure from co-hosting #Blogchat was also great for the co-hosts. A true wn-win.

And yes, we will have sponsors for #ContentCircus. Lining up sponsors honestly is not a concern at this point, that will take care of itself later on. As with #Blogchat, any sponsorships with #ContentCircus will be structured so they add value to the community, and aren’t a distraction.

So I’m excited about #ContentCircus and I’m looking forward to creating another community that can help others become better content creators. See you next Tuesday at 7pm Central on Twitter!

by

Toolbox Saturday: The Editorial Calendar Plugin

Welcome to the first edition of Toolbox Saturday! Every Saturday I will talk about a tool or technique you can use to make your blogging, content creation or social media efforts just a little more effective and efficient.

When I decided to ‘relaunch’ my blog, I wanted a plugin that would help me visualize the posts I have running for the rest of the week, and month.  Basically, I was hoping to find a plugin that would show me all the upcoming posts that were due to publish, on a calendar.

Luckily, that’s exactly what I found with the Editorial Calendar plugin.  Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for this blog in September:

At a glance, I can tell what my editorial calendar looks like.  I can see the first week is ready to go, and the remaining weeks still have work to do.  Also, I love how it lets me get a list on the right side of all the unscheduled post drafts I have ready to go.  Over the last 11 years of blogging here, I have started a lot of posts that never made it past the ‘draft’ stage. This gave me a way to see what all those drafts are.  Now granted. some of the older drafts covered topics and information that may have been relevant 5-10 years ago, but no longer was.  So those were scrapped, but I also found many great ideas that had been buried for years in my drafts section.

I’ve heard so many bloggers, the vast majority really, say that they have plenty of ideas for posts, they just don’t have the time to write. I have the opposite problem; I struggle to come up with ideas for content.  Once I figure out an idea for a post, the actual writing of the post takes no time at all. So anything that can help with the content creation process, I want to know more about it! I also assume that a lot of you, whether you are a blogger for your business or a content manager for your company, you have more time to pick up tips and tricks on the weekend. That’s why I wanted to run Toolbox Saturdays on the weekend, so more of you would have time to implement these tools and tips on your own blogs to help take your blogging efforts to the next level.

Hope everyone has a great weekend, see you on Monday!

 

PS: My buddy Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media asked me to pass along this link to take his blogger survey.  He’s been doing it the last few years now and it’s always interesting seeing the results.  I’ll share the results from this survey in a later post when they are ready!

by

Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage

Every interaction you have with a customer creates another interaction. And in this case, not engaging with the customer also counts as an interaction.

For instance, let’s say you eat at a particular restaurant and have a wonderful meal. You’re so happy with the experience that you decide to hop on Twitter and tell the restaurant directly.

If the restaurant never responds, how does that make you feel?  Unappreciated? Invisible? It probably leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth, right?

On the other hand, if they respond, it feels like they value you as a customer enough to take the time to thank you, right?

I am always talking about the idea of Rewarding the Beahavior You Want to Encourage. The idea is simple; when someone does something that you want them to do, you find a way to ‘reward’ them and encourage them to do it again. If someone compliments you, you thank them. If they buy your product, you go out of your way to communicate to them that they made a smart purchase decision.  If someone comments on your blog, you respond so they will do so again.

The idea is to validate the behavior that they just engaged in.

Every Sunday night I run #Blogchat, we’ve been having #Blogchat for almost 10 years now on Twitter. Every week, someone will mention that this is their first time attending #Blogchat.

I always always ALWAYS respond to this person directly and THANK them for coming to #Blogchat. This is because I appreciate them taking the time to come to #Blogchat, but also because I want them to RETURN! If you come to a Twitter chat and no one talks to you, you’re probably not coming back, right? I go out of my way to communicate to first-timers that I appreciate them showing up, and want them to return.

Julia tweeted it was her first time joining #Blogchat, I thanked her and let her know how much I appreciated her taking the time to join us.

When you respond to others, it also sends a message to everyone else. Notice that after I reply to Julia, Zarina does as well:

I made a point to welcome Zarina when she first joined #Blogchat as well, and now she’s helping me and welcoming new members as well! This sends a message to both Julia and Zarina that they made a smart decision in joining #Blogchat, that we are going to look out for them, and help them solve their blogging problems.

