Get High at Work!

Author: Kevin Sandlin

  • “Shut Up & Listen” to Van Baird

    Last night, we enjoyed the third of our four scheduled guest speakers at the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly. Van Baird has spent over a decade in the financial services industry, and when he opened his State Farm insurance agency in Johns Creek, he decided he didn’t want to be a typical insurance agent. Van describes what he did not want to be using this clip from “Groundhog Day”:

    Right from the get-go, we knew we were in for something different from Van this night. He started us off with a simple exercise that took less than a minute, but made a huge point. Pair up, and take 15-seconds to tell the person you’re paired up with 3 things: where you live now, where you went to high school, and your favorite color. Then switch. Simple. Now, on the count of three, everyone YELL the answer to this question as loud as you can: where were you born?

    In the first portion of the exercise, connections were made, information exchanged. In the second part – the yelling part – nobody could hear any information. In 10-seconds face to face, we learned more than screaming the same information all at one time. Is this what social media was meant for? Boom.

    At this point, Van started bombarding the class with nuggets of digital wisdom that have the power to completely change how you do social media.

    The dreaded auto-DM on Twitter: “Thanks for following! Please subscribe to our newsletter.” I don’t even know you. Don’t be like Ned Briarson from Groundhog Day. Van did not want to be Ned Briarson, so he developed a different model which became Relational Equity, to invest in the people who pay them for something they never use: Insurance. Insurance is like an epi-pen. You must have it there, but you hope you never use it. But Van does it differently. He uses social media to invest in the success of his clients. The results are uncanny.

    Remember that very first week on a new job, working for the man? You’re special! Three months later they hire a new group of fresh faces, and you’re no longer special. When you start a business, your first clients feel really loved, because they are your only lifeline, but not after you have 50, 100, 200 clients. We all want to feel loved all the time, not just because we’re your first or 8th client, but because we are people. And people need to be loved on.

    Whose content is more valuable, your content or your clients’ content? Try this to get a clear answer to that question: What would happen if you did not listen to your spouse for a month? People share what they are passionate about online. Listen to those you care about. In business, you should care about your clients, so listen to them on social media. How are you using social to create a relational equity with those who pay you? In business and in life, relationships are all that matter.

    We don’t apply the 60-20-20 rule that Lindsay Trinkle espoused in real life, but we should. Imagine what would happen if, in real life, when you spoke, 60% of the time you were adding value to those you were speaking to by teaching them something new.

    Some facts about the average digital media user:

    • The average Facebook user has 338 friends.
    • The average Twitter user has 208 followers (those who have more than 1,000 followers are the top 1% in the world).
    • The average Instagram user has 112 followers.
    • The average Pinterest user has 67 followers.

    Some facts about how users of digital media make purchase decisions:

    • 53% of people on Twitter recommend products in their tweets.
    • 93% of shoppers make a buying decision based on social.
    • 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
    • Only 14% of people trust advertisements.

    Now do some math:

    • If 5 Facebook friends like a post, that means up to 1690 people might see it.
    • If 2 Twitter users RT, then your exposure is up to 416 users.
    • If 2 Instagram followers like our picture, that’s exposure of up to 112 users.
    • Two Pinterest repins gets you exposure to 134 users.
    • Total eyeballs from a few seconds on digital media: 2352

    But that’s “organic” reach. If you’re paying for advertising, and you’re not paying for advertising on Facebook & Twitter, you’re missing the boat. It has never been easier and more economical to directly target the people that you want to be your customers.

    Which is better: you talking about you or other people talking about you? Shut up and listen.

    The 4 Ps of marketing don’t matter in digital. Now it’s the 4 Cs:

    1. Create
    2. Curate
    3. Connect
    4. Culture

    Van and his company use Evernote to capture life events of their clients – the little things – so they can bring them back up on special dates. Van once noted from one tweet that a client of his loved – I mean really, really loved – a certain kind of pickle. So Van bought him a jar of these pickles for the client’s birthday. Client’s. Mind. Blown.

    Van gives access to his company Instagram account only to clients. Then he shares very specific things with only those clients, like a free Starbucks offer that they can use, simply because they are his clients.

    Mobile alerts: get notified when your clients tweet.

    Van has setup a very simple thing in Twitter: mobile alerts. Every time his clients tweet, he gets a notification, and then he engages with a comment or a favorite or the old fashioned “RT”, which works better, because you’re not one of many. It’s a separate notification to that user, and they see your name. Free advertising, and dirt simple to setup.

