In the previous chapter, I mentioned
that you're going to have to mix in
your original content. Now, the
question that's probably at the top of
your mind is, "How do I know which
content to produce?"
Well, there are two ways to do this,
like I mentioned earlier in this training. You can try to figure things out on your own and engage in all sorts of experiments, or you can just simply allow your competitors to do your homework for you.
I hope you can see which path is the easiest. It should be obvious. If you are sending the very best content on your niche, your original content must be at the same level or better. Otherwise, your followers are not going to take the bait.
They're not going to trust your brand.
They appreciate the fact that you're collecting all this information, and they're probably going to stick around and follow your social media accounts, however, you can't count on them to do much of anything else. There's really no incentive for them to join your mailing list.
Why should they? Your content is not that great. They only need to compare the kind of original content you produce with the other top notch third party stuff you're sharing to see your weakness. Do you see the problem here?
You have to produce top content if you want your brand to be credible.
Thankfully, this is easier than you think. Simply reverse engineer your competitors.
Look at their most successful stuff. How do you know? Look at the social media indicators of their content. How many "likes" do es their top content get? How 43
many "shares?" Is there any other indicator that shows that this content actually has traction?
Maybe you should pay attention to the number of comments for that content.
Maybe you would want to run a backlink checker on a piece of content and see how many other blogs or websites link to that piece of content.
This is how you measure the overall success of any single piece of content so you can use it as a "template," if you will, for your own content. I'm not saying you should rip it off, instead, I'm encouraging you to use it as a starting point and come up with something so much better.
Focus on What Works
When you look at your competitors'
most social pieces of content, you
are basing your own original content
on themes and topics that actually
work. They have traction with your
target audience members. You're
not wasting money or time taking
wild guesses.
This is one of the most common mistakes social media marketers make. They think that they have the best ideas regarding "hot" content in their niche, so they come up with all sorts of content that they think is just plain awesome, only to fall flat on their faces.
I'm telling you, for every 100 pieces of those types of original content, maybe 10
would gain any sort of respectable traction in your niche. It's too expensive, and it burns too much time. Thankfully, there is a better way. You just need to reverse engineer your competitors' most successful content.
Use that as a starting point. You can adjust them, you can modify them, you can come up with your own variations, but at least you get a head start. At least you're in the ballpark when you start off. You're not just taking random shots in the dark.
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Learn from Your Own Success
After you have started curating and
mixing in your original content, pay
attention to your statistics. They
should tell you which of your
content gets the most love.
If you notice that a handful of your
curated third party content gets a
lot of retweets, shares on Facebook, or any other indication of social media engagement, pay close attention to those pieces of content.
At some level or another, they struck a nerve. They caught your audience members' attention in a very positive way. Find these successful curated pieces of content and create original versions of them.
Similarly, if you have many different original pieces of content, only a handful of them would be really successful. Pay attention to those. Find them. Once you've identified them, create more of them. Focus on the same themes and present similar information the same way.
The key here is to focus on what works and expand it and grow it. Ditch the stuff that failed. Build on your strengths. Create Derivative Cross-Platform Versions of Your Most Successful Content
Now that you have a clear idea of how to create content that has proven traction, don't just keep reverse engineering it. While you need to continue doing that, you also have to do something else. Create derivative or cross-platform versions.
For example, one particular type of blog post does well on all your social media accounts. Identify its themes, pay attention to its patterns, and come up with another blog post. See if that works.
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If you achieve the same level of success, you're on to something. This is not a fluke. This is not a one-time thing. You have struck on a theme that your audience members readily enjoy.
The next step is to take things to a whole other level. Instead of just cranking out yet another blog post, create videos about that theme. Make specialized diagrams. Produce infographics.
Take these materials and share them on social media platforms that specialize in those formats. For example, for blog post URLs, share them on Twitter and Facebook. For videos, share them on YouTube. For diagrams and infographics, share them on Pinterest.
Drilling even deeper, look at your hottest blog posts, and strip out key questions and use these as leads or titles for tweets. Tweet the same content several times over the course of a week. Of course, don't drop it all in one hour, but space them out. Still, when you use the right questions, you become very visible on Twitter.
Pair these with the right hashtags.
The Bottom Line
The great thing about content
curation is you save a lot of money,
but you are also positioning yourself
to build on your strengths. You focus
on things that you're doing right, and
figuring them out so you can
predictably produce successful
content.
Now, this is not going to happen overnight. You have to keep experimenting until you find the right themes that consistently work with your audience.
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Chapter 09 - Fine Tune Your Payload
Content
As I have mentioned previously, you
can come up with your very own
content based primarily on the social
signals of the top notch third party
materials you are curating. Put simply,
when you are going through your
research, you will keep coming across
certain pieces of content which get a lot of engagement on social media.