 

Think about what behaviors you want your readers, clients or customers to engage in. Maybe it’s commenting on a blog post, or subscribing to your newsletter, or buying a product. In fact, let’s just run through each right now and how you can ‘reward’ that behavior.

Commenting on a blog post – This the behavior you want your readers to engage in. So how do you ‘reward’ that behavior? The most obvious way, is by RESPONDING to their comment. People leave a comment because they want other people to REACT to it. By responding, you validate to that person why they left the comment to begin with.  You ‘reward’ them with a respond and that makes them feel good about leaving the comment to begin with. It also increases the chance that they will comment AGAIN, and it communicates to everyone else that if they leave a comment, they will probably get a reply as well.

Subscribing to your newsletter –  Often when you subscribe to a newsletter, you soon find out that it’s not as valuable as you hoped it would be. So there’s a sense of ‘buyer’s remorse’. What I’ve done with my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter is I help subscribers immediately see value from the newsletter. I’ve created an email trigger funnel for new subscribers, so as soon as they subscribe, over the following 5 days, they get a total of 4, daily emails that are packed with in-depth advice on how to create and cultivate fans of their brand. This is the ‘reward’ for these subscribers engaging in the behavior that I wanted to encourage. It communicates to them that they made a smart decision in subscribing to my newsletter.

Buying a product – ‘Buyer’s remorse’ can be literal here, especially as the cost of the purchase increases. You can offset these feelings and make the buyer feel smarter about the purchase by making customer support available to them post-purchase and by staying in contact with them to make sure they know precisely how to use their new products and that they fully understand how to use all its features. Often, customers simply aren’t aware how to use a new product correctly, and if they figure out how to use the product correctly, it can greatly increase their satisfaction with the product.

 

Remember, a big part of rewarding the behavior you want to encourage comes from making the person feel SMART about engaging in the behavior that you ultimately want to encourage. If they feel smart, then they will probably have positive thoughts about interacting with you and/or your company.

by

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.

by

How to Republish Your Old Posts Like a Rock Star

Republishing old blog posts has become increasingly popular among bloggers over the last few years. I’ve been doing this for about a year now, and I’ve seen spectacular results. I use a specific system for republishing my old blog posts, and I wanted to share that system with you.

I’ve often talked about how you can greatly improve your content creation efforts by thinking like a rock star. In fact, one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written focuses on adopting a rock star’s mindset to your content creation and marketing efforts. So let’s further think like a rock star when it comes to republishing our old blog posts.

Find Your Greatest Hits

Every rock star who has been successful eventually has a ‘greatest hits’ album. Let’s say you are a fan of Soundgarden, and wanted to introduce your friend to the legendary Seattle band. You may decide to give them a greatest hits album from the band.

In much the same way, you as a blogger should have a collection of ‘Greatest Hits’ posts. If someone was new to your blog and wanted to learn what topics you write about and are known for, what 10 blog posts would you show them? These 10 blog posts are your blogging ‘Greatest Hits’. And if you haven’t been blogging very long, you can go with your best 3 posts or best 5 posts. The point is to focus on your BEST work, the posts that you want to be known for, the posts that advance the ideas, thoughts and beliefs that you want to be associated with and known for.

I started doing this last year with this blog. I went through my archives and found several posts that I thought represented my best work. I then whittled that list down to my 10 ‘best’ posts. These are the posts that I want to be known for and the ones that I want to promote and see be more successful.

Your Greatest News, Now Remastered! 

Rock stars don’t just collect their greatest hits and resell them on a new album. They spice them up.  They remaster them to improve the sound quality, they repackage them with additional information on how the songs were writtten, etc. All of this improves the quality of the songs and makes them more interesting and appealing to fans.

In much the same way, you should ‘remaster’ your best blog posts. Here’s the checklist I went through with each of my greatest hits posts:

First, I selected my list of 10 posts that I would republish. Then, I scrubbed the posts for any outdated information. Are there broken links? Old videos from YouTube that are no longer hosted there? Next I see if there’s any outdated information or stats that need to be updated. Basically, I start with making sure that everything in the post as it stands now is still useful. Anything that isn’t, gets stripped out.

