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  • “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.

  • 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.

  • How to Generate New Ideas For Your Blog

    Essentials-of-blogging-and-content-strategy

    One of the most frustrating things about blogging – or writing in general – is coming up with new and fresh topics. You may call it “writer’s block,” and everyone who is even somewhat engaged in creating written content has run into writer’s block at least once.

    Well, no more for those of us who blog for our brand! Here are a dozen different ways to help you establish regular topics that you can count on for keeping your blog fresh, relevant, and compelling to your readers.

    For more on starting a blog for your brand, check out the first post from this series.

    1. Remember why you’re blogging.

    Often, taking things back to their most simple form can help regenerate the original purpose of starting a blog in the first place. When all else fails, refer to your original goals for your blog, and start there.


    2. Remember for whom you are writing.

    Always, always, always try to empathize with your audience, your readers, those who are interacting with your brand. What are they saying? You may find that a reader comment is easily translated into a full blog post.


    3. What does your audience need to know?

    Consider everything your company is doing right now – all the projects everyone is working on or just completed. Now ask yourself, what do our customers, users, channel, or fans need to know? Tell them!


    4. Read other blogs.

    For inspiration for content, style, topics, and ideas. Following blogs in your market space also helps you keep tabs your competitors, customers, and the market itself.


    5. Every company event is a blog post.

    What is your company doing in your community? There’s no better way to gain genuine goodwill and press than organizing a company outreach into your community.


    6. Every company success is a blog post.

    Every success should be touted from the rooftops as well as the company blog. Did your company raise some money, win a new customer (get permission), do well in a market survey, win an award?  Every company success should be a blog post.


    7. Every new product should be several blog posts.

    The beauty of the 300-500 word SEO optimization is that you can stretch your content over a series of blog posts.


    8. Every new feature is a blog post

    Not only because it’s a new feature, but because it’s an opportunity for you to teach your users and/or customers how to use the new feature and why the feature was added.


    9. Every company team member is a blog post.

    Sometimes, when a team member leaves, it’s a blog post, too, as you fondly remember the team member’s contributions and wish them well in their new adventure.


    10. Company news is a no brainer.

    Some of the above points may also serve as “news”, but actual news that used to be traditionally shared in a press release should be on the blog immediately after the press release, or, some might argue, instead of the press release.


    11. Company history

    Detailing your company’s history is a great way to share your humble beginnings, your culture, your team, and generally why your users and customers have stuck with you for all this time.


    12. Teach your audience how to use your products

    This is a great way to maintain a long series of blog posts, and using video and great images really adds to these posts. Also, your sales and support teams can (and should) refer to these posts for their direct contact with customers.


    13. Have your support team answer the most frequently asked questions.

    Answering FAQs is a great way to address your customer’s needs, and for your team members to shine in their deep technical knowledge of your offering or the dynamics of your market.

    That’s a baker’s dozen ways for you to avoid blogger block, and keep your blog’s content new, fresh, compelling, and relevant to your company culture and your audience.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.

  • How To Start Your Email Newsletter

    Email-Marketing-Optimization

    There are many parts to a content marketing strategy. One of the most important parts is an email newsletter. Despite many cries to the contrary, email is not dead as a marketing tool. In fact, email remains the most effective digital marketing tool, in spite of the meteoric rise of the most popular social media platforms. Your customers may or may not check their social media accounts during the day, but business email remains the go-to choice for communication.

    Knowing and understanding that fact, you may be considering producing a regular email newsletter for your customers, users, sales channel, or other audience segments. Before you get anywhere, you must remember that an email newsletter is an integral part of your content marketing strategy, so the goals of the newsletter should support the goals of the content marketing strategy.

    Here is a straightforward 8-point plan to beginning your email newsletter.

