MackCollier.com

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Why I Turned Off Comments

The short answer is that I want to focus more on my writing for the time being. The longer answer is that conversations about and around blog posts are incredibly fractured, and have been for about a decade. One of the great things about blogging from 2005-2010 was the amazing conversations that could happen in the comments section of a post. Blog comments are typically more in-depth and fleshed out, than comments you see on social media, which tend to be more like soundbytes. Before social media sites like Facebook and Twitter went mainstream, blogs were where the commenting action was at. And great comments led to more great comments, and before you knew it, there was a long discussion happening in the comments section that ended up being more valuable than the post itself. In fact, in the early blogging days I always had the goal of writing a post that led to a discussion in the comments section that was more interesting than the post itself.

I’ll write about this more next week, but I think in many ways, social media has hurt our ability to communicate more than it has helped.  And I think that’s readily apparent when you look at the comment section of most blogs. The volume of comments is down sharply across the board. Yet the funny thing is, spam comments keep chugging right along.  So if you are a blogger, you begin to realize that a lot of your comment moderation time is now spent just dealing with spam, whereas a few years ago, it was quite easy to lose a couple of hours a day responding to wonderful comments on your blog. Many prominent bloggers have already dropped comments for this reason alone.

Another reason why I’ve decided to turn off comments is because when I decided to recommit to blogging, one of the promises I made to myself was that I would give myself permission to write about more topics that I want to write about.  It won’t all pertain to marketing, business or anything related, as I talked about yesterday. I quite honestly want the freedom to write about what I want to write about without having to worry about some person who has never read this blog before commenting and saying I am an idiot simply for taking a stance they don’t like. Once I’ve been blogging again for a few weeks, I may decide to reopen comments, we’ll see how it goes.

But I do want to hear from you, and my email is always open, and you can always find me on Twitter.  Although I will admit, I am spending less time there. Again, more on that here in one week.

 

BONUS:  I’ll be joining my good friend Kelly Hungerford tomorrow at #SEMrushChat on Twitter to discuss matching your content creation to your marketing funnel.  Hope to see you there!

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Individuality is Fine, as Long as We All Do it Together

I was going through my WordPress app on my phone (BTW if you publish with WordPress, you really need this app, it’s great to keep up with your site, especially when you’re mobile), and came across this world map while checking my stats. This shows every country in the world that sent a visitor to this site in 2017. As you can see, almost every country in the world had at least one visitor come here in 2017.

I think we sometimes lose track of just what an amazing communications tool a blog can be. When I first started blogging in 2005, one of the very first people that linked to my blog (tracked with Technorati, anyone remember them?) was a 13 year-old girl in China. That opened my eyes to the enormous power of a blog to spread your message on a truly global scale.

The reality is, we’ve given up on the promise of blogging. Blogs give everyone a voice. As long as you have access to the internet and the blogging platform, you can share your voice with the world.

But over time, instead of sharing our unique voices, perspectives and personalities, we’ve become better at sounding like everyone else. We study blogging ‘best practices’ and try to ‘improve’ our writing to increase engagement, stats and visitors. It’s enticing, but if you aren’t careful, we all end up sounding like everyone else.

I’m just as guilty of it as anyone. I tell myself I can’t talk about certain topics here or in a certain way, because I always have to be mindful of who my audience is, and what they want.

But lost in that, is the fact that your audience wants to know YOU. They want to hear your unique take, your personality. They want to see something different, that’s how you catch attention. And if the content is good, then you hold it.

I love reading business success stories, learning how a particular company came out of nowhere to stand out in a crowded marketplace. More often than not, the founder or CEO’s explanation for what worked is simply “I zigged, when everyone else zagged”.

Here’s to more ‘zagging’ in the year ahead.  And a gold-star to whoever can be the first to tell me what TV character said the title of this post.

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Understanding the Tool Doesn’t Help If You Don’t Understand Your People

I’ve often been told that I could make a nice career for myself just by advising companies how to start and maintain a blog and social media channels. I sometimes do such consulting, but not that often. One of the reasons why is because too many companies are focused on learning the social media tools moreso than learning to understand the customers they want to reach via social media. They want to talk about what is the best CMS, what’s the best way to schedule and automate content distribution. What’s the best way to tweak a tool’s settings to get more engagement and shares?