Then, I see what I can add. Are there any new studies or research that’s been done on this topic? Has my thinking evolved or have I learned something new that I could add to the post? By combining both these steps, I’m stripping out outdated information that no longer has value, and I’m adding in new information. The end result is that the overall quality of the post is improved.

Finally, I ask what is the ‘bigger idea’ behind this post? What’s it about? What core topic am I wanting to discuss, and am I doing this as well as I can? Remember, these 10 ‘greatest hits’ posts are supposed to represent the core ideas, themes and beliefs that I hold dear. I also look at the post headline, and the post itself to make sure I am targeting the right keywords that are associated with the concepts I want to discuss. For example, if my post is about brand ambassador programs, then the keyword phrase ‘brand ambassador programs’ needs to be in the post headline if at all possible.

But Mack, Can’t I Just Change the Date and Call it a Day?

You can, but I wouldn’t advise it. Remember, these 10 posts are supposed to be examples of your best work. If all you can do is change the date of publication to today, is this really a topic you should be writing about? If I’ve written a post that covers a topic I am actually knowledgeable about, I can always find something new to add and a way to improve the post.

Having said that, changing the date of a post to make the post ‘newer’ will typically improve your search rankings alone. Google wants to serve the most relevant and RECENT content to its users. If I’ve written a post on creating an incredible content strategy from 2010 and you’ve written a similar post from 2015, your post will typically be higher in search results for terms related to ‘content strategy’. So it’s my job to improve and update my post, and make sure it has better content than yours.  Then I can update my post and give it a 2018 date, and guess what? My post will now show up higher in search results than yours. As it should, if my content is better and more recent than yours, it will and should be higher in search results.

And Here’s the Results….

Last year I used this process to update several of my older posts that I wanted to be known as some of my ‘best’ work.

One post I updated last Summer was this post on Red Bull’s content strategy and why it’s so successful. So to see how my efforts are working, let’s compare traffic to this post during 2018 so far, compared to Jan 1st-April 15th of 2017:

It’s a bit hard to see, but the blue lines represent pageviews this year, the orange lines represent pageviews for this same time period in 2017. That’s an increase in Pageviews of almost 400%, mostly from doing one update and refresh of this post, which was originally published in 2013. Not bad, right?

Here’s another example: this post: 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program. Like the Red Bull post, I updated this one last Summer. Here’s the traffic this year compared to the same period last year:

This post has ‘only’ had a 233% increase in pageviews, but notice that the increase was from 1,142 pageviews last year to 3,811 pageviews so far this year. But what I’m most proud about is that fact that this post now typically ranks on the first page of search results for the term ‘brand ambassador program’. For most of last year the post ranked in the Top 20 for that term, now it’s in the Top 10. This is huge for my business as helping companies launch brand ambassador programs is one of the key consulting services I offer.

And even though both these posts are doing great, when I do my next update on my ‘greatest hits’ blog posts, you better believe I am going to again update both these posts. Every time I do, the quality and comprehensiveness of the post is improved, which makes it more valuable to readers, and helps it rank higher in search engines.  Which drives even more traffic to the post.

 

So go through your blog’s archives today, and find your 10 posts that are your greatest hits. These are the 10 blog posts that you want to be known for, the posts that cover the topics you want to be associated with. Update these posts, don’t just give them a new date, scrub the posts, remove any errors, grammatical or fact-based. Then add any new information that you think improves the quality of the post. This can include new studies, new research, etc. Also, consider adding new visual elements, such as updating the pictures used, or adding videos.

The end result should be that you have improved the quality of your content, and that will increase traffic to your blog and to that content.  As a bonus tip: Regularly promote these 10 ‘greatest hits’ posts of yours on social media. I have my 10 greatest hits posts, and I am constantly sharing links to these posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The reason why is simple: I want to remind people that they should associate me with the topics of these posts.

Finally, check out ProBlogger’s recent post on republishing your old posts and why it’s a good idea.

 

by

The Secret to Getting More Engagement on Our Blogs That We’ve All Forgotten

From 2006-2011, I did a weekly ‘Top 25’ list of the best marketing blogs on my first blog The Viral Garden. Yesterday, I was doing some maintenance on The Viral Garden, and I found a Top 25 list I did back in December of 2007.