    1. Choose an email service provider (ESP).

    Please, do not try to operate an email newsletter with GMail. There are hundreds of email service providers to choose from. However, since you are just starting off, my advice is to find one that has a freemium option, meaning you don’t pay for a certain limited number of subscribers. Mailchimp is one such provider: emailing even daily to up to 2,000 subscribers is free. I use Mailchimp to manage all aspects of the Atlanta Tech Blogs daily digest email.

    2. Ask the hard questions before you ever begin to create your first newsletter.
    • who is your target audience?
    • what content will you share in the newsletter?
    • where will you promote your newsletter?
    • when will you send each issue out?
    • why are you creating a newsletter (what are your goals)?
    3. Gather content.

    Gather content from all of your available sources— including your blog, social media channels, company news, customer and employee testimonials, video training, customer support, and product/service documentation. Remember, you’re creating a vehicle to share content, so you need to make sure you have a lot of content to tap into for each newsletter issue.

    4. Prepare & Plan your content strategy.

    For this piece, I mean to put it on paper with a plan for each of the following:

    • frequency
    • format (template)
    • types of content
    • amount of content
    • calls to action
    • opt-in tactics
    5. Promote the newsletter.

    Promote your newsletter on every page of your website, email signatures, social media channels, your blog, and every other digital marketing channel you employ. Most of all, to promote your newsletter, offer something of value to your would-be subscribers.

    6. Use best practices for maintaining your email subscriber list:
    • double opt-in – when a subscriber enters their email address, they should receive an email confirmation that they must click on to confirm that they did opt-in to subscribe.
    • easy opt out – make it very simple if someone no longer wants to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t take it personally, just let them out.
    • “you’re receiving this email because” – include the simple reminder in the footer of your email newsletter template that reminds the subscriber why they’re receiving the email.
    • datavalidation offers a free service to check your email list against spam reports.
    • offer an alternate contact method such as a phone number or your social media account
    • respond to email inquiries from your newsletter
    7. Measure performance against your goals.

    All ESPs offer measurement and analytics tools, so you can easily track your most common metrics:

    • Open & read
    • Click rate
    • Subscriber growth
    • Unsubscribes
    • Spam reports
    8. Iterate what’s working or not working.

    Just like you should do with your blog or any other aspect of your content marketing strategy, you should constantly measure the results of your email newsletter against your goals, and change what’s not working. 

    If you walk through these eight steps in the creation of your email newsletter, you’ll be starting off on the right foot. Content is king, and email is still the killer app of content marketing.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.

  • Week 1 of Digital Marketing @GA

    I could not ask for a more enthusiastic and engaging group for this session of Digital Marketing at GA’s Atlanta location. In our first two sessions, there has not been a dull moment.  So far, we’ve delved mainly into creating a brand and articulating that brand’s message.  Last night we got a great insight into why some people are more successful at articulating and achieving their goals through this wonderful TED Talk from Simon Sinek.

    Understanding that “people don’t buy your what they buy your why“ had a profound effect on the rest of the evening’s learning.  After the video we started with a blank white board and named 4 brands that the group thought were “good” and then four brands the group thought were “bad”. Very interesting dynamics occurred during this discussion.

    You can see the discussion starting to escalate below on Instagram,plus a demonstration of Comcast’s continued misunderstanding of “brand”, and then a good example of how not to do social media.

    After praising the good and torching the bad brands, we realized somethig very curious: the words, thoughts, feelings, and other things evoked by these brands – good and bad – had nothing whatever to do with their products.  That really brought home how we must be intentional about creating our own brands (personal and company) based on a set of core values, taught to us by FAKEGRIMLOCK.

    The final exercise for last night was for each of the students to create their own individual brand brief based on Mr. Grimlock’s MVP model above, and then get full-barrel feedback from someone else in the class, one-on-one. AS FAKEGRIMLOCK SAY…

    In this #DGM2 class, we’re learning by doing, by creating our brands, then creating a strategy for marketing and promoting our brands successfully. Next week, we dig into analytics. Who doesn’t love analytics?!?

  • How To Start a Blog For Your Business

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog.