It really gets to be depressing sometimes.

Understand yourself, and your audience first, then you can focus on the tools. Too many companies focus on the tools and ignore their customers, which defeats the purpose.

Start by asking and answering these questions:

1 – Who am I creating content for?

2 – What impact will that content make on their daily lives?

3 – What action do I want these people to take after interacting with my content?

 

Notice those questions are focused on the audience for your content and have nothing to do with the tools you could use to reach that audience.

Know your audience first, then that will help you understand which tools you can best use to reach them. THEN you can dig into understanding the tools.  But it makes no sense to learn the nuts and bolts of Twitter, if your audience is on Pinterest.

BONUS: Understand yourself. How do YOU like to communicate with your audience? The content you create has to be interesting to your audience, but it also has to interest you. Granted, this is more of an issue for a solopreneur or maybe an executive versus a team, but the fact remains that if the content creator doesn’t enjoy the process, it will be more difficult for them to create their best content. If you love writing and your audience is reading blog, write a blog. If you think better on the fly and are comfortable in front of a camera, look at shooting videos. Or if you can better explain yourself by talking, but hate being on video, try a podcast.

The point is, understand who your audience is and what you are comfortable doing before you even consider which tool is best. The people decide the tools, not the other way around.

 

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How to Write Great Blog Comments

Writing better blog comments
Are you a commenting superhero?

Blogs are sexy again. As we move away from social media sites and toward a more decentralized social web experience, people and businesses are devoting more time to their blogs as a way to connect with readers and potential customers. If you’re devoting more time to your blog, don’t forget to focus on writing better blog comments. Whether you are replying to a reader on your own blog or leaving a comment on someone else’s blog, commenting is one of the best ways you can connect with new readers/customers, and build exposure for your business. Let’s talk about how to write great comments whether it’s on another blog, or on your own.

 

How to Write Great Blog Comments on Other Blogs

One of the best ways to grow your blog, is to leave it. What I mean by this is leaving comments on other blogs is a great way to create value for others, and ultimately grow awareness for your own blogging efforts. This is especially helpful for new bloggers that are looking to build a readership or following as compared to established bloggers.

But not all blog comments are created equal, and here’s some of the tips I’ve learned over the years for writing great blog comments:

1 – Add something to the conversation. Often I will read a post and think ‘wow, great post!’ But go past that, highlight issues that the blogger addressed, and add your own take. You don’t have to agree completely, and you don’t have to stick with their point. If one example they mentioned reminds you of another instance from your own experiences, mention that. But try to avoid simply repeating what others have said. And this is easier to do when you…

2 – Comment early. Sure it’s nice to let a few people comment first, so then you can build off what they say, as well as the blogger’s post. But what if you wait too long and everyone has addressed the points you wanted to raise? Don’t be afraid to put your thoughts down and to share your opinions. This is how you generate conversation and attention.

3 – Don’t over-promote yourself. No one likes reading a comment that’s blatant self-promotion.  We’ve all seen these comments, “Hey Mack, really great thoughts on this topic, I recently blogged about this as well…”, then they include a link to their blog (In fact, I often delete these comments if someone attempts to leave one here). Obviously, the only reason they left the comment was to link out to their site. Remember that you aren’t leaving the comment to promote yourself, you are trying to create value for the blog by adding to the conversation. If you’ve done your job, you’ll get promotion as an indirect result of your efforts.

4 – You can disagree, without being disagreeable. I might be a bit different from some in how I approach disagreements in the comments section, but I love it when readers disagree with my posts, and challenge my points. The biggest reason why, is because when you bring in alternative points, that extends the conversation and gives more people a chance to jump and leave their point of view.

However, always remember that it’s ok to ‘attack’ the ideas, but not the people presenting the ideas. Challenging stances and ideas are fine, but personal attacks add nothing to the conversation, and make you look like a jackass. Not what you want. Feel free to disagree, but don’t be disagreeable.