Ten years ago! When I saw the list, I was immediately curious to see how many of the blogs were still around and active, ten years later.  Most of them had either ‘died’ years ago, or had moved to a new URL, a couple had apparently let the hosting for the domain lapse and someone else had taken it over. BTW, props to Valeria, her blog Conversation Agent is still going strong, looks to be even more prolific today than it was 10 years ago!

I spent probably two hours clicking the links and reading the blogs, several of which I hadn’t visited in years. It was a very interesting digital trip down memory lane. Putting my Content Strategist hat on, I immediately noticed several differences in the content being created on these blogs 10 years ago versus today:

  • Shorter posts. There weren’t a lot of 1,500-word posts floating around in 2007. In fact most where a few hundred words, if that.  Short, and to the point.
  • There were few ‘How-To’ posts. There was little, if any teaching and instructive content. I have a theory on why this is the case, and I’ll get to it in a minute.
  • No ‘Listicle’ posts. You know, “Ten Steps to Building a Better Blog” or “Five Ways to Improve Your Digital Presence Today!”

But what really struck me about the content being created on these blogs 10 years ago was the tone. Most of these blogs were written as if the blogger was talking to no more than 30 people. Because they probably weren’t! I think back to my own experiences blogging around this time, and there were many days when I wouldn’t crack 100 visitors. But the flipside was, I knew most of the people who visited my blog, because they were commenting on my blog!

And when you are writing for people that you know, and people who know you, you write differently. Remember I said that most bloggers in 2007 didn’t write ‘How-To’ or ‘Listicle’ type posts.  Instead, they mostly wrote ‘Here’s what happened to me today’ type posts, with a business slant or moral behind the post. But when you write in that way, it’s much more ‘folksy’, and it makes you much more relateable.

One of the constant complaints I hear from bloggers in #Blogchat, from clients who blog, is “No one ever comments on my blog anymore!” We know why some of this happens; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social sites are fragmenting conversations. Most bloggers and their readers weren’t using these sites in 2007, so as a result, social conversations were still mostly happening on blogs. Over the years, as these sites grew, we started to spend more time off our blogs, which meant our social interactions followed us.

Sidenote: Back in those days I had a ‘trick’ I would use to get more blogging readers. A decade ago, Technorati would list all the blogs (or it tried to) by their number of links. And you could sort them so that the list would be ascending or descending. I would sort the list of blogs so that it was ascending, meaning that it showed me the blogs that had few or no links, first. My thinking was that the blogs with few or no links were probably brand new bloggers, so I wanted to check them out and comment as often as I could, to help them get going and also to get on their radars so they would start reading and commenting on my blog! One day, I found a particular business blog with few or no links, and I clicked over and started reading the blog. It had about 5 or 6 posts, the first five were strictly business focused, on a particular topic, all written in a very textbooky tone. None of them them got any comments. Then the ‘newest’ post was simply the blogger asking “Why in the world isn’t anyone commenting?!?  I keep writing posts, putting a lot of effort into them and no one comments!”  That was the last post on that blog, the post was about 3-4 months old by the time I saw it, and I remember thinking “I just saw this blog die”. That’s always stuck with me, for whatever reason.

But looking back at these ‘old’ blogs from 2007 and such, I’m reminded of the role that the tone of our blog posts plays in driving engagement. Or, how the tone used can stifle engagement. Remember I said that I saw few ‘How-To’ or ‘Listicle’ posts on these blogs from 2007 years ago. Now, these are all the rage on blogs, but think about why that is. These types of posts are written to EXPAND your audience. They are written to help more people, many of which you don’t know. So you write in a tone that’s more formulaic and impersonal. This makes your message more accessible to a larger audience, but it also makes your message less engaging, in a way.

I want to illustrate how this applies to one of my favorite blogs from 10 years ago, Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. Kathy’s blog was always brain candy to me, but even though she had a massive audience, her blog always felt welcoming and engaging in a way that I never really understood. As I was reading these old blog posts from 2007, I noticed that one of the blogs had Creating Passionate Users on their blogroll (remember those?), so I clicked over and started reading Kathy’s blog. I was immediately struck by the tone! She wrote in a way that made it seem like she knew all her readers and was just chatting with us at a bookstore and having a casual conversation just with us. It made her content much more interesting, and engaging, even if I didn’t realize why at the time.

