Social Media & Email Marketing Experiments, Strategies & Ideas

Starting in October 2014, I automated many tweets by scheduling them for the next year. It cost $126. Within 6 months, I’ve increased my Twitter following by 32%, had interactions with many people I’d love to meet in person, and removed myself from the Twitter Treadmill. And now I use Twitter day to day however I like (mainly sharing links and checking notifications once per month).

Monday through Saturday at some point in the day, you’ll see me tweet out an article that I have actually read with a mention of the author. I’ve been doing this for more than 4 years.

It’s part of my ongoing experiment to use social media platforms more sustainably and effectively.

Even though I joined Twitter back in 2009, I never really took to the platform. It seemed too broadcast-oriented with an insular culture where soon people were fighting over Klout scores. It seemed absurd at worst and tedious at best.

I also couldn’t see any huge traffic benefit to investing time when even tweets from my industry’s most influential leaders drive less than 1% click through rates.

However, after much informed reading and prodding from Brett Snyder, I figured out that even though Twitter does not drive traffic per se – it does drive awareness and connections.

It’s sort of like a giant conference. Each session or networking event doesn’t drive a lead or sale, but the people you see, meet, talk about, and talk with all drive success for everyone in the future.

The question still remains – how do you maintain that visibility and make initial connections without draining hours into a platform that you don’t own. In other words, how do you get to meet and spark conversations with people at the conference without sitting through every boring session, standing in every lunch line, and hovering over the coffee table?

For me, that’s where automated tweets of posts that I have read and found useful comes in. Writing custom tweets, searching and tagging author at the end of each article, then posting is productivity death by a thousand cuts. But batch writing and scheduling the tweets save time while keeping the benefits of custom tweets.

If your goal is to build visibility on Twitter, make connections, build a “sharing safety net” to free your Twitter-self up and save time while doing it, then this strategy is for you.

*Note – also, I tried to make this process as optional as possible. I dislike the bot-ification of Twitter as much as anyone. And yes, by adopting this strategy, you are guilty on the same spectrum as the Internet Research Agency. Use it in moderation with your own personal spin. Don’t hook it up to a random RSS feed. Make it yours with a bit of computer help.

[Read more…] about How I Automated Tweets for a Year: My Experience & Guide To Scheduling Quality Tweets

What do you think of when you think of marketing campaigns? Typically, crazy promotions, phoney contests, giveaways, and flash sales come to mind. These campaigns, while effective in the short term, are not repeatable.

At what point does your discount become the regular price? At what point do you burn out your Facebook following or email list?

What if I told you there was a better way to build a marketing campaign? What if I told you there was a type of marketing campaign that could provide lasting benefits to your business for years to come?

It’s your lucky day. There is such a strategy. It’s called evergreen marketing, and it fuels some of the most powerful companies across industries.

[Read more…] about Evergreen Marketing: How To Plan Marketing That Lasts

You’re ready to audit and optimize your (or your clients’) YouTube channel or you want to see what a competitor is doing with their YouTube videos. But you run into the problem that YouTube makes it kind of tough to scrape and export video information.

You can’t really crawl YouTube like you can a website – it’s too large and there’s no way to control your crawl. I ran into this problem a few weeks ago while trying to map out videos and optimize titles & tags in bulk.

Here’s how to scrape & export video information from YouTube without buying sketchy blackhat scraper software.

[Read more…] about How To Scrape & Export Video Information from YouTube

Ah, the art of email marketing. Chances are you’ve landed here because you’re looking into sending email blasts as a part of your marketing strategy, and you’re wondering how to do it.

Email can be an incredibly effective way to connect with your customers and improve your business… when used correctly.

When used incorrectly, it can be a surefire way to land in spam (AKA where emails go to die).

So how do you use email blasts effectively for your business? What best practices should you follow?

But before we get there, let’s cover a few of the basics.

[Read more…] about Email Blasts: Definition, Examples, & Best Practices

You can see YouTube Tags in the in-line Javascript in the source code of the video.

On any given video, you can right-click on the page and choose to “View Source”

Once you have the page source open, just CTRL-F for the “keywords” meta tag – and get the tags that the author used.

To view tags on mobile, you will have to sub in view-source:https://m.youtube.com/

in your mobile browser. Then CTRL-F.

This is all a bit more confusing than before.

Before 2018, YouTube placed the tags in the  <meta name=”keywords” content=”[keywords]”> field within the view-source code for any video.

Whether you are researching YouTube for your own content or you are trying to optimize your own YouTube videos – competitor tags can provide a ton of insight. It’s like free keyword research.

