Is there a formula for viral content?
May 2nd
By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Every now and then I will write a post that meets the following formula:
- It has a clickable headline (i.e 7 ways to increase traffic, 5 ways to get more followers, etc)
- It’s something I think will get shared plenty
- It’s a safe topic that has probably been repeated 1,000 times before
Mark (being the smart guy that he is) never accepts the post and tells me it won’t cut it. That’s why the content at {grow} brings a unique perspective that you won’t find on many other blogs. The writers are held to a different standard, especially if there’s a formula involved!
You Can’t Manufacture Authenticity
And yet, we’re all looking for that magic viral “formula” right? In the past when I’ve had a blog post go viral, I’ve tried to make an effort to write something that will catch fire again and can rarely reproduce that effect.
A conversation with Danielle Laporte made me realize why. When you approach producing content this way, it’s not authentic. It’s manufactured. It loses the personal touch that makes people read your blog. To quote Scott Stratten, “what people spread is emotion.” When you write a post in the hopes of getting tweets, traffic, and likes, you filter your voice through that lens. It’s a bit like adding artificial sweetener to your dessert and wondering why it doesn’t taste as good as real sugar.
Stop Trying to Fit In
People who fit in rarely make history. They get lost in the echo chamber. What makes you human is that there is no other person on this planet like you. Infuse that into every blog post you write. As Mark once said, social media amplifies your competitive advantage, so make sure you leverage it.
Take a Stand
If you’re afraid to offend people or fear people disagreeing with you, get over it. If you want to write something that makes an impact, it’s unlikely it will appeal to everybody. If you lose some people because of what you write, they may not be the right members for your tribe. As you’ve probably heard before, if you try to appeal to everybody you’ll appeal to nobody.
Create Art, not Marketing Material
One of the things that holds most business blogs back is that most of their blog posts read like PR puff pieces that promote their products. But we’ve entered an age in which everybody is in the publishing business. Everybody is a creative business owner. So you have to create art, not marketing material. Entertain and inspire.
Ditch the Scripts and Formulas
Scripts, formulas and best practices will only get you so far. You might even be the most popular person in the echo chamber. But if you ever want to get out of the echo chamber you have to ditch the script. I’d recommend taking a week off from reading any other blogs so you can reconnect with your own voice.
Writing anything formulaic with the intention of inflating vanity metrics is a recipe for mediocrity. Forget the traffic, tweets, likes and comments for a while. For some reason when you stop keeping score it goes up on its own. Write as if you’ve got nothing to prove and you’ll resonate with your audience in a way you never have before.
Srinivas Rao writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did and his the host-co founder of BlogcastFM. You can follow him on twitter @skooloflife
Five of the All-Time Biggest Blogging Questions Answered
May 1st
As I teach and speak, I start to see certain themes in the questions I’m asked. Here are the most common questions I am asked about blogging and some answers!
How do I get started with blogging?
- Start with your strategy. What are you trying to do and why? What does “success” look like to you? Money? Community? Actions? New friends?
- Write out the first 25 blog posts headlines you think you would like to compose. Compare this with your strategy. Does it fit? Is there a common theme you can stick to for the long term?
- As far as technology, I recommend using WordPress. It works and it can expand with your needs over time. Leave the tech stuff to the tech people. Spend your time on CONTENT.
- Write consistently. It may take months for you to find your voice and your rhythm. You have to just do it.
- Commit. Carve out time on your schedule to work on this every week. To be successful, it can’t be an after-thought.
- Don’t be discouraged at first. It takes time to find success. Last month, I had the same number of page views as my first 18 months of blogging all put together. Be patient.
How often should I blog?
Depends on your strategy (a common theme!) At a minimum, shoot for one new post per month. But here’s an easy regimen to follow if you want to shoot for one great blog post per week:
- Can you write a 500-word essay on a topic that interests you? Sure you can. In analog terms that is one-page double-spaced. In the old days, you could probably crank that out 10 minutes before class, right? There’s post number one.
- Now, find a a really interesting article in your field. Summarize it, comment on it, provide a proper link and attribution. There’s post number two.
- Find a success story or a customer to love on. Celebrate why these people are special to you. That’s post number three.
- Walk down to customer service. Ask them what the biggest customer question is. Answer it. That’s blog post number four.
Don’t forget to leverage existing content like videos, presentations and speeches. Deputize other resources to help you. Get guest posts from sales, PR, customers, suppliers, community members. It adds to the content diversity and helps build your community.