So if you want to write to expand your audience and to establish your expertise, the ‘How-To’ posts and really any content that teaches a skill is a good idea.

But if you want to increase engagement, if you want to get more comments and interaction, do like we used to do in the ‘old days’ of blogging; Write like you only have 30 readers, and you know who each of them are.

Try it! It really does change the way you write, doesn’t it?

by

How Do You Blog Every Day For 1,000 Straight Days?

UPDATE! Here’s the transcript for this #Blogchat!

One of the biggest challenges bloggers face is creating content on a regular basis. In fact, an inability to create content regularly is probably the biggest reason why most blogs fail.  Creating content regularly is very difficult, even for seasoned bloggers.  I’ve been blogging ever since 2005, and I still struggle with creating content regularly.

So in February of 2015, Helen started her blog, Anchored Scraps. Her blog is all about encouraging letter writing, old-style correspondence. She uses technology to connect with other kindred letter writing enthusiasts. On Tuesday, she will hit an incredible milestone: She will have published a daily blog post for 1,000 straight days! Writing 1,000 blog posts is a fantastic accomplishment for any blogger, but to do so daily for almost 3 years is incredible.  Helen is a longtime participant in #Blogchat, so I invited her to share her advice on how to write a blog post for 1,000 straight days.

Helen will join us tonight at 8pm Central at #Blogchat. Please follow her on Twitter.

Here’s our topic: How Do You Blog Every Day For 1,000 Straight Days?

Questions (These will start at 8:00 with a new one asked every 10 mins:

Q1 – Why did you decide you wanted to write a new blog post every day?
Q2 – How do you find enough ideas for posts to blog every day?
Q3 – What tool (digital or analog) has helped you the most in creating daily content for your blog?
Q4 – How has blogging every day impacted your blog’s engagement and traffic?
Q5 – What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had about blogging everyday that you didn’t realize when you started?
Q6 – If someone wanted to start blogging every day like you have, what would be your best piece of advice for them?

 

Also, here’s a talk Helen gave earlier this year on blogging every day for 900 days! Life comes at you fast!

I hope you’ll join us tonight at 8PM as this is a wonderful chance to learn from Helen how to blog every single day!  Please follow Helen on Twitter, and also check out her blog, Anchored Scraps.  If you’ve never joined #Blogchat, here’s what it’s all about.

by

Extra Space Storage is #Blogchat’s Sponsor for October 1st!

UPDATE: Here’s the transcript from last night’s #Blogchat!

SECOND UPDATE: Extra Space has published this wonderful recap of this #Blogchat on their blog.  Check it out, it really gets into everything we covered, so awesome!

This Sunday (Oct 1, 2017), Extra Space Storage will be joining #Blogchat as its sponsor!  I’m thrilled they are on board and love their topic selection!  We’ll be discussing “How to Be a Better Blogger By Creating a Better Blogging Workspace”.  I love this topic because in all the 9 years of doing #Blogchat, we’ve somehow never discussed the physical organization of the space we each write and blog in.

#Blogchat begins at 8pm Central, this Sunday.  Here’s the questions we’ll cover:

8:00pm – 8:10pm – Q1: What does your primary blogging/writing workspace look like?

8:10pm – 8:20pm – Q2: Which spaces or areas in your home inspire your creativity when writing?

8:20pm – 8:30pm – Q3: What style elements make a blogging workspace more productive? Being organized? Lighting? Location? Quiet?

8:30pm – 8:40pm – Q4: What are your best tips for maximizing a small writing space?

8:40pm – 8:50pm – Q5: What has been the most important change you’ve made to your writing space that improved your productivity?

8:50pm – 9:00pm – Q6: What advice do you have for maximizing productivity while writing blog content from home?

 

I think this will be a wonderfully informative #Blogchat as how you organize your writing/blogging space is so important to improving your productivity as a blogger.  I’m sure we’ll all have plenty of tips and tricks to share on how to better organize our spaces, and I bet @ExtraSpace will have some ideas as well!

So please join us this Sunday at 8pm Central for #Blogchat, sponsored by Extra Space Storage!  And please follow @ExtraSpace on Twitter, and check out their blog, Spacewise!