These are all the objective indicators you need to understand that you are looking at high quality, high demand content. At that point, you can come up with your own version of that content.
You can use it as a template, so to speak. Another approach would be to just do curation first. You just take all the high quality third party content with great social signals and put them all on auto-publish on your social media accounts.
You run this curation campaign for several weeks. Soon enough, you will see a pattern. Eventually, you will see that some of these materials get a lot more engagement than others. At that point, you can then come up with your own version.
Personally, I pick my own content using both methods. If I'm in a hurry to get people to sign up to my mailing list, I do the first method. But if I'm unsure about the niche or I'm still trying to feel my way around in terms of understanding my audience, I would stick to the second method. There is really no one right answer. It really all depends on your situation.
The great thing about the second method is that you are picking out your original content strategy based on what actually works in terms of your social media accounts. You have to understand that even though high quality third 47
party content may have a lot of objective social signals, those signals may have been generated in different contexts.
Maybe the original publisher was doing something that you may not be doing. Do you see how this works? Still, you can definitely do the first method if you're in a hurry. But if you have some time to spare, you might want to try the second method. Do curation first, let it run, and then pay attention to your statistics. You should be able to see a pattern.
In fact, based on my experience, content that tends to do well often fall s within a narrow range of themes. In fact, in some of my campaigns, almost all the content that got a lot of love from the internet was focused on one question.
That's how focused your audience's needs may be.
You should pay attention to the following: look at the engagement of the content and the click through. A lot of social media marketers drop the ball at this point. They think that it's all about engagement. I'm telling you, regardless of how many likes, shares, or comments a piece of content gets, if people don't click through, those engagement signals are not worth much.
Remember, at the end of the day, you want traffic. That's the whole reason why you're doing this in the first place. Getting caught up in how many shares, likes or comments you get is not going to do you any good. You have to always pay attention to click through.
There has to be some sort of ratio between total engagement and click through.
The higher the ratio of the click through, the more attention you should devote to a piece of content.
Study High Click Through and High Engagement
Content Closely
Now that you have identified
curated content that performs
well, the next step is to analyze
them with a fine toothed comb.
Ask yourself, what problems are
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people interested in when they
read this piece of content? How
are these pieces of content
positioned or presented? Do they use some sort of emotional headline? Do they use subheadings that ask questions? Do they drag the person along, or do they just lay out the information dead center?
Pay attention to cosmetic issues. People do judge a book by its cover and blog posts and articles are no different. How are these materials formatted? Do they have big pictures? Do they have header pictures? Do they use diagrams? What are they doing exactly?
Once you've answered all these questions and you're comfortable with the answers you got, the next step is to create your own content specification sheet.
This is going to be your template.
Now, make sure that you're not just basing it on one successful piece of content.
That third party content might be a fluke. The company behind it might just have gotten lucky, and for some reason, that piece of content went viral. That's not going to help you.
You have to base your template on the success of many different pieces of curated content. This way, you can be more confident of the fact that even if you barely comply with all the specifications, you would at least get some decent and positive results.
Using the Information Above, Create Payload Content Now that you have gotten your template
together, you need to create your own
high quality, high engagement original
content. This content is going to be
used to sell people on your mailing list.
When they read this content, they're
supposed to
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get excited about joining your mailing list. This is content that is most likely to be credible and most likely to be shared.
Are you excited? Well, don't get too excited. A lot of people jump in with both feet and they end up sabotaging themselves because the payload content they create looks like an advertisement. That's obvious spam. Nobody's going to trust you with that.
You're obviously trying to pull tricks and play games. That's not going to work.
Instead, the content must be informative. Think of it as an infomercial. You're selling something, that much is obvious, but people have to walk away with solid value.
You have to walk that tightrope. There's a thin line between shoving stuff down people's throats and providing solid value without asking for anything in return.
You have to come up with a decent compromise between the two.
The bottom line is, whatever you do, the content you produce must be valuable. It must add value to the lives of people reading your materials. That's how you build credibility. That's how you get people to get excited about your mailing list.
Remember, your list is supposed to add value to their lives. It's going to be very hard to give that impression when the content that you share is worthless. I hope you can see that. I'll see you in the next chapter.
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Chapter 10 - Market Your List Right
Now that you have figured out your
payload content, the next step is to
understand what kind of giveaway
you're going to have to use to get
people to sign up for your mailing list.
In an ideal world, people can see the
value you bring to the table. They only
need to take a look at the content you share as well as the crucial information they get from your premium content. They see this premium content and they see what you're about, what you have to offer, and why it's such a good idea to sign up to your mailing list.
Unfortunately, things don't work out that way. Even if you have the very best blog posts and articles on your website, people still need a push to sign up to your mailing list. This is where incentives come in.