    Blogging-for-Business-How-to-Extract-Value

    In the daily operation of Atlanta Tech Blogs, I have spoken to dozens of daily and weekly bloggers about what, how, and why they blog. Unfortunately, I’ve spoken with many more businesses who do not blog. The reasons so many startups and small businesses do not blog are many, and include the following:

    • Not enough time
    • Can’t write well enough
    • Not enough content
    • Don’t see the advantages

    These are valid points that anyone can make; however, the biggest obstacle I’ve seen in those who “get” content marketing and really understand that the need to blog is this: they just don’t know where to start. To help everyone overcome that obstacle, here’s a step by step plan to get you started blogging regularly, consistently, and effectively.

    1. Choose a service/platform

    Sometimes this decision is the hardest one!  Isn’t it odd when life gives you too many choices that it’s even harder to make a decision? That’s how I feel when trying to decide on a new pair of running shoes. I just shut down, and that’s how it can be when you dig deep into all the different blogging software available today. It’s amazing! But fear not. Here’s a short list that beginners won’t find overwhelming.

    • WordPress – simply the easiest, most flexible, most popular, and most well supported platform for anyone to start blogging.
    • Blogger – Google’s clean and simple blogging service gives you a free yourblog.blogspot.com domain or your can use your own custom URL, e.g., yourblog.com
    • Tumblr – Yahoo acquired Tumblr last year, and has generally left the service alone, allowing Tumblr to remain a really, really simple user experience.
    • Medium –  If you just want to write and show off beautiful images, Medium (built by the same guy who created Blogger back in the day) is for you.

    I’ve used all of these, and now in my daily blogging I use Blogger because of its simplicity. For more flexibility (via plugins) to manage Atlanta Tech Blogs, I use WordPress. Don’t fret too much about it. Just pick one and make a start. A year from now, if you want to switch to a different blogging platform, you can do it. It’s not the end of the world.

    2. Ask a few questions: who, what, where, when, why

    More specifically, you should ask these questions about your intended audience. Your target audience could be your customers, your prospects, your partners, your community of resellers, or a group of users who cause your community to thrive.  Asking – and answering – these questions as the purpose of your blog will help you every time you sit in front of that blank screen wondering what to write. (We’ll cover that in part 2 of this series!).  Here’s some food for thought on each of these questions.

        • Why are you blogging? This question is first for a big reason, or I should say dozens of reasons, but you need to understand why you are blogging for your brand. That’s part of your plan (next step)
        • Who do you want to read your blog? This answer is the audience you will reach with your words.
        • What does your audience like to read or consume (e.g., images or video or podcasts)?
        • Where are your readers? The Bitter Southerner is targeting an audience is mostly located in the south, so colloquialisms and southern phrases are the norm.
        • When (2 parts) can you write and when will your audience read? Both are very important. You will develop a rhythm of blogging, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or 2-3 times per week.
    3. Prepare a plan for your blog

    The worst mistake you can make when you start a blog for your company is not having a plan. What does that mean? Well, the result of not having a content marketing plan looks like this: “OK, what should I write for today’s blog post?” Don’t do that. Create a plan, no matter how simple. Here are the basic elements of your content marketing plan for the first 3 months.

        • Goals – back to the why you’re writing a blog question, you aren’t just blogging to say that your company has a blog. You must have goals before you start. Some common goals of a blog are:
          • to establish your company as an authority in your market space
          • to keep your ecosystem updated on the changes in your software (or whatever you make)
          • to share your customers’ successes
          • to generate buzz for an upcoming launch..
        • Writing team – who owns this blog? In a small company or startup, it might be just you. ProTip: make sure company leadership is completely 100% on board with content marketing as part of the company’s marketing plan.
        • Posting frequency – how often will you publish posts? Decide and agree on a frequency (daily, weekly, twice a week, but no less than once a month) and stick to it.
        • Post length – for SEO purposes, 300-500 words is optimal; however, you should try (and measure) different length posts to see what your audience prefers.
        • Post image types (or not) – decide from the start whether you will use images in your blog posts and to promote your blog posts. I recommend using at least one beautiful, relevant image in each post and to promote each post.
        • Subject matter categories – what sort of topics will you write about? You really want to decide this long before the first post.  The next post in this series will provide different ways to come up with ideas for individual posts, but here are a few “buckets” of topics to consider writing about:
          • Company events
          • Products and product updates
          • Your market space
          • The company’s ongoing history
          • Announcements (in addition to press releases, if you do that)