5 – Ask questions. What if you find a post and agree with the post, and everything the commenters have said. Now what? Why not ask a question or bring up a point that no one has raised yet? One thing that often happens, especially on blogs where the writer is very popular, is the readers may all agree with the writer. Why not offer a contrarian view and bring up the other side of the issue? Again, this helps extend the conversation, and you might find that others will then chime in saying that they agree with your point of view.

6 – Know why you are commenting. Are you leaving a comment to draw attention to yourself, or to add to the conversation? As with most everything else in social media, blog comments work best as a way to INdirectly promote yourself. Write a comment that others find value in, and that encourages others to check out your blog, follow you on Twitter, etc. Write a comment that was clearly intended to promote your blog, and you will likely gain nothing, and hurt your reputation.

 

How to Write Great Blog Comments on Your Own Blog (And Tips For Leveraging Great Blog Comments Left By Your Readers)

So that covers how to write great blog comments on someone else’s blog, but how do you handle blogs written on your own site?

My over-arching rule for comments on your own blog is Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage. If your blog allows readers to comment, then you want readers to comment.  So if commenting is the reader behavior that you want, then you need to think about what you can do to encourage more readers to comment. Here’s some of my tips:

1 – Reply to as many comments as possible. If a reader comments on your blog, you want to reply to that comment if at all possible. This signals to the reader that you read their comment, and that you appreciate their comment enough to take the time to respond to them. This also ENCOURAGES this reader to comment again, since they know you will reply to them if they do.

2 – Ask the reader to expand on their thoughts. If a reader has left an indepth comment, then feel free to engage them in your reply and ask them to clarify or expand on a point they raised in their comment. This doesn’t always work as the reader that left the original comment may not see your reply to them or they may not feel like replying. Still, by replying to the commenter you are signaling to them and all your readers that you value their comment and that encourages your readers to comment more often.

3 – Add great reader comments to the body of the post they are commenting on. This is a great way to acknowledge and thank your reader for a great comment, and it encourages them to comment again. If a reader leaves a comment that I want to highlight, I will add it to the end of the post (or in another part of the post, if relevant), and make special mention of the comment, and the person who left the comment.  If the commenter added a link to their blog when they commented, I will add a link to their blog when I add the comment to my post, as an extra incentive for the readers to comment more often, as well as an additional way to acknowledge and thank the reader for their great comment. Also, doing this encourages readers to check out the comments and may encourage them to leave their own comment.

 

These are some tips I have learned from my own experience in writing blog comments. What did I miss that works for you?

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What’s Next For Blogging? Delivering Personalized Content Based on Visitor Intent

Recently I’ve been discussing how blogging will have a bit of a Renaissance soon as users move away from a centralized experience (social media sites like Twitter and Facebook) and back to a decentralized experience (like blogging). I believe blogging will become popular again as we look for ways to better gain control of the data we share and the content we create. Additionally, the functionality of blogs has continued to increase and improve. Ten years ago, blogs were little more than a writing area and one sidebar. Now, you can completely customize a blog’s layout and functionality so that the line between blog and high-end website is completely blurred.

But one area where blogs have lagged a bit is in providing personalized content to each visitor. Every visitor is different and is looking for different content for different reasons. What blogging platforms and technology need to improve upon is taking visitor signals and translating that into intent and creating the content that the visitor expects. This can be done at a source level such as social media vs search, or based on search terms. Or it could change based on the landing page/post.

This is already happening a bit, I’ve been tinkering with a couple of plugins that attempt to address the content customization issue. The first is Thrive Leads (affiliate link). It lets me control where my newsletter signup popup appears. For example, I wrote a few posts in 2012 on how to write and publish a book. These posts are very popular among aspiring authors, and I get a ton of search traffic to both of them. But most of the people that would read these posts are not the potential clients that I would want subscribing to my newsletter, so Leads lets me turn off the newsletter popup on those pages, so I won’t get subscribers from those posts.