You're going to offer free high quality premium content, but you're going to repackage it in a way that people would appreciate. Maybe you put it in a book, maybe you would come up with some sort of cheat sheet or resource sheet, or perhaps you can strip it all down into a booklet or even convert it into software form.
Whatever the case may be, this premium free give away content is going to act as an incentive for people to join your mailing list. They get a copy of whatever it is you are giving away for free in exchange for their email.
I call this an ethical bribe. You're bribing people to sign up to your list. Normally, they wouldn't. Only a very few people would take the time and bother to sign up for your list, regardless of how awesome your blog posts and articles are. That's just the reality.
Finding Out What to Use
as an Incentive
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I hope you can see the logic behind
giving away freebies so people can
sign up to your mailing list. People
need a push. People need some sort
of extra sweetener to get the
deal going. They need something extra to get them off the fence and onto your mailing list.
Now, the next step is to figure out what kind of incentive to give away so people would join your mailing list. The good news is, you don't have to start from scratch. You don't have to take wild guesses.
You don't have to take shots in the dark. When you pay attention to your top performing original content, you should have all the information you need to come up with a compelling incentive.
For example, if you run a gardening blog and you notice that a lot of people click on "share" and otherwise engage with your content on tomatoes, it's probably a good idea to come up with a free giveaway book on how to build your own inexpensive tomato greenhouse. Do you see how this works?
Pay attention to your best performing original content. Look at the questions they answer and look at the questions they fail to answer. This way, you can use your popular content as a launching area for your incentive content.
You let your readers know that if they need more information, and they will because the content that they're enjoying are missing certain items, they should click on this link. That link, of course, is your squeeze page. The squeeze page advertises your giveaway and lists out the reasons why people would want to download that giveaway. It's pretty straightforward. You're just offering premium content that your other freely available content is already pointing to.
They're pointing to that content because they don't contain that material. They do a good job building credibility and authority. They do a great job adding value to the lives of your readers, but it's also obvious that there are certain parts that are 52
missing. For those extra materials, they have to sign up. It's absolutely free. It doesn't cost them a dime, but they need to sign up to your mailing list.
This is how you set up your mailing list. It has to be closely tied into your premium content. Coming up with incentives or freebies that look like they came out of left field because they're unrelated to whatever it is you're currently doing is not a good idea. Chances are quite good that you're going to fail. When you come up with incentive content that is directly related to the materials you're already sharing, you create a feeling of value. There's also a feeling of exclusivity.
After people have seen your content and have become aware of what you are and what your brand is about, you let them in on a special premium. This is a special deal that other people who haven't accessed your brand have no idea about.
Position All Your Original
Content to Push Your
Mailing List First
To play up the value of your incentive
content, you first have to promote the
value of the mailing list. I know this
sounds counterintuitive, but if you
think about it, it makes all the sense in the world because in reality, it's the mailing list they're signing up for.
The freebie that you're giving away is just a bribe. It's intended to get people to enter their email address and nothing more. If you were to use all your original content to play up the fact that people can get this additional content, don't be surprised if people sign up to your list and quickly unsubscribe because they really don't care about your list.
Again, you are walking a tightrope here. On the one hand, you want people to get excited about the premium you're giving away for free in exchange for their email address. On the other hand, you want people to see the value that they would get by being members of your mailing list.
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This is how you should play it. All your original content should push your mailing list first. I'm not saying that you should not tie it into the incentive, but your original content should highlight the fact that when people join your mailing list, they will continue to get valuable information. This is the key.
Because when you use your tried and proven content to push mailing list membership, people are less likely to join your list and immediately unsubscribe.
They are aware of the value that the list can possibly bring to their lives.
You then play up the premium content as part of the membership. In other words, it's an extra. It is not the main focus of the list. Keep the list separate from the premiums you use to get people to sign up to your list.
I hope this is clear because you want to play up the list first, but it must be obvious that you are using the premium content, whether it's a free book, a booklet, a cheat sheet, some sort of pre-recorded video or something else, as a means to get people to make a decision.
That's the bottom line. You want the incentive to push people to make a decision to join your list, but all your original content, and your website by extension, should push the reader to see the value of being a list member.
A lot of social media marketers completely blow this. They think that it's all about marketing the incentive. Well, to continue with the example I raised earlier, what happens after you get people to sign up to your list in exchange for the greenhouse guide? That's right, nothing.
Why? You played up the value of the greenhouse guide to such an extent that people are clueless as to what other value they would get from the mailing list.
Indeed, don't be surprised if people start reporting your list as spam after you start sending them updates.
They were so focused on getting the free book that the updates from your mailing list completely took them by surprise. This happens all the time because of faulty messaging on your blog or website.
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You cannot afford to play the game this way. You worked hard to pull all this social media traffic to your site. You spent a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to build a solid brand. Unfortunately, you're dropping the ball if you market your mailing list this way.
