It's All About the Conversation

Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good.  Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.

It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.

Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.

Here are a couple questions to consider:

1. Why are we doing this?
   • because it’s fun?
   • to find business?
   • to show off our thought leadership?
   • increase customer engagement?
   • PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
   • Improve search engine optimization?
   • Provide a way to disseminate information?
   • Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
2. How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves?  Can we put numbers to this?
   • Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
   • Comments on blogs
   • Links to blog postings
   • Increased leads
   • SEO
   • Social Media mentions.

1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.

2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.

3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success.  Wave your own flag a bit.

4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post.  Find keywords that support the blog and the post.

5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions.  Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.

6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world.  Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client.  If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.

Some bullets on process:

• Address a business need
• Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers.  Guest post both ways whenever possible.
• Encourage online reviews of your work
• Be strategic not trendy
• Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
• Social media is NOT an experiment.  It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
• Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
• Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
• Social connections.  Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets.  Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
• Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.

A short bit ago, I received the typical twitter email announcing that someone had followed me.  It was quite strange as you can see…

@Gangsta_Claus tweet

Fortunately, Someone I work with, @paulknipe, translated this for me:

“Have you heard the news that I have a Twitter page? I highly encourage you to follow me right away. Click the follow button. It doesn’t cost anything.”

Thanks Paul, I think you are right on!  (But how would I know, I imagine I’m a little out of touch…)

This is an interesting spam email I received yesterday that looked like it was from Twitter.

But, upon further examination, and something everyone should do BEFORE you click a link, is to hover over the link and see what appears.  You just might learn something the easy way.

Remember, always be careful what links you click on in your email.

I was recently followed by an affiliate marketer from Australia claiming that she could “guarantee 25,000 followers in 90 days.”  There are 2 things wrong with this statement.

First, why do you want 25,000 followers?  Seriously, do you think they all really care what you have to say?   There is so much twitter spam out there and the real guarantee here is that your followers will be lousy.  Here’s a good summary from WebWorkerDaily.com describing the result of too many followers well.

How Auto-Gathered Followers Hurt You

There are services available that claim to increase your follower account automatically. These are a bad idea, however, because auto-gathering followers creates:

• Chaos and noise on your Twitter stream if part of the automated follower-building process you’ve adopted entails “auto-following back.” That reduces the value of your Twitter stream as a listening tool and information source.
• Followers who aren’t listening to what you have to say. That diminishes the value of marketing anything on Twitter and reduces the chance of being heard at all.
• Overinflated follower numbers, which are a turn-off for those looking to make meaningful connections. Many people use the “follow-to-follower ratio” as part of assessing someone’s “worth” on Twitter, as opposed to sheer number of followers. For example, if someone is following 48,895 people and has 46,975 followers, that looks suspiciously like they are fishing for followers rather than genuinely interested in interaction.
• Automated activity in your Twitter account that you don’t control.
• The possibility that your Twitter password gets into the hands of an untrusted third party.

And secondly, This person was guaranteeing 25,000 followers but only had 11,000 themselves!  If you’re gonna say you can do something for me, you netter be able to do it for yourself first.

My advice is to pick your followers carefully.  Don’t auto follow everyone. Then check out their twitter page first to see if you’re even interested in reading what they have to say.

A few rules I have for who I won’t follow.

1. Are their tweets boring?
2. Are all their tweets inside jokes?
3. Are all their tweets trying to get me to buy something form them that I know is gonna be too good to be true?
4. Do they cuss?
5. Is your profile picture a picture of you barely in a bikini?

Basically, if they offer something I’m interested in and will benefit from, I’ll follow them.  Likewise, I try to have my tweets offer some good information that I hope someone will benefit from.  If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, I hope you don’t follow me either.

Currently, I’m following 149 people and that’s almost too many.  Fortunately, there’s only about 10 of them who post regularly that I’m interested in.  Otherwise, it’d be too much to follow.

So, If you like what I have to say, follow me at twitter.com/mpeesel, don’t worry, I don’t tweet too often.

PS.  While researching this article, I found a great article in a blog that I’d never seen before talking about how bad thousands of followers were and the bad tactics affiliate marketers….  It sounded great until I checked his twitter account and found it was FULL of affiliate marketing links for making quick money, losing quick weight and more.

I now have a number 6 on my list: People who send inconsistent messages and don’t practice what they preach.