Another plugin I’ve been experimenting with is Clever Widgets (affiliate link). Clever Widgets allows you to customize the widgets that are displayed for every post or page. So if someone visits a particular sales page, you can customize the widget areas on that page to either complete the sale, or give more information about the product, or even include a live chat widget to attempt to close the sale. Or if someone visits your blog’s homepage where your latest posts are, you could serve up widgets that are designed to encourage them to become a subscriber, or view your most popular posts.

As you can see, even these content personalization options are fairly limited, but it’s a start. Definitely check out the two plugins I’m using, but also give more thought to who your visitors are, and what content they are looking for when they visit your blog. For most bloggers, at least 50% of their traffic will be from search engines. People coming from search engines are looking for specific information, and if they don’t immediately find it on the post they land on, they will leave. Check your WordPress dashboard, if you use a plugin like Jetpack (affiliate link) you can see which search terms visitors are using to find your blog. This also gives you a better sense of what information they are looking for when they arrive on your blog.

Besides focusing on visitors arriving via search, also consider that many visitors to your blog will arrive via a mobile device. This adds another layer of complexity as mobile users are far less ‘sticky’ and will quickly leave a site if they don’t get the information or experience they were expecting. It is imperative that your blog displays correctly on mobile devices including tablets and smartphones. For many publishers, mobile traffic has now reached a tipping point where it has passed desktop traffic, so you can no longer ignore mobile users. Make sure that your theme is responsive, and make a point to regularly load and navigate your blog on your smartphone. If you can’t figure out how to properly view and navigate your own blog on your smartphone, the odds are your visitors can’t either.

Soon, CMSs will seamlessly integrate machine learning to create personalized content experiences for visitors on the fly, which we can all use. Until that day arrives, think about what you can start doing now to give every visitor the content experience they are expecting.

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Is it Better to Have a Centralized or Decentralized Social Web?

I recently came across a Fast Company article on how Tim Berners-Lee (credited with inventing the world wide web) is creating a new service called Solid that would decentralize your data and give you more control over it. This could potentially address the data protection and privacy concerns that many of us have when it comes to surfing the modern web.

But I got to thinking about this whole idea of decentralization vs centralization when it comes to social media. On the surface, centralization seems like the way to go.  You bring everyone together where they could share their thoughts and opinions and interact.

The problem is, whenever you bring everyone together, the overall user experience eventually degrades for everyone.

I’ve been online since 1988, or for the last 30 years. In that time, online activity has followed this pattern; Decentralized>Centralized and back.  Here’s what I mean:

In 1988 when I started getting online, BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) were all the rage. These were typically smaller groups, and hyper-local. Usually the ‘geeky’ guy in a neighborhood or city had some software on a spare computer and could use it as a pseudo server that other people could call into (on dialup 300 baud modem, natch), and usually post on a message board. It was a very decentralized structure, small groups of people, but they typically had something in common, even if it was simply geography.

These grew more popular in the coming years, and then by the early 90s, online services like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL popped up.  These were centralized networks. They were also expensive, whereas most BBSes were free to access, these online services typically cost $25 a month for 10 hours. Yeah. But they had a lot more people, incredibly crude ASCI ‘graphics’, and other ‘perks’ of the day. Oh and CHAT ROOMS! Really big deal. Prodigy eventually folded and it was CompuServe and AOL both offering a premium service. This was actually a good thing in many ways because only people that were ‘serious’ about being on these services would pay for them. And they had a lot of message boards and chat rooms that were topic-specific, so these places developed their own communities. I remember in the late 90s there was a chat room on CompuServe that was reserved for college students. At the time I was midway through my undergrad studies so I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to participate in a chat every Sunday night with other college students from around the country. Come to think of it, that habit of chatting on Sunday nights was probably one of the factors in my wanting to have #Blogchat on Sunday nights.

But around 1996 or so, AOL got the bright idea to ditch their hourly rate, and start charging everyone a flat $25 a month fee for UNLIMITED access.  If I recall correctly, at the time both AOL and CompuServe was charging like $25 for 25 hours, with $2,50 an hour for anything over 25 hours.  So switching from that to unlimited was a huge deal.