    Everyone loves to receive love, but it’s even stronger to give love, whether the recipient knows it’s you it or not. Don’t invest for ROI, but for “R.O.R.” – return on relationships.

    It’s also simple to create lists in Facebook. Create a list of your clients, and like, share, and comment there first, before you get lost in all the other garbledeegook of Facebook.

    You must use Twitter Lists. Put everyone on a list. From your corporate account, follow back only people who are clients.
    Make a private account (also using your name or company name) in Instagram, and follow only your clients who use Instagram. Then, every day, scroll through and double tap every picture. How often are you the only user liking someone’s pictures? That’s giving love in a really easy way, and again, they are seeing your name in their digital media life. Free advertising.

    Using these simple methods, how many times will your clients see your name in a day? In the Relational Equity model, you don’t ever have to post or tweet. Just follow, like, and share.

    And, some quotes from Van that might rock your world, or at least your perception of who you are on digital media.

    • “None of us are as busy as we think we are.”
    • “There’s not a lot of people encouraging others on social.”
    • “Don’t ever just ask people to like your Facebook page. Give them a very specific reason. Tell them what they will get for liking your page.”
    • “Always engage on a personal level if you can. Most of the time, on the other end of that social account is a person. Engage with them as a person.”

    Finally, this amazing thing that I don’t even know how to describe: Van’s company buys Facebook ads for his clients. He invests in the success of his clients.

    If you have the opportunity to invite a guest speaker to talk about building real relationships in an increasingly digital world, you should book Van Baird. You’ll be glad you did.

  • “Does SEO make anyone feel warm & fuzzy?”

    Lindsay Trinkle Visits #DGM2 Class @_GAAtlanta

    As we begin the second half of our 10 week Digital Marketing class, we welcome another great guest speaker from the Atlanta digital world. Our first speaker blew the doors off of market & customer segmentation, setting the bar high for our remaining three guest speakers. Tonight, Lindsay Trinkle, whom I met at The Village and is now at Write2Market, where her aim is “to help entrepreneurs find their voice and tell their stories,” put down some fantastic information about content.

    Here are the high points from Lindsay’s 49 minutes of content magic entitled “CONTENT: How to make it better”:

    • What is content?
      • the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. – content marketing institute
      • what separates us from salespeople
      • blogs, white papers, video, social media
      • Social Media is content marketing, not just a channel of content distribution
    • Some statistics on content marketing:
      • Content marketing generates 3X as many leads per dollar spent as traditional marketing tactics
      • 7/10 readers prefer to learn about a brand via content, not ads, especially millennials
      • 65% of people are visual learners, so use visual content, infographics
      • 82% of consumers trust a company more when leadership – mainly the CEO – is active on social media and blog
      • 70% of consumers “feel closer” to a company when they consume that brand’s content marketing
    • Content marketing is not selling. Content marketing is creating a relationship with a prospect that makes them feel closer to your brand
    • Content marketing builds credibility & trust
    • Content only matters if it matters to your customer/user

    Lindsay’s Content Ratio Rule of Thumb:

    • 60% educational posts
      • Example: moz – read it and think, “wow, this company actually cares about me”; they never pitch their product in their eBook; they just tell you how to do SEO better, which builds trust.
    • 20% conversational posts
      • This one is tricky; this is where the “CEO is on social media” thing comes into play; your brand must be personified, humanized in some way for it to be relevant and trustworthy; put a human face to the words; focus on the team (e.g., “We’re going to SXSW!”) adding a human element, face, name, job function; “conversational” isn’t the accurate word, since we’re not engaging in discussion, but rather just more “human”, talking about the people of the brand and what they’re doing.
    • 20% promotional posts
      • posts that actually talk about your product, brand, or services; tips on how to use the products, etc. Keep this to a minimum; never over 20%. Don’t work this into every other post. Keep this separate. Your instinct is to create a great educational post, and then put a call to action to get an offer at the bottom. Don’t.
    More about this formula for content creation:
    • This rule of thumb is hard to define when you’re putting it into practice.
    • The point of white papers & eBooks is to put them behind a form and do lead gen. WPs no longer than 15 pages, or else it’s an eBook. Both are PDFs, just formatted differently. Put it behind a marketing automation tool.
    • If they’re interested in your content, then they’re interested in what you have to offer.

    Great tools for visual content creation:

    Other golden nuggets of content marketing from Lindsay:
    • SEO, linkbuilding, blah blah blah yada yada yada: focus on creating content that connects you to your audience.
    • Re-purposing content is wonderful, but you have to be creative about it.
    And finally, “Does SEO make anyone feel warm & fuzzy?” Consistently create great content that engages human consumers, and you’ll win the SEO game.
    Lindsay killed it. The class loved her, and peppered her with questions that she handled like a boss.