If you want to see them directly in videos like pre-2018, check out this YouTube extension for Chrome.

[Read more…] about How To See YouTube Tags for Competitor / Keyword Research

Getting mentioned in a publication (aka PR) has tons of benefits from referral traffic to branding to long-term organic traffic growth. It’s a lever that can provide marketing returns well beyond your investment.

But “getting press” can be daunting. And plenty of agencies will help re-inforce that feeling.

There’s a role for PR professionals. But you don’t need to spend a lot of money on an agency to get press. Creating a PR campaign is not easy. It’s difficult, but it’s not magic either. In fact, the formula is fairly straightforward.

1. Write a pitch
2. Send it to a writer
3. They like your story & publish it

But in those simple steps bury some details. To run a successful DIY PR campaign, you’ll need to understand the process and create your own plan. That’s the goal with this post.

Let’s get started. [Read more…] about How To Plan a DIY PR Campaign in 6 Steps

Usually when marketers think Reddit – they think massive promotion, reach, and influence. Reddit is the most influential social news aggregators in the world. It drives headlines, traffic, and new ideas further and more rapidly than any social network.

*Editor’s Note – I originally published this post in 2014. Since then, not only has Reddit grown and changed, but marketer’s tools for Reddit has grown and changed. But the approach is the same as it ever was. I’ve revised & re-published this post in 2019 with new resources, screenshots, and corrected information.

Simply using Reddit for promotion can be worse than a waste of time, it can actively damage your brand and reputation. Unless you are willing to put in the time and investment to learn etiquette, and become a legitimate member of a community (aka subreddit), you should not use Reddit to organically promote your content.**

**Editor’s Note – and no, I am not that naive to think that you can’t succeed with a shortcut approach. Reddit is quite the cesspool of purchased accounts, corporate campaigns, and even state-sponsored disinformation campaigns that are all still quite active despite Reddit’s efforts. The people who take shortcuts can and do win in the short-run. But this post is for those who do care about the long-term health of their brand, Reddit, and the Internet at large.

The Reddit community does take a better eye towards buying ads to promote your content. There are good and bad ways to advertise on Reddit – and it’s something you should certainly consider. But Reddit ads usually don’t give you the same promotional effect (even excluding monetary costs) as organic submissions.

Using Reddit to promote your content marketing & SEO efforts is going to take either a lot of time or some money – neither of which many marketers have.

To reiterate – if you don’t have time or money to market on Reddit well – please do not promote there. Be cool and respectful.

But that doesn’t mean Reddit is useless for marketing. Here are 3 ways to use Reddit for better SEO & content marketing without submitting or paying for submissions – all involving the goldmine of research that is Reddit.

[Read more…] about How To Use Reddit For SEO & Content Marketing Research

Using giveaways for marketing is a tried and tested idea both on and offline. Raffles, lotteries, and giveaways are as old as the Bible. But in the age of social media, giveaways have become the next supposed silver bullet for marketing. Entire companies such as Rafflecopter, Gleam.io, and KingSumo have started to help companies make the most of their giveaways. Even Amazon is in on the game.

The formula for running a giveaway online is pretty straightforward. You pay a certain amount for a prize. Offer a chance to win it for free by entering their email. Incentivize people to get more entries by sharing it. The extra sharing creates a viral factor that gets you more email addresses and entrants than you would have with pay per click ads or more 1 to 1 organic promotion.

You then award the prize, and start email marketing to all your new subscribers. If the cost of the prize is less than you would have spent acquiring them via pay per click or other channels, then it’s a marketing success!

There’s plenty of examples of giveaways that appear successful. They’ve become nearly ubiquitous with Amazon even integrating them into shopping pages. They happen daily in every industry – everything from copywriting to industrial tools. Giveaways seem like marketing best practice.

But are giveaways worth it? What does it take to run one? And what’s the best way to use giveaways for marketing? That’s what this guide is for – let’s dive in.

[Read more…] about Using Giveaways for Marketing: My Results, Ideas & Guide

A LinkedIn Company (or business) page is an excellent way to keep people informed about your company, brands, products and services and job opportunities. Creating a page for your business is fairly straightforward. But, like any platform, you’ll be much more effective if you dig into the manual, apply best practices, add your own creative touches, analyze then improve.

Why You Need a Company Page

LinkedIn is the premier social network for business professionals. The platform has over 460 million users throughout the world. Depending on the business your company is in, LinkedIn offers access to a key demographic.

In some ways, LinkedIn is nowhere near as sexy as other social networks. Day to day, it can feel like a haunt for recruiters and weird spammers.