At first, it was awesome. Then, over a few months I noticed that something started to happen.  You see, when AOL switched to unlimited access, suddenly mom and dad who had before been using the 25 hours a month access, now had unlimited, so that meant they LET THEIR KIDS get on AOL. Suddenly, all these super cool message boards and chat rooms where intelligent adults had previously had engaging conversations, were flooded by teenagers and preteens POSING as adults. Needless to say, the overall user experience degraded significantly as the UNLIMITED floodgates opening meant all these ‘adult’ forums and chats were awash in a sea of fart and sex jokes from teens who were sneaking on mom’s AOL account.

Around 2000 or so, companies like Earthlink started offering straight internet access for around the same $25 price for unlimited. This really cut into AOL’s business and eventually it folded as well.

So we’d moved from a decentralized environment (BBSes) to a centralized one (AOL and CompuServe) to…….now what?

We went decentralized again. Around 2003 or so, weblogs started to gain traction. Blogs were like our own digital islands. We could create our own space where we could discuss whatever we want. And since a lot of us were still jonesing for a way to discuss our favorite topics in a post-AOL online world, it was perfect timing. Plus the great thing about blogs was that I could go read your blog, and immediately catch up on everything in your life (well everything that you were willing to share on your blog). Basically, if I wanted to reach you, I knew to go to your blog and there you were!

The problem was…not everyone wanted to have a blog. So it created an opportunity for someone to create a way for people that didn’t want to bare their souls everyday on a blog, to still have a way to create and share content. And maybe more easily interact with the content from others.

Enter social networking. Sites like MySpace and later Facebook and Twitter gave all of us centralized platforms where we could more easily connect with each other. Plus the great thing was, these platforms at first actually enhanced our blogs. It gave us a way to more easily create content for our blogs, and also to link to content we were creating on these platforms as well.  Plus, these social networking sites gave you immediate access to SO many more people! Especially hundreds of millions of people who weren’t blogging.

From 2006-2010 was the most fun and excitement I’ve ever had in 30 hours of being online. Blogging was hot and we had these wonderful communities springing up around our blogs, then sites like Facebook and Twitter launched and we had wonderful communities and discussions there as well.  It was truly the Golden Age of social media, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

Then…..this happened:

Ashton Kutcher killed Twitter

Yep, the celebrities found social media.

This was the equivalent of AOL offering unlimited access for the first time, resulting in a flood of preteens with fart jokes. Suddenly Oprah, Britney and the Kardashians were on Twitter. Which meant that suddenly the MEDIA flooded to social media to follow them.

And within the span of a few months, Twitter and Facebook went mainstream. Suddenly, those of us who had been on these sites since the beginning and who loved the communities we had formed there, were flooded by new users who were mainly there to e-stalk their favorite celebrities.

Then the marketers followed, and that led to wait for it…..SELF PROMOTION!

When ‘everyone’ joins a centralized platform or service, the user experience for everyone degrades significantly. It happened when everyone joined AOL and CompuServe in the 90s, it happened to social media when ‘everyone’ joined Twitter and Facebook.

I’ll be honest: Social media really hasn’t been fun for me in about 5-6 years. It truly hasn’t. I’ve written previously about the problems these sites are having with transparency and trust issues. I think we are going to see Twitter and Facebook undergo radical changes in the coming year or two, if not go away completely.

Then the questions becomes, when that happens, do we revert back to a more decentralized web, and if so, what would that look like? I think we will, and I hope we’ll see our blogs become more prominent again. The interesting thing is that as a lot of people moved to social media sites, the functionality of blogs increased dramatically. Plus, people are more comfortable with the idea of blogging now, so I am hopeful that we’ll see a bit of a blogging Renaissance soon. It’s one reason I’ve doubled down on my blogging here and I’ve been advising clients to do the same for a while now.

However, there’s an even clearer pattern of this decentralized to centralized flow that we saw in the 90s and again over the last few years. When the shift from decentralized to centralized begins, that’s when the overall user experience is the best. But once EVERYONE floods into the centralized platforms, that’s when it all starts to go downhill.

Right now feels like about where we were in 2000. AOL was getting long in the tooth, and we were starting to look for other/better options. A year or two later, the mass-migration away from AOL had begun.