Does your company want to sponsor #Blogchat on a weekly or monthly basis? Here’s all the details you need, email me at [email protected] to reserve!

by

How to Make Your Blog Relevant

When you start blogging, whether it’s for yourself or your employer, you want the blog to be relevant.  You want it to stand out and be recognized by readers as a valuable source of information.  Last night at #Blogchat we discussed this topic, and I wanted to share some thoughts here.  If I was starting a new blog in 2017 and wanted to make it relevant, these are the steps I would take:

1 – Define your desired audience.  Know who it is you want to reach, and why you are trying to reach them.

2 – Understand where this group is CURRENTLY getting its information from. What blogs and sites are they reading? What type of content are they looking for? In short, what is relevant to them?

3 – Start reading the sites they read, and start writing about the same content.  Once you know what is relevant to your audience, then you can create it for them.

4 – Start reading the sites your audience reads, and start commenting on those sites. This gets your readers familiar with seeing you and your thoughts on the sites they view as being credible. This not only drives traffic to your blog, it also helps make you credible and relevant in the eyes of your desired audience.  When I started blogging in 2005, I wrote every day. I figured the quickest way to get readers was to blog more. So I was a sponge, I wrote every day, and every day I read marketing and advertising blogs to get ideas for posts and to stay up to date on the space. As I would read these blogs, I would occasionally find an article I liked, and I would comment on it.

I kept writing every day on my blog, and nothing was happening. No traffic, no comments, nothing. Then one day, the floodgates opened.  My traffic started growing, and I started getting comments! On every post! I was thrilled, but at the same time, I was confused; Why was I suddenly getting traffic AND comments? I had no idea, till one day, someone left a comment and said “Hey Mack, coming here to leave you a comment since you left a comment on my blog!”  That’s when the light bulb went off…I went and checked and everyone that had started leaving comments on my blog were bloggers that *I* had commented on their blog first! It worked in 2005, it still works today, so get out there and be social!

5 – Take a stand, share your voice. Readers want to read blogs that are written in a passionate voice. We are drawn to passionate writing, it’s more interesting to us. Obviously, if you are writing for an employer, you want to be mindful of your company’s blogging or social media policy, but you can still share your opinions in a passionate and constructive way.

6 – Put in the work and don’t be afraid to ‘act’ bigger than you are. I started blogging in 2005, and one of the first posts I wrote as a series on how female rock stars were marketing themselves. I thought that a great companion piece to the posts would be if I could convince someone in marketing at a major record label to let me interview them.  Again, I was a new blogger so I thought what the hell. I emailed every record label I could find. None of them even answered me, except for Nettwerk, and eventually I got an interview with Terry McBride, who at the time was the manager for both Avril Lavigne and Sarah MacLachlan. Not bad, eh? But if I had thought ‘well I’m just a lowly blogger that no one knows, I can’t email record labels!’, I would have never gotten that interview. You never know till you ask.

7 – Ignore anyone that tells you that you can’t be a big-shot. One thing I learned the hard way is that social media can be just like high school. If you start doing well, you’ll start to draw criticism. Almost always, this criticism will come from people that are afraid you are getting ‘bigger’ than they are, and they are jealous. When I announced I was writing Think Like a Rock Star in 2013, a few people lashed out. They said I didn’t deserve a book, that it was a dumb topic, that I wasn’t an ‘expert’ on the topic. These few people had one thing in common: None of them had written a book yet, and all of them wanted to. Take criticism as a sign that you are being successful and growing. No one criticizes the unknown blogger!

8 – Act like your blog is relevant, because it is. Cover the space that’s interesting to your audience. Talk about where your industry is headed, don’t just react to existing opinions, share your own. This is also how you become a thought leader. The truth about thought leader is that it’s not about the people that walk the same road as everyone else, it’s about the people that clear a path for the rest of us.

 

So there’s some tips on how to make your blog relevant. If you want to review the transcript from last night’s #Blogchat, here it is.

by

I’m Letting You Off the Hook; You Don’t Have to Blog As Much Anymore

UPDATE: Here’s the transcript from this #Blogchat.

If you’re a business and you’re blogging every day, then you’re doing it wrong. I know, I know, for years the conventional wisdom was that in order to build readership for a blog, especially if it’s a business blog, you needed to blog as often as possible.

