I’ve known from the day I first hit “Publish” on a blog that I had a lot to learn, so I spend a lot of time looking up as a blogger. Besides sometimes being a pain in the neck, I end up asking questions such as: what separates the folks like of Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, Darren Rowse, and Chris Brogan from the rest of the mere mortals that aspire to achieve what they have?
What I’ve realized is that these supposed, “A-List Bloggers”, aren’t bloggers at all, they are really A-List business people. Sure, they run blogs. They write and produce incredible content constantly. That’s what we get to see on a day to day basis because we don’t get to peek behind the curtain of their operations.
If we had the opportunity to see what their operations really looked like, here’s what we would see:
Smart, long-term strategies for products, content and community building.
Coordinated efforts across all areas of the business and content creation, marketing, product development, networking and the rest.
And chances are, you’d see a team of passionate people working together to turn their visions into reality through a business.
Mike Stelzner and the Social Media Examiner team are at it again. Raising the bar yet one more time. 2010 was already super successful with two of the most recognized events of the year “Facebook Success Summit” and “Social Media Success Summit”, which were attended by more than 4,400 people.
But in 2011 SME is planning to start early with their new Blogging Success Summit opening on February 1st and running through the 22nd.
Look At All This Value
Here is some of the value delivered in the summit:
Discover the best ways to market your business with a blog
Find out how to build an engaging blog presence
Discover innovative ways to generate quality leads and increase sales with your blog
Learn how to drive traffic to your blog with Facebook and other social media platforms
Yep, it’s that time of the year when we publish and consume an unusual amount of best of and top 10 list. And who am I to change the tradition?
So today I’m delivering a compilation of the Top 10 posts of 2010 right here at SocialMouths. In case you missed something…
Also, there are a couple of things I want you to read at the end of this post =)
But before I start with that I have a quick…
A Thank You Note For My Readers
I want to do this now because I know the last week of December is very slow as many of us disconnect to be with our families.
I can’t deny that this has been a great year for SocialMouths in terms of the things you can measure. I’m at about 50k monthly pageviews, bounce rate is insanely low, the subscriptions are at a growth rate that I didn’t expect and I could keep going… I’m thankful for that because it means some of you like what I’m putting out there.
But I’m mostly thankful for the great connections I have been able to establish as clients, fellow bloggers, readers or just friends. The focus for 2010 was to try to deliver as much as possible without asking for anything in exchange but I was definitely able to also receive so much awesome sauce from you guys that I feel I need to come back in 2011 with much more. So that is the intention!
Yes, I said “Less Followers”. It’s not a typo. I’m not crazy and it’s not a clever headline for a post that will turn into the opposite in the third paragraph.
Let me first do a formal introduction, this is the second installment of the “Striking Six” Blog Series that involves 6 online mavericks sharing knowledge on how to craft an inspirational and powerful online presence. Each one of these awesome and mystery bloggers are revealed on each post when it’s published so you have to keep up with the series. Exciting isn’t it?
Back to our topic in hand… and why “Less Followers” is the new “More Followers”. I’m inviting you today to disregard all those posts you’ve read about how to build huge communities, get more followers and likes, including mine. This has nothing to do with administration of all those Twitter followers and how hard it can be if you have too many because it’s clear that with the appropriate tools we can easily manage and filter information however we need.
Followers, Likes, Retweets, Subscribers… Is any of this stuff important? I’m sure you’ve listened to both sides, “get more followers” and “numbers are not important”.
There is a lot of noise on both sides, people telling you that numbers are important are usually trying to sell you some kind of software and people telling you they’re not, have 50k followers and get retweeted like crazy. So which one is it?
I’m going to tell you when and why numbers are important, or not.
Let’s take it step by step…
Business Objectives
First of all, the most important thing is that you understand what your business objectives are and how they translate into online goals. That will make the difference and you will be able to determine if numbers, either high or low, are important for your business AND, if it’s relevant to display them on your site/blog.
Profit Anyone?
How do these numbers affect your bottom line? most likely not directly, having higher Retweets than your direct competitor means nothing on the front-end. Having a bigger influence over that same competitor could mean everything and Retweets, Likes and RSS subscribers could be part of that.
Being successful online requires that you beat a pretty long learning curve and while I try to contribute with my 2 cents, there are amazing bloggers out there that you should be reading on a regular basis.
These people put their amazing talent and knowledge into blog content and deliver it to their online communities week after week.
I have to advise you that if you see that I’m not going with the obvious is for 2 reasons, one because I like helping you discover stuff that you might have missed (there is just too much content out there…) and two, not that I don’t occasionally read the usual suspects, but this is the stuff I visit frequently. Also let me say that this is not a ranking so don’t pay attention to the order.
Then we usually go and start worrying about how to make that content easy to share, how to provide valuable information, how to engage readers and so on to make it even harder.
How do you write your content? There are just too many things to consider…
In the last couple of weeks I was asked a few times on what are the things I consider when writing a post, so I thought of putting a list or items together which then turned into this post. I hope it can of help to you.
In previous posts and polls we have discussed the issues of maintaining a blog, that is of course, if you blog for your business and the goal is to make it part of your marketing approach.
Today, entrepreneurs are known for being great at delegating and outsourcing segments of their business to be able to focus on the essentials but, would you consider outsourcing your blog? or at least aspects of the work load it represents?
What would you be willing to outsource?
Also, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments sections. Maybe you think it should not be outsourced at all…
This is a guest post by Jonathan Wondrusch from ByBloggers
Yep, it’s that time of the year when we publish and consume an unusual amount of best of and top 10 list. And who am I to change the tradition?
Followers, Likes, Retweets, Subscribers… Is any of this stuff important? I’m sure you’ve listened to both sides, “get more followers” and “numbers are not important”.
Being successful online requires that you beat a pretty long learning curve and while I try to contribute with my 2 cents, there are amazing bloggers out there that you should be reading on a regular basis.
Writing content is not easy, no doubt about it.