I think we’re in the same place now. A lot of people want to leave the popular social media sites, but really don’t see a better option. When we do, we’re gone.

I think that day is coming sooner rather than later.

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Social Media is Destroying Our Ability to Create Impactful Content and Meaningful Connections

Go scan your timeline on Twitter or your news feed on Facebook.  Look at the articles being shared, and more importantly, look at the headlines.

After a while, you’ll begin to notice something. The headlines are written in a way to attract people that are already on Twitter and Facebook.  This is important, because the content is created in a way to attract people from social media sites, instead of creating content that appeals to your blog’s current readers and subscribers.

Social media has trained us to chase bigger numbers.  We want to go ‘viral’, we want more social shares, we want that flood of visitors from Twitter that gives our analytics a nice hockey stick.

But there’s a trade-off in this approach, and it’s one that a lot of us haven’t really thought about. If you chase new readers, what impact does that have on your current ones?  Because when you chase new readers, you change the way you create content.  You create content that will be more likely to ‘go viral’ on Twitter and Facebook.  When in reality, you should continue to create content that your CURRENT readers love.

We rail on companies for trying to acquire new customers and ignoring their current, loyal customers.  But it could be said that we do the same thing with our own content.  We chase more shares, more visitors, when we should be delighting the people that are ALREADY reading and enjoying our content.

A few months ago I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he said that social media has nothing to do with the success of his radio show.  He said he built it before social media, and even now, he’s not on Twitter at all.  He does repost show updates on Facebook, but that’s all designed to drive people off Facebook and back to his website.  He said if social media went away tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect his show in the least. And he has the most popular radio show in the country.

Seth Godin really doesn’t use social media either. He blogs every day, and every one of his pithy posts gets thousands of social shares. For years he wasn’t even on social media. He now does have a Twitter account for his blog, but all it does is repost his daily blog posts.

Rush and Seth are both great marketers and both highly successful.  And neither really uses social media in any meaningful way.  Certainly, neither is creating content that’s tailored to sharing on social media. Now you can easily say that both of them built their following BEFORE Twitter and Facebook, and therefore don’t need either of them. And you’d be right. But the point is, neither is altering their content to leverage social media.

I think there’s a lesson in that for the rest of us. I was looking back at my early blogging from 2006 and 2007, before I joined Twitter or Facebook. I blogged in a completely different style, it was almost like every day I was writing a letter to friends. As a result, I had a devoted community of readers, many of which commented on every post I wrote, and we had wonderful discussions in the comments section. Then, I would go and read their blogs and leave comments as well.

When social media sites came along, the conversations for many of us moved from our blogs to those social media sites. We lament how commenting fell off a cliff on our blogs, as it was ‘just easier’ on everyone to comment on Facebook and Twitter.

But along the way, we also changed the way we created content, and that change in the way we create content had an even bigger impact on dampening the number of comments on our blogs. We stopped writing in a way to elicit conversations. We trust people that we understand, and we understand people we can connect with. Those connections start by creating content that helps us be vulnerable and accessible to our readers. Ironically, this is the very type of content that the ‘experts’ have told us not to create.  Don’t inject too much ‘personality’ into your posts, you don’t want to offend potential customers or clients. Focus solely on business, don’t blog about your passions, that’s being ‘off-topic’.

The reality is, the only true value you get from your blogging is in the connections that you make. It doesn’t matter if you are a personal blogger or if you blog for business. I can tie about 80% of the business I’ve gotten over the last 10 years of consulting to about 10 people. Those are all people that I made connections with over time, via my blog. Maybe once every 6-12 months do I get someone that I don’t know who comes to my blog from a search engine, and we end up doing business. Almost all of my customers know ME first, then trust me, then decide to do business with me.

What if there were no social media sites? What if you could only create content on your blog, and that was the only way you could connect with potential customers and potential friends?

Would that change the way you created content? Would you go from focusing on increasing social shares, to increasing subscribers and readers?

I bet you would. I know I am.