Been looking for a few Twitter tools and found a few that are pretty interesting.

Qwitter - Catching Twitter Quitters

First, in reference to Twitter Quitters, There’s a service that will alert you when someone quits following your Twitter account.   It’s called Qwitter, and I’ve signed up but, fortunately, haven’t seen anyone stop following me.  Without Qwitter, when you start getting a lot of followers, it gets hard to find out who stopped following you.  But with Qwitter, when someone stops following you, you get an email like so:

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

Second, Twitter Analyzer graphs your tweets and gives some pretty interesting stats, like how many tweets per day, how many ReTweeted, how many people you reached, etc…

In addition, you can track your followers, where they come from, your links, RTing, growth rate, friends, mentions, growth, etc.

I started playing with it and couldn’t stop.  Then I had to tell a friend and we went over it more together.  I don’t have a ton of followers yet, but if you look at Ashton Kutcher’s account, aplusk, you’ll see much more cool data.   I imagine this gets better when you have more users.

Splitweet, is a cool little application that let’s you manage multiple Twitter accounts.  I signed in and quickly added 4 accounts and then it lets you tweet to any or all of them at once.  It was really easy to tweet once to 4 accounts.  Of course, you don’t always want to do that, especially if your accounts are all very specific, but for ease of use and twittering to multiple accounts, it was very easy.  They also offer desktop apps, but I haven’t tried that, but why would I need to now?

WordPress Plug in, Twitter Tools.   This is a great plugin to connect your Twitter account with your blog and vice versa.   I use it and as soon as I publish this, it will get sent to my Twitter account.  Also, if I Tweet via Twitter, it’ll show up over there to the right in my Twitter update list.

That’s all for today, more another day.

Enjoy the weekend!

Like many people, sometimes I get writer’s block.  But it’s odd, because I’m not really a writer, I just sometimes have lots to say but not always sure how to go about it.

Recently, I came across this interesting article with 13 Tips for Actually Getting Some Writing Done. The article is technically for people who want to write a book or novel of sorts, but I find that it’s truly effective for just about anything you ant to write.   I’ll summarize it here.

1. Write something every work-day, and preferably, every day
2. Even if you have just fifteen minutes, you can write something
3. Don’t binge on writing
4. Sometimes it’s easier to stop in mid project and then continue later
5. Don’t get distracted
6. Write regularly and frequently
7. Just get ideas down, lot’s of great writing comes in the revisions
8. Find a way to keep track of your thoughts
9. Be comfortable
10. Limit or eliminate interruptions
11. “Wait” or do it “Now”
12. Take a walk or read something else
13. Have something to say

I would add a last item to this from my old public speaking days.

14. Write what you know about.  Don’t try to write about things just because you think someone will want to read it. If that’s all your interested in, you won’t last.  In fact, if you follow this one tip (#14), it usually solves most, if not all of the other tips.

A week ago, I twittered about the “Twitter Quitters,” people who signed up for Twitter and left within a month.   It’s an interesting study, but here’s a follow up from VentureBeat that says that their study is probably wrong for a variety of reasons:

Their report states that 40 percent of users fail to return to Twitter in the month immediately after they join. It says nothing about the second, third, or fourth months after they join.

For example, if I join Twitter in January but don’t tweet until March I would be considered a “Twitter quitter” in Nielsen’s report. This behavior is common on immature social networks where new users who join don’t yet have any friends or followers.

It also turns out that a large portion — over 20 percent — of the people who fail to return the next month never once updated their status. It seems unfair to penalize Twitter for users who sign up and never tweet. After all, one could just as easily pretend they never signed up and the retention rate would increase by 50 percent in April alone, from 40 percent to 60 percent.

These are good points and I would agree with them. In fact, I signed up for Twitter, and then didn’t use it for some time.  I think there’re are plenty of people who sign up because there’s so much buzz about it but don’t know what to do with it…  I know i have a bunch of followers and followees that haven’t twittered yet, but I’m not counting them out.  Eventually, they’ll have something good to say – at least I hope so, as some of them have lots to say and good products to tell the world about.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk to a couple of them to tell them how they can use Twitter better…

I’m always looking for how people are truly making money by using Twitter, not just by spamming their followers with network marketing schemes, but by truly getting sign ups, or selling a product or service.  I don’t believe the perfect model has been found yet.  I have a few ideas, but maybe I’ll save them for a paying client…