    Next class, we’ll be joined by the one and only Van Baird, of Relational Equity, the most interesting Insurance salesman in the world, as he brings his own version of digital marketing: ““Shut Up & Listen!” Using digital for Referrals, Retention, Revenue, Relationships and Other Words That Start with R.“

  • Three ways to auto-promote your blog posts via email

    Write-Emails-Your-Users-Would-Actually-Read

    There are many ways to share the content that you’ve created on your blog; however, the most reliable method of promoting your blog to your intended audience is through email. Most people check their social networks regularly, but everyone reads – or at least checks – their email at least several times each day.

    There are three very simple methods of sharing each blog post you create via email, and you don’t ever have to worry about spamming anyone because all three methods are opt-in. The tools to share your blog posts via email are WordPress, Feedburner, and Mailchimp, all probably already familiar names.

    WordPress

    Using JetPack by AutoMattic (the people who operate WordPress), it’s very simple to activate the “Subscriptions” functionality of Jetpack, and then let WordPress.com handle all the rest. You’ll add a widget to your WordPress blog, and the software does the rest. Every time you post, everyone who has opted in to receive your blog via email will get a nicely formatted email containing the full text to your blog and a link to read the blog on your site.

    blogpost1

    To implement Jetpack Subscriptions, follow the following steps.

    1. Install the Jetpack plugin.
    2. Go to “Settings” under the Jetpack menu.
    3. Scroll near the bottom and find “Subscriptions” and activate the service.
    4. Click “Configure,” which will take you to a new page to configure all email options for WordPress. At the bottom of this configuration page are two check boxes to allow you to choose whether Your visitors follow your blog, or your blog’s comments, or both. We recommend choosing the blog only.
    5. Activate the Subscriptions widget, by going to Appearance → Widgets.
    6. Drag the widget labeled “Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)” into one of your sidebars.

    That’s it, and it really is that simple.

    blogpost2
    Feedburner

    Feedburner is a service from Google that creates an RSS feed for any web site. When you create a Feedburner RSS feed, you have a lot of other options, but one of the most basic is to allow people to subscribe to your blog via email.

    Follow these steps to create your Feedburner RSS feed and offer email subscriptions through Feedburner.

    1. Login to http://feedburner.google.com/ with your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to create one.
    2. Just below the words “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:” enter your blog’s url, e.g., kevinsandlin.com, and click “next.”
    3. If Feedburner finds more than one valid feed on your blog (there may be a separate feed for comments), choose the RSS feed for posts.
    4. Give the feed a title, something simple like “My blog feed” or the name of your blog.blogpost3
    5. Click next and you’ll have your RSS feed URL, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kevinsandlin.
    6. At the bottom of that page, click on “Skip directly to feed management.”
    7. Click on the “Publicize” tab at the top of the page.
    8. Scroll down to Email Subscriptions and click on that link.
      blogpost4
    9. Click “Activate” at the bottom of that screen.
    blogpost5
    1. Then you’ll see this success message at the top of the page:
      blogpost6
    2. Copy and paste the snippet of code on the resulting page into a widget on your blog, and anyone can now opt-in to get an email every time you post to your blog.
    Mailchimp

    Mailchimp offers simple forms and code for widgets to add to any blog. Mailchimp’s documentation and instructions are simple, thorough, and very friendly to the new user. The concept is the same as using the WordPress plugin or Feedburner:

    1. Setup an email list at Mailchimp.com.
    2. Configure the widget code.
    3. Copy/paste the widget code into a widget on your blog.

    The complete instructions from start to finish for using Mailchimp to create an email subscription service for your blog are on Mailchimp’s website tutorial called “Mailchimp for Bloggers.”

    Each of these service options is very simple to setup, and each is popular and reliable, so it’s a personal choice. The best part about enabling your readers to subscribe to your blog posts via email is that you are also creating a very powerful marketing tool: an opt-in email list.

  • The Math of the Marketing Funnel

    We’ve been talking about the marketing funnel just about every session of Digital Marketing, but we hadn’t really brought it to life yet. So, in our mid-term (10th session) of the #DGM2 class, we focused completely on the math of the marketing funnel.

