Thoughts from the Beach…
Whether a small business or a professional your blog is not only a part of your online marketing efforts, it should be your lynchpin that holds it all together. Now since you are creating posts that share valuable and interesting information and offers on a regular basis it is time to make sure that you are getting the most from this library of content you have created.
Have you heard of Evergreen Content?
That is a term that refers to blog posts that contain information that si not date specific and still of value to the reader months or even years after it is written. Just because it is buried thirty posts ago doesn’t mean it is done and gone forever. Google search will have them indexed and send visitors too your pages when they are relevant to search terms. That is one of the primary reasons we write blogs, to create content about the business we are marketing, and allow customers to find us via search. You may have heard of inbound marketing and this is a founding principle of that method.
But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing
Search is amazingly easy, and it currently sends upwards of 20% of the traffic to this blog, but we want more, faster. Sharing via social networks and email is the obvious answer, but how you do it will determine success or failure. At GuestFeed we pay careful attention to the frequency of messages we send out for ourselves and for our customers, I created the EFT Ratio to aid us in maintaining a helpful non-intrusive vibe with our followers. I believe it is one of the primary reasons that our clients and our own followings have increased so rapidly.
We made a tool to Help
So we spent a lot of time creating great content, most of it evergreen, and tried to determine how to best share it. The over riding principle is that no matter what we don’t want to come across as a spammer, or annoying, or repetitive. But we want to share our evergreen posts more than once, especially on twitter. That is how Spoke Social was born, we wanted to create a tool that both our clients and us could use to help automate some of the sharing. How we do it:
- We write a great post first.
- Next we share it immediately on all our networks.
- Then we schedule it to be reposted with Spoke on twitter at a specific interval, like every 15 days, for a specific timeframe, like until August 25th.
- Then we monitor the click throughs and page views for all our pages. When one of them is clearly a STUD post with great interaction numbers we share it again on Facebook a month later with a comment along the lines of ‘In case you missed it the first time check out our most popular post of the past month.’
Isn’t automation Evil?
The answer is yes and no. Yes if your feed is a robot driven non-human inconsiderate self serving stream of boringness. No if you automate a very small percentage of what you send out, and if it is sincerely helpful things you are sharing. Check my twitter feed for an idea of what I mean: @spirocks
Keep in mind that EFT ratio idea from earlier, on twitter it is highly unlikely that a large percentage of your following will see a particular tweet. It is just the way it is with twitters real time stream of tweets pushing your last one out of view quickly. So with that understanding the second or third time that you share a post may be the first time that it is seen by a follower. That means that was their only opportunity to see what you are sharing and decide if it was of interest to them.
Take a look at this screenshot, see the spikes? Those are re-shares on twitter. What this tells me is that there were a bunch of people who were seeing this for the first time even three months after the post was written.
So why do we need a tool to help us automate the Re-Posts? Well creating content is time consuming and time is short when you are running a business. Spoke allows us to schedule posts out as long as we want with exact frequency in a matter of 10 seconds. That single feature would make it worth using for us, of course we use more of Spoke’s capabilities but scheduling recurring messages alone is the key one for us. Of course you can manually schedule posts with Hootsuite, we tried that and found that we were just not doing it as much because it was cumbersome and repetitive.
The bottom line is that you should do it, it is proven to drive more traffic to your blog, which means more potential customers are exposed to the fantastic things you are doing.
That is successful marketing defined.
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