You must sell the list first, but the incentive must be used to push people to make a decision. This is the proper order of priority. Anything else will fail.
Set Up Your Squeeze Page for Maximum Social Appeal As I mentioned earlier, you should
use your content to push your
mailing list. You should use your
content to upsell your squeeze page.
But this doesn't mean that you can
get away with badly designed
squeeze pages. That's not going to
cut it. Your squeeze page must be
well designed. After all, this page is a specialized recruitment page.
When people get on this page, you have to make the case as to why they should join your list, and not just for the incentive. While the incentive takes a big chunk of the real estate of a squeeze page, you should be clear about the fact that people are signing up to your list.
With that said, you have to make your case. Why should people bother with your updates? Why should people stay on your mailing list? What kind of value would they get?
Remember, people are always asking, "What's in it for me?" Your squeeze page must answer that question effectively, clearly, and powerfully. Your squeeze page must be well designed enough to be able to make that connection, while at the same time, it must be easy to market on social media.
Maybe you should have a graphic on your squeeze page that can be easily posted on Pinterest. Maybe you should have a video on your squeeze page that can easily be shared on YouTube.
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There are many ways you can go with this. What's crucial is that your squeeze page must be social media-ready. At the same time, it should also do a good job recruiting people.
Set Up the Right Confirmation Page
When people join your list, thank
them and make them feel welcome.
You also have to clue them in
regarding the content they should
expect to receive.
Make them feel that they just did the
right thing. Make them feel that they
solved a major problem. Not only do
they get access to the digital freebie you're giving away, but they're also going to be receiving valuable information regarding a particular topic that they have problems with.
This is how you sell the list. Simply hyping up and over-promoting the premium is not going to help you convert social media traffic into cash. That's just not going to happen. You have to sell the list. You have to build trust in the list.
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Chapter 11 - Unlock the Power of
Repurposed Content
I've already described this in an earlier
chapter, but this topic is so important it
deserves its own standalone chapter.
When you create original content for your
blog or website, you already know that this
content has some sort of traction in your
niche. You already know that there
is a significant amount of demand for this particular type of content.
Not only did you base your decision on the social signals of your reverse engineered competitor’s content, but you're also picking out content choices based on your own statistics. In other words, you're basing your best content on tried and proven material.
You're not taking shots in the dark, you're not taking wild guesses, you're not crossing your fingers and hoping that something sticks.
Instead, you have based your decision on what actually works. Congratulations.
But you shouldn't stop there. Once you have noticed that this content really performs based on the amount of clicks as well as the social media engagement it gets, the next step is to repurpose that content. Turn them into other types of content, and re-share them on platforms that specialize in those content types.
For example, if your blog post is getting a lot of retweets and clicks, you might want to strip the blog post into questions. This isn't all that hard because if you look at any type of content, it consists of answers to questions. The questions may not be obvious, the questions may not be plainly stated, but the content is meant to address certain concerns. These concerns can be reworded into questions.
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Strip your most powerful and best performing content into a series of questions.
Each question then is linked to the article or blog post that answers it. Tweet these and pair them with niche-specific hashtags.
By using automation tools, you can rotate different questions that essentially promote the same piece of content. Since you're rotating hashtags, there's a high chance that different people looking for different segments of your niche would become aware of your tweet and possibly click through.
Another thing you can do is turn your article into slideshows. Each article brings to mind many different mental images. Come up with different pictures for each of the topics raised by your article and create a simple slideshow using PowerPoint. Share these PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare. You can also use other tools to create a video from your slideshows. Once you've created these videos, you can obviously share them on YouTube.
Alternatively, you can look through the issues you raised in your blog post and turn them into infographics. Infographics are essentially stripped down graphical forms of articles or blog posts. They focus on the most important points you raised and make them easier to understand by the viewer by converting them into pictures.
Share these infographics on Pinterest.
Finally, you should make sure that all your blog posts or articles have a nice header picture. This way, when you load the link on Facebook, a nice preview shows up. It grabs eyeballs and people are excited to share the content.
On Facebook, you have a wide range of content formats to choose from. You can share links, videos, infographics, photos, diagrams, and even audio files. After you share materials on your Facebook page, you should then get the link to that post and then share that Facebook page link in Facebook groups that cater to your niche or a related niche.
This is how you unlock the power of re-purposed content. If you play the game this way, you spend less time creating content and more time promoting.
Promotion is the name of the game. You may have great content, but it's not going to do you much good if people don't even know it exists. For every hour 58
you spend creating content, you should spend 10 hours promoting that piece of content.
This is how you build up a successful mailing list. This is how you create a solid brand on social media. Start with powerful content, but create different versions and spread it on many different social media platforms.
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