    A photo posted by Kevin Sandlin (@kevinrsandlin) on Feb 26, 2015 at 6:24pm PST

    It helped that this class was also our maiden voyage into the very cool new General Assembly space at Ponce City Market, so we had Willy’s and beer to help the presenting and teaching. The 18 new marketers presented in their groups of 3 or 4 from our lesson from the previous class, in which each group had the assignment to create a marketing budget to do an ad buy on Google Adwords or Facebook Ads with the goals of 1,000 new users and a 100% ROI on the spend.

    Then we dug deep into the marketing funnel, because that was a challenge for most of the group. Here are the six specifics that should be considered when engaging in an early (e.g., very first spend) digital marketing buy.

    • Information is imperfect – the first time you tackle Adwords or Facebook Ads, you’re guessing. You don’t know what your CTR will be, what your best keywords are, or what your conversion rate is.
    • Social media channels want you to spend – so they make it really easy to spend a few dollars at a time to get you hooked on short term results, but their model is to get you spending a little more each time and keep you spending.
    • Finding correct keywords is difficult – trial and error are best replaced here with test & measure, because that’s how we figure out which words work for our campaigns and why.
    • The top of the funnel has to be huge – CTRs from Google and social channels are going to be small, despite “viral marketer” claims that “I got 28% CTR on my first Facebook ad!” so you need to start small, and build your own historical information, upon which you can then make more educated guesses about larger spends in the future.
    • Experiment, experiment, experiment – the first assignment I gave the class after GA so generously supplied them with $25 Visa cards (no beer or shoes!) was to go test something. Just getting used to the process of a social ad buy is a major learning event. Repetition of testing and measuring come much easier with understanding of how things work.
    • Buying the ad is the easy part. Determining the math that goes into the proper ad buy is the hard part.

    In the end, the visualization and MS Excel formulas were what brought it home for the class. Marketing is all about the numbers, and it starts with that top of the funnel: total addressable market. Then the key metrics of CTR and conversion rates (into email, warm lead, trial user, user, customer) must be measured and improved to improve the bottom line.

    This session was completely off-the-cuff from the students and myself. No slides, no agenda, just digging into a big, important roadblock that had to be destroyed. The beer & Tex-Mex helped a lot.

  • Google Analytics for Bloggers

    We’re halfway through the Digital Marketing class here at General Assembly. One of the biggest challenges in the class is tackling Google Analytics, which is a big, hairy, complex beast of a tool that can either overwhelm you or totally guide you.

    If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must embrace the beast that is Google Analytics, and learn how to use it, piece by piece. Why? Because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it, and measuring your web site and marketing metrics is the foundation of digital marketing.

    To get over the first big hump that greets most beginner bloggers, I wrote a series of posts for GA on connecting your blog to Google Analytics.

    1. How to setup a Google Analytics account – It’s not difficult, but not nearly as easy as getting a GMail account.
    2. How to connect your Blogger account to Google Analytics – You’d think that, since Google owns Blogger, Analytics would be automatic, but you’d be wrong. Blogger has its own “Stats” package, but the numbers are always different from Analytics.
    3. How to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics – Manually or with a plugin, and I highly recommend the plugin method. Dirt simple.
    4. How to connect your Tumblr blog to Google Analytics – This one’s the easiest by far. A few navigational clicks and copy/paste.

    I was also planning to write a similar post on connecting Medium to Google Analytics, but it would have been a very short post, because you just can’t. I talked to the folks at Medium, and they said they were working on a couple of things in that realm.

    1. Using Medium to blog on a custom domain, instead of medium.com/@yourname
    2. Building their own analytics tools to compete with Google Analytics

    You kinda have to take what the folks at Medium say pretty seriously. One of the founders of Medium was a founder of Blogger before Google acquired Blogger, and then that same guy went on to build a little company called Twitter. You know him better as @ev.

  • 10rocket’s Blog Challenge

    I’ve known Chris Turner, the founder of 10Rocket since early last year, when he and I met at Tech Talent South. Shortly after that, Chris enrolled in The Iron Yard‘s Ruby on Rails software developer course, because he wanted to be able to build the software product that he had envisioned. A few months later, Chris showed up at Pitch Practice and started working on his pitch for what is now 10Rocket.

    Since then, 10Rocket has rocketed to some serious success as Chris refined his pitch to what it is now:

    We build MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5k.

    Boom. Well, last time Chris showed off his pitch at Pitch Practice, I reminded him that 10Rocket needs to start telling its story via a blog. They came out swinging today on Medium. Chris is right: most blog posts teach you something or make a list or tell you “How to” this or that, but few posts cause you to do something. 10Rocket’s first blog post challenged its readers to write a haiku about their startup. Brilliant!