And that advice worked well, 10 years ago. Unfortunately, now every social media site had become a content stream. The News or Home feed on most major sites like Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn, are a constant stream of links being shared.

Here’s the problem: If your writing team is hustling to write multiple posts a week, you’re probably creating a lot of mediocre content simply due to time constraints.  That mediocre content is then competing against a sea of equally mediocre content in a sea of link-sharing on those social sites.

Nothing gets lost on social media sites faster than mediocre content. What IS getting shared these days is long-form content. More specifically, long-form content that does a deep-dive on a particular topic.  And research shows that the longer your content is, the more social shares it generates:

Average Shares by Content Length

Yesterday, the goal was to get out 2-3 posts every week, each one fairly short, 300-500 words. Today, the goal is to get out 1-2 posts a month, each one 1,000-2,000 words.  Think about the time you spend each month writing 3-4 posts. What if you spent that time on writing one comprehensive post?  How much better would that content be if you had more time for research, editing and production? How many more pageviews and social shares would it get? Let me tell you, nothing is more frustrating for a blogger to write post after post and never see the needle move.

I’ve seen this with my own blog. A couple of years ago I started occasionally writing longer posts, and these posts almost always did better as far as traffic and social shares than the shorter posts I would sometimes write.  Now, if I write a post that isn’t at least 1,000 words, I wonder if there wasn’t something that I left out or additional information that I could have included.

Now this isn’t to say that you should stop writing multiple posts every week.  If that approach is working for you, then by all means stick with it.  NEVER change what you are doing if it is working for you. I don’t care how many ‘experts’ tell you otherwise.  It’s fine to experiment and be open to new ideas, but never change what’s working for you just because it’s ‘conventional wisdom’ of the moment. But if your current efforts to write 2-3 posts a week aren’t working, then I would suggest you consider spending that time on writing fewer, more comprehensive posts.

But wait, there’s more!

Now it’s not enough to simply write fewer posts, that are longer. What we’re talking about is shifting your content strategy. You want to transition from writing many posts that give a quick, superficial coverage of a general topic, to long-form deep dives of fewer topics that are the cornerstone of your business. I’ve written before about planting your content flag and finding the 2-3 things that you want to be known for. The great thing about longer content is that it helps you really drill down into topics that are core to your business. This helps you establish your expertise around these topics, and makes it easier for your readers to associate those topics with your business.

In addition to writing longer, more comprehensive posts, you also want to beef up your promotional efforts for those posts. You want to invest more time in custom graphics for those posts, or even custom videos. For example, I used Lumen5 to create a custom video for my last post on using millennials in your brand ambassador program. That allows me to also post the video on YouTube, and there link back to the post. Check out how UnBounce even created a custom pop-up graphic for one of its more popular posts.

But I don’t like promoting my posts, it feels so….icky!

Here’s the deal: If you are creating truly great content that is USEFUL to your readers than you OWE it to them to share that content. It’s not about helping you, it’s about helping THEM. Share the content and tell your network why it will help them. One of the great ironies of social media is that it seems like bad content gets promoted too much, and great content isn’t promoted enough.

Also, despite what social sites tell you, very few people actually ‘follow’ you. I have around 46k people currently ‘following’ me on Twitter, and each time I share this post, I will be lucky if 1% of that number actually sees each share. Which is why I don’t mind repeatedly sharing my best posts on social media, because I know that most people following my updates won’t see the post being shared more than once.

So if your current blogging strategy is to write multiple posts and week, and that approach is NOT working, then try this:

1 – Write fewer posts, that are longer, deeper dives into topics.

2 – Pick topics that are core to your business. What do you want to be known for? Blog about these topics, and related ones.

3 – Don’t think of it as writing blog posts, think of it as writing a comprehensive ‘guide’ to that topic.

4 – Work on custom graphics for the posts. In general, more visual elements equals more social shares.

5 – Feel free to promote your posts.  You’ve created amazing content, you will be doing your audience a dis-service if you aren’t sharing it with them.

 

Want more ideas? We’ll be discussing this very topic this Sunday night (7-16-2017) at #Blogchat on Twitter.  For now, here’s the custom infographic I created for this post on The Rock Star’s Guide to Content Creation, Content Marketing and Promotion.