[Read more…] about LinkedIn Company / Business Page Best Practices w/ Examples

What’s hot? What’s are the trending topics getting shared? Creating content around trending content can build entire businesses and feeds the content-social-sharing mill that is the Internet.

I’ve written about how to find pre-qualified “evergreen” content ideas for search. In other words, how to research and find content ideas that you know will work well for organic traffic.

Finding prequalified content ideas around trending topics is a bit trickier – there’s much more noise. But it can be done, BuzzFeed certainly doesn’t guess at ideas. They have tools that help them identify and bubble up winners.

If you are a website owner trying to go viral and get ahead on a trend, you may not have a proprietary listening tool, but you can certainly do plenty of deep research to find the next trending topic to cover.

You may have seen Twitter Trends and you may stalk BuzzFeed Trending but here are several free (or mostly free) tools & sources for trending topic ideas.

[Read more…] about How To Find Trending Topics for Social Optimized Content

Email can be a powerful way to connect with your eCommerce customers. But you already know that.

Chances are, you’ve landed here because you’re looking to make your emails better.

In order to keep your email list engaged and taking action, your actual emails have to be good… which means the copy (AKA the words in the email) needs to get the job done.

So, how do you improve your email copy for your eCommerce store? Here are 5+ email copywriting rules to follow.

[Read more…] about How to Write Better Email Copy for eCommerce Stores

Did you know it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain one? Or that by increasing your retention rate by just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25-95%?

Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk email marketing.

Email marketing is one of the top ways to retain customers. But in order to do that, we’ve got to keep people on our list.

Unfortunately, a lot of business owners put too much emphasis on growing the list instead of retaining the subscribers they have. Meanwhile, they’re losing subscribers left and right, sometimes before they even get the first welcome email.

In order to make email marketing an effective retention technique, we’ve got to retain subscribers. Here’s how to do it.

[Read more…] about How to Retain Email Subscribers

One of the most incredible things about the Internet is that you can see what people are saying about you – for better and for worse. In fact, there’s a whole industry (and government agencies…) dedicated to social media listening tools, tracking and monitoring.

The information from paid industry tools can be valuable, especially if you have the team and resources to use and act on the data. But social listening tools are expensive. Even cheap ones can really add up if you can’t act on the information.

So what if you’re just a DIY website owner, blogger, or small business owner interested in monitoring your brand online without monthly fees or daunting dashboards (or low-quality “free” ones)? That’s what this guide is for – how monitor your brand & website across the Internet for free yourself… [Read more…] about How To Set Up Free DIY Brand Monitoring & Social Listening

Your Facebook cover photo is the most visible part of your timeline. In fact, it’s often the first place a visitor’s eye goes when they come to your page.

This means when used correctly, a solid, creative Facebook cover can enhance your profile significantly.

Here are a few guidelines to follow when picking a Facebook cover photo, and examples of a few people and brands who have creatively used their cover space. [Read more…] about Facebook Cover Photos: Guidelines and Creative Examples

Email can be an incredibly effective way to connect with your customers and improve your business.

Chances are, you landed here because no one is opening your emails (or your “open rate” is low). Perhaps you suspect that your email campaigns are getting marked as spam, meaning they’re immediately sent where email goes to die… the spam folder.

So, how do you avoid spam filters? How do you get your audience to actually engage with your emails? [Read more…] about How To Send Better Email & Avoid Email Spam Trigger Words

The world of marketing is filled with jargon and buzzwords. Some are essential, while others are just… well, interesting.

Personally, I try to stay away from marketing jargon as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to learn these terms and understand why they’re used in the digital marketing space.

So, without further ado, here’s an essential guide to marketing jargon: [Read more…] about Beginner’s Guide To Digital Marketing Buzzwords & Jargon

YouTube is one of the Internet’s largest platforms. It’s also an interesting hybrid platform – YouTube is simultaneously one of the Internet’s largest social networks, one of the Internet’s largest search engines (by queries processed), and the largest video hosting platform.

YouTube’s hybrid nature provides versatility but it also creates some confusion around best practices, getting started, and optimizing your channel for discovery, engagement and business goals.

I’ve been able to do work on client channels, my own successful hobby channels and I’m working on a YouTube strategy for the new ShivarWeb channel. Here’s my guide to YouTube optimization – for your videos and channel based on my experience and curation of the best YouTube resources on the Internet. First I’ll cover goals, concepts & benchmarks. Then I’ll tackle all the nitty-gritty details. [Read more…] about YouTube Optimization: Guide To Channels, Videos & Strategy