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It’s Time for a Social Media Reboot, Based on Communication, Not Narcissism

It’s not getting a lot of coverage, but social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are facing serious trust issues right now from their users. And it’s hurting their stock prices, Twitter’s stock has gone from close to $50 a share in June, to $35 a share today at the end of August. Facebook’s stock has also been hit hard, going from around $220 a share in July, to around $175 a share now.

What’s causing the drop? It would be easy to say that concerns over how the social media platforms display content and worries over potential censorship based on political affiliation is driving the fall. This is definitely playing a role, but I think there’s a far bigger underlying issue that’s been at play since the sites were launched over a decade ago.

Over the years, social media has morphed from being communications tools, to being ego tools. It’s somewhat understandable, appeals to ego (number of followers you have, how many Likes and RTs your updates get) are very strong, perhaps even necessary to some degree to drive user growth. But these appeals to ego have fundamentally changed user behavior.

And in a very bad way.

The great promise of social media was always that everyone has a voice. We are all connected. Conversation changes the world.

Yet if you look around, there’s not a lot of conversation happening on social media these days. There’s a lot of broadcasting, and a lot of yelling.

I’m in a rare place among most social media users, in that I can remember being active online before Facebook and Twitter. Back then, we didn’t call it social media, we called it ‘blogging’.  There were blogs, and MySpace.  That was pretty much social media in the days before Likes and ReTweets.

In those days, there weren’t a lot of numbers to game.  It’s wasn’t about how many followers you had or how many Likes a post got, it was about the conversation that it started. I can still remember waking up at 2am on many nights simply because I couldn’t get a blog post I’d read earlier that day out of my head. I’d have to get up, open Word and write a comment.  Or if the comment grew long enough, just open Blogger and write a new blog post.

As Facebook and Twitter grew (then later Instagram and Pinterest, etc), we became sort of ‘trained’ to gravitate toward shorter and faster communications. Which led to broadcasting more than talking. I mean if you have a deep thought you want to get out there, you have to constraint it to 140 characters in a tweet. And hell, who can wait 2 mins to see if anyone responds, so just stick it in a blog post, tweet out the link, and wait for everyone to ignore it.

Social media has changed our thinking, and our behavior. We don’t talk to each other anymore, because we don’t have the patience to wait 5 mins to hear what the other person thinks. We send out a tweet and immediately start looking for RTs and hearts. When you do that, it changes your behavior. You create content (tweets or updates) in a way to drive engagement. That means less talking and more yelling.  Because yelling drives engagement. Being angry drives engagement.

Taking the time to listen to the other person’s perspective? Well you don’t get Likes or RTs for that, so to hell with it.

But How Can I Tell Who is the Most Popular or Influential on Social Media Without the Numbers?

The argument for Likes, Followers, Retweets, etc has always been that we need a way to measure who is ‘worth listening to’.  Who should you follow? The guy with the most followers, so the logic goes.

The problem with focusing on numbers is that numbers can be gamed. If you tell me that number of Twitter followers is the most important metric, then I can instantly get 1,000 followers in the next 24 hours by simply following 2,000 people.  About half will follow me back. Or I could simply buy 10,,000 followers, likely for a few bucks.

Again, if we just go by numbers, then someone will find a way to game the numbers. Look at Twitter, and note how many people you see with 50,000 followers who are following 50,000 people. Yet here you sit with 5,000 followers following 50 people, and you think that person is more influential than you are.

What if you had no idea how many Likes or RTs or Followers someone had on Social Media? What if all the numbers we currently use to decide if someone is worth following or listening to, were gone. How would we judge if someone is worth listening to?

By what they say. We would judge people based on the content they create. This is honestly how it should be. Our criteria for creating content shouldn’t be “Is this going to get social shares”, it should be “Is this going to make an impact on the people that read it?”

Think about the word ‘impact’. Think about something impacting another object. It changes that object. A literal impression is made.

Will your content make an impression on its audience? Because if it doesn’t, then what the hell are you doing?

 

BONUS: Great post from Kathy Sierra – More buzzwords, likes, RTs and followers are only a potential competitive advantage if both you and the competition are mediocre. Think about that.

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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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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.