    To take it even further, 10Rocket wrote a haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs in this tweet.

    Not bad! And the challenge caused me to write my own haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs:

    Atlanta Tech Blogs
    We help you tell a story
    Everyone can hear

    Which do you like better?  What is your blog challenging your readers to do?

  • Marketing is all about the numbers

    Tonight we got a special treat at our #DGM2 class: Maria Joyner of Synapp.io laid down the growth hacking truth on the class, setting the bar very high for our next three guest speakers. Who knew that Synapp.io was her first salaried job? The key to Maria’s success?

    “Find a startup that’s killing it, and take credit for all their success.”

    As a growth hacker, here’s what Maria has done since starting work at Synapp.io:

    • email marketing
    • rebranding the Synapp.io web site
    • relaunch the web site
    • a/b testing
    • building out the support team
    • Moving into the new office
    • interviews for a sh**load of new employees
    • product management
    • API integration for partners
    • work with web site designers 
    • write cookbooks
    • learn basic HTML and markdown

    What the heck does any of that have to do with digital marketing? Everything, and segmentation. That’s startup life. If you work for a huge company, you’ll do one of these things. At a startup, you’ll do all these and more. Learning basic coding is very helpful to anyone in a startup, but specifically for a growth hacker.

    So we’re now in our 4th week of Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, and these new marketers are rapidly learning that “digital marketing” is far less about fun web sites, apps, and banner ads, and far more about the numbers, and Maria helped drive that home with a thorough talk on customer segmentation.

    Last week, we slogged through a couple of sessions of Google Analytics. Now that we’ve slayed that beast, tonight we dug into the world of data analysis and visualization. You know what that means, right? Excel. In all its glory. Microsoft Excel, whose replacement has been the motivation for hundreds of SaaS startups, still rules the day when it comes to analyzing data.  In fact, just today, I retweeted this gem:

    That’s right. #4 behind three kinds of software gurus is the person who is most adept at making sense of all that data. I got my first promotion out of B-school because I could make an Excel spreadsheet sing with pre-IPO numbers. Remember: marketing is all about the numbers that go into the top of the funnel and the percentage that make it out the bottom of the marketing funnel and into the loyalty loop.

  • On smartphones and social media

    Our kids (both 13) do not have smartphones. Yes, I know I’m a freak-parent for this day and age, but I’ll wear that one like a badge of honor. In a recent discussion about my and my wife’s horrible behavior, I was told by a friend as we discussed how much my children have “suffered” under our regime’s tough standards that “there’s nothing wrong with 7th graders having iPhones.” We agreed to disagree, and I continue to hear the moans and groans of my teens as they begrudge me for making them so “different” at school.

    Smartphones and social media in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It’s what you do with either that can be either good or bad. We’re taking this time to let our kids see how good or bad both can be from the outside looking in as a kind of training before we turn them loose with their own devices.

    In Thursday’s Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, we ended the class with a lesson of sorts, prompted by this blog post, as we contrasted how Arby’s won the 2014 Grammys versus how Justine Sacco’s life was ruined by three tweets to her 170 Twitter followers.

    Notice the engagement on the Arby’s tweet. Amazing. The hat in question later generated thousands of dollars for charity. Wins all around. The power of social media.

    Then the opposite. With three tweets, the last of which was simply extraordinarily offensive on so many different levels, a young lady’s life was changed forever.

    • “ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”
    • “Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”
    • “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”



    This is the power of social media. Sacco posted these tweets minutes before boarding an 11-hour flight, on which she turned off her phone and had no knowledge that #HasJustineLandedYet had become the top trend worldwide on Twitter.

    You can’t train the wit and excellence that won the Grammys for Arby’s, but you can teach users of social media to think twice, read thrice, and be nice, even when they have only 170 followers on Twitter. We teach that “your brand is everything you do” in this DGM class. In this case, Sacco was employed by IAC, and their brand had to take the heat for Sacco’s actions.

    This is why my kids don’t have iPhones or social media accounts yet. They will someday, but until then, every day is training day.

  • 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Bloggers

    A-Conversation-On-Trends-Best-Practices-E-Commerce

    Beyond the obvious (write), there are tactics that you should build into the DNA of your blogging strategy. These are things that should become habitual, so you don’t even have to think about doing each of them. These are blogging habits that you see in the most successful blogs, but they are not advertised as “Here’s how you do it right.” But you can do these things. They are not difficult. Rather, they are so simple, that you might overlook them or think that these 7 habits of highly effective bloggers are not all that important— they are.