    The idea behind your plan, no matter how simple the plan, is to make sure you never ever sit down in front of that blank screen knowing you have to publish a blog post later today, and asking yourself, “so, what should today’s post be about?”  Don’t do that. Create a plan.

    4. Tell your story

    So many times, I have had the conversation that starts with, “But I just don’t know what we should even write about!”  It’ll come back to your plan (above), but in its simplest form, a blog is by definition a “web log” of happenings or events or thoughts.  So when you start your company’s blog, start by telling your story, one little bit at a time. If it’s your company, then nobody is as good as you at telling the story, because you invented the story.  So tell it. Break it down into digestible chunks, and write it.

    “How much detail, you know, should I share?” The acronym “TMI” should never be in the reader comments of your blog, but your company is a reflection of who you are, and so your blog should be as well. The most important purpose of a blog is for the readers to get to know the people behind the blog. When someone reads your content that you’ve written, they are consuming your content and getting to know who you are and what you’re all about.

    5. Check your grammar

    Fortunately, not everyone majored in English in college.  For those of us who did, it is our blessing to understand grammar and our curse to not be able to correct every single mistake we see on the internet.  For the everyday blog writer, if you are not comfortable with your own grammar knowledge, you are not alone. That’s why there are free services like Grammarly to do it for you. Give it a try, and if you don’t like it, that’s ok. I highly recommend that you find someone – on your team or outside – to do a simple grammar check on each of your blog posts.

    There are those who think that grammar is not important in this text language world, and it may not be important to you, but there is no quicker way to remove a reader from your audience than to make a big, ugly, glaring grammatical mistake on an important point.

    6. Promote your blog

    If you don’t tell anyone, then nobody will read your blog. We won’t get into your entire social media strategy here, but generally speaking, your most effective methods of promoting your blog are as follows.

    1. Link to your blog front and center on your web site.
    2. Use your blog content in your monthly newsletter if you have one (you should).
    3. Share each blog post appropriately on all your social media channels. There are best practices for sharing on each different social media channel, and you will do well to follow them.
    4. Make sure everyone else in the company also shares it to their social networks, and give them appropriate text and images to use.
    5. Measure it

    You cannot change what you do not measure.  Remember that as you start your blogging adventure.  If you use WordPress or Blogger, the stats are built in so you can see how many people are reading your blog posts, how long they’re staying on each page, which are your most popular posts, and what they are clicking on when they arrive at your blog. Those are easy to do, and you should align your goals (above) with your measurements so you can tell at a glance if you are hitting your goals or not.  Establish goals first, then measure against them regularly (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually).

    7. Iterate

    Not meeting your goals, or blowing past them? Then it’s time for a change! If you’re not meeting your goals, try something – anything – different. Longer posts. Shorter posts. More images. Fewer images. Do something different to see if it moves the needles in your statistics. That’s the beauty of digital content marketing: you can change it as often as you want to meet your goals. The most important part of changing though, is re-setting goals and expectations. When you change strategy or tactics, your goals will change, too.

    8. Repeat!

    That’s right, repeat! Whatever you’ve done right, do more of it. Whatever you’ve done wrong, change it. The more often you post, the more and faster you will learn, and the more effective you will become in your content marketing.

    I have found that getting over the first hump of actually creating and maintaining an active blog is the hardest, and most important, step. You can start an effective, popular blog if you follow these simple steps.  Then you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of content marketing for your brand.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.