What do I write about?
In addition to some of the tips above, here are five fail-safe ideas when you get stuck for a topic:
- When you don’t know what to write about, google “what should I write about.” You’ll be amazed at the creative prompts that are out there.
- Go to a relevant LinkedIn group for your industry. Scan through the questions being asked in a forum. Pick an interesting one. Answer it. Great blog post!
- Carefully look at the comments and questions that come in from your community. I would say I get 25% of my ideas from community comments or my own comments on other blogger posts.
- Look at your Google Analytics for the keywords people are using to find your blog. These offer insights into the topics people are interested in. For example, I recently had a keyword of “beginning blogging” so I thought it was time to write an article like this one.
- Collect ideas all the time — something you read or view, an idea in a meeting, a comment from a customer. Just write the headline for the idea in your blog as soon as possible. That way when it is time to blog you’ll have a list of topics to riff on.
How do I promote traffic to my blog?
Depends on your strategy (naturally!). Are you even sure traffic is the right goal?
There are two camps on this — the keyword camp and the creative content camp.
The keyword camp would have you stuff keywords into your content as much as possible — especially headlines and early paragraphs — to attract search engine love.
The creative camp would say people will come to your blog, and eventually the search engines will too, if you really put an effort into fantastic content.
I am firmly in the creative camp. I’m aware of keywords but I’m not wedded to them. My goal is to build community, make new friends and have some fun along the way and I would die if I had to force keywords in every sentence, or even every post. Who wants to read that?
There have been tons of blog posts written about this subject but here are seven things (other than content) that have helped me grow a great community:
- be active in other relevant blog communities;
- earn the right to do some guest posts
- surround myself with awesome people on Twitter (who may be interested in my content;
- make the content easy to share;
- respect and support the people who honor you by reading your blog and commenting;
- blog consistently so people expect new content.
- if you write something truly stellar, ask your friends to help get the word out.
How do I make money from my blog?
There are six ways I know of to make money from your blog:
1) Advertising. This will not work for 99% of all bloggers because the traffic simply is not great enough.
2) Affiliate links (for example links to books on Amazon). Every time somebody clicks and buys, you get a small pay-out. This also will not work for 99% of all bloggers because (you guessed it) the traffic has to be huge to make any significant money.
3) Re-purposing your blog content. Many bloggers have assembled blog posts to create books, e-books and other content they can sell in a number of ways.
4) Sponsored posts. Link-hungry SEO promoters are eager to pay people to add links or even entire pieces of content to a blog. Once you do that, you turn your blog into an ad. People do it. I won’t. Ever.
5) Selling adjacent products. I have no plans to monetize my blog directly, but I’m hoping that people who love the free content will support me by buying adjacent products on my website such as my Social Media From Scratch video tutorials, books, or instant coaching services.
6) Indirect sales. This is the strategy behind my blog. I want to create great content that will make people want to hire me as a consultant, come to their office to teach a class, or give a speech to their association. My blog is basically my marketing strategy.
OK, so there are some answers for you. I’m sure I missed a lot, and as usual, you will provide some more great ideas in the comment section. Your turn!
Social media success also breeds risk
Apr 29th
I’ve occasionally used this blog to document my social media journey and in that spirit it would be impossible not to mention last week’s epic Social Slam event.
By successfully gathering 600 social media friends and fanatics and highlighting some of the coolest speakers and topics anywhere, this must be considered a milestone, a signature moment. And while I am filled with joy and pride for this event, I could not be honest with you without saying that the week was filled with trepidation. You see, success on the social web also breeds increasing risk.
Gini Dietrich kicks off Social Slam
Although Social Slam was spectacularly run by the Knoxville Social Media Club, my name is inexorably associated with the event as its founder and the person who puts the program together. Leading up to the event, I shuddered each time I saw somebody tweet that they were attending “Mark Schaefer’s conference.”
Ten years ago, if something went wrong at a conference, the damage would be limited to a little grumbling. If something failed at Social Slam, the news would spread though millions (yes, millions) of possible social media impressions. If the room was too cold, if the wi-fi didn’t work, if the lunch was awful — that is what would be recorded, that is what would be remembered. Potentially, that is what would go viral.
No person or company receives any direct financial gain from Social Slam. It is an entirely non-profit initiative so that we can keep the prices at a point where anybody can attend. In fact, that is our vision. If you attended an event featuring speakers such as Mitch Joel, Jay Baer and Gini Dietrich in New York, it would easily cost $1,500. Unless you’re working for a big company, who can afford that? You could come to Social Slam for $79 and get a whole day of content, networking, breakfast, lunch and an after-party to boot.
And yet, I realized that although this was entirely volunteer-driven (even the speakers donate their time) we would be inevitably compared to professionally-run events in big cities. In the era of the social web, there is no room for error any more.
Tom Webster in the process of making statistics hilarious
As it turned out, I don’t know how it possibly could have been better. Here is the best indicator of success — You know when you go to conferences and see people milling about outside the main room doing emails and phone calls? During Social Slam the halls were empty. Everybody was stuck to their seats because the content was so amazing.
Yes, the wi-fi worked. The room was comfortable. The lunch was delicious. The parties were a blast. The speakers rocked. The social web hummed with positive comments.
And yet mid-way through the morning, the weight of the #soslam hashtag attracted the attention of porn spammers. The stream of “Mark Schaefer’s conference” was quickly hijacked with hundreds of disgusting tweets automatically produced by bots. Other companies, not even in attendance, tried to sell their wares by adopting the popular conference hashtag like little social media leeches. And unbelievably, even individuals in my home town (who I have never met) sat on their couches at home and threw darts at a conference they have never attended in a pathetic attempt to feed their need for attention.
The grotesque irony is that the better we are, the bigger the target becomes. The bigger the target I become, too.
Mitch Joel pushed the crowd to think of social media in new ways.
And this leads me to the inevitable question — Why?
Why put myself through it? My business is thriving without it. My books are selling without it. My friends and students love me without it. Why work all these hours just to become a target for creeps?
Here is the lesson of taking big risks in the social era. Even if it pays off, you put yourself, and your brand, increasingly at risk. Success breeds hate and corruption. It always has, but now it’s automated and it’s amplified. So if you want to take a step on to the national stage, you better have a helluva thick skin.
I am still driven by this idea of creating an entirely new kind of social media destination. Of creating an event centered on relationships instead profit, on content that breaks new ground instead of re-hashing the most popular themes, on showcasing worthy new voices instead of the same 10 middle-aged white guys. How far can our passionate band of volunteers take this thing?
So, this is my way of saying thank you for your support … and yes, I’ll see you at Social Slam next year!
There has been a lot of content developed following Social Slam 2012 and here are some stand-outs I found:
- A nice short round-up from Chris Craft.
- Clinton Barnes took away lesson on trust and innovation that changed his perspective.
- Courtney Seiter takes a Storify-view of the proceedings (including the candied bacon!).
- Stanford Smith said he could write a book on his learnings but distilled Social Slam into six powerful ideas.
- Behind the scenes at Social Slam from an insider view at Pyxl.
- What a lovely post — Margie Clayman describes how Social Slam re-kindled her faith in social media
- Chuck Hemann writes about how Social Slam re-inspired his faith in conferences.
- Tom Webster posted about keeping his cool during a Social Slam fail.
- Doug Brock picked up on some great speaking tips from the Social Slam experts.
- Jenn Whinnem covers Social Slam from the angle of non-profits.
- Laura Click covers 10 quick tips from Social Slam.
- Debbie Andrews looks at 10 customer-facing takeaways from the event.
- One of our speakers, Billy Delaney, describes his experience being thrown into “the deep end of the social media pool!“
- Jayme Soulati records her take-aways with some video interviews of the speakers.
- 12 nuggets and some cool Social Slam photos from Rosemary O’Neill.
- Jeff Haws culled the day-long event into three major Social Slam themes.
- Dr. Alice Ackerman recounts the experience of speaking at her first social media conference.
- Brian Vickery of Denver did a video blog re-cap.
- Kristen Daukas creates an awesome tribute to the Women of Social Slam.
- For Davina Brewer, Social Slam was all about the connections.
- Marisa Peacock contends that Social Slam cut through the nonsense to deliver real value.
- Unique view from a SPONSOR perspective. How to turn this into B2B awareness from MLT Creative.
- Gary Schirr says it was weird to give a talk to a tweeting audience!
- And last, but not least, Tom Webster recites his favorite SoSlam hashtag spam as poetry.
Draw Something from the Heart. A {growtoon}.
Apr 27th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Kacy Maxwell is a guy who loves his work, family and a good challenge. See more of his cartoons at EverythingIsMedia.com.
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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