    1. Be consistent.


    Regardless of how much you blog, you must adopt a rhythm, a cadence, a regular schedule for your posts. As you build your audience, your predictability will add value to your regular readers, who will come to expect your posts at certain times on certain days. Whether you push a long form story out once a week at exactly the same time like The Bitter Southerner or post every night between 9pm and 10pm like Atlanta tech entrepreneur David Cummings, you should be consistent in order to grow the readership of your blog.

    2. Talk about what you know.

    Tell your  story. That’s why people will follow, read, and share your blog. It’s your blog, so talk about your experiences, the things you know the best, what you personally have learned through this experience or that. You are unique, and so is your point of view on the world. I’m not going to write about cricket or ballet because I have no knowledge of those things. Rather, I write about tech startups and my (good and bad) experiences living through 7 of them.

    3. Tell a story.

    Everyone loves a story, so entice your readers with stories that you’ve lived, seen, or been a part of. The greatest stories always have lessons, and your experiences are no exception. Telling your story, helps you provide your own context for the lessons you’ve learned and are now teaching your readers. When you tell a story, it makes it real for your readers. They can then share your story and the lessons you’ve learned in their own lives.

    4. Use good grammar.

    You knew this article would get uninteresting at some point, didn’t you? Grammar. Every amateur writer’s nemesis. One poorly used comma, apostrophe, or gerund, and you’ve lost a portion of your audience. Fear not! You have two lines of defense against poor grammar. First, read it out loud. Does it sound right? If not, chances are it’s not. But don’t let your voice be the only decider. Grammarly offers a great, simple, free browser plugin that checks everything for proper grammar use.

    5. Include an image.

    The age-old adage “a picture tells a thousand words” is famous for a reason. Adding a beautiful, relevant image to your blog post helps capture the reader’s attention, adds color and beauty to your words, and helps your reader feel like they are part of your story. Also, when you promote your blog in social media, the results of using an image in a Facebook post or Tweet speak for themselves. Hubspot reports that using an image in a Facebook post gets 53% more Likes than a post with no image. Twitter is not shy about its research that adding a photo to a tweet increases engagement by 35%, among other promotional benefits.

    6. Quote outside facts.

    Do you see what I did there? Quoting relevant, authoritative 3rd party facts gives you credibility that you are not just making this stuff up. Do the research so that your readers don’t have to. They can rely on you to give them all the information they need. Nobody knows it all, but everyone knows something, so share other people’s knowledge to earn credibility for your own writing.

    7. Share & engage.

    Sharing is easy and fast with the plethora of social media and email plugins available for any blog. If you want people to read your blog posts, you should share each blog post on the social media channels that your audiences frequently visit. If your audience is on Pinterest, sharing your blog posts on Google+ may not reach them as effectively. Then, once you share, unless you’re writing for you, like Indie Developer and Partner at The Iron Yard John Saddington, you must engage your readers. Reply when they comment or ask a question. Engage in the conversation on your preferred social media channels. Let them know you’re real by accepting comments, corrections, and even criticism.

    It takes 21 days to create a habit of just about anything. Therefore, if you practice each of these 7 things for your blog for 21 straight days, each one will become a habit, and from then on become part of your blogging DNA, helping you become a better, more consistent, and more popular blogger.

  • Learn Something New

    I read a lot of blogs every day. A lot of blogs. Today, one of John Saddington’s four blog posts today (he blogs for himself and for Desk) caught my eye and made me think. John wrote about Roost, a plugin for WordPress that enables Safari users to get push notifications of new posts.

    So what? I use Chrome. Why would I care about Safari users? I’m teaching Digital Marketing at GA, and one of the topics we’re covering is segmenting in Google Analytics. Just for kicks, I checked out the traffic that Atlanta Tech Blogs gets from Safari users, both desktop and mobile. Whaddya know! More than 30% of the visitors to Atlanta Tech Blogs are Safari users. That ranks second only to Chrome users. Who knew?

    So I had to eat a bunch of my own dog food as I teach the DGM class, and it was a really good example to show:

    • How our customers/users can be segmented
    • How we can address each segment in a different way
    • That we can offer each segment something of value
    • That we need to practice what we preach :-)
    • That we can all learn something by reading others’ blogs
    • That we are all more likely to make a purchase (or download) when someone we trust recommends it.

    Saddington is about as smart as technologists come, so I trust his advice. Roost was extremely easy to install and get running, so now I can offer my Safari visitors something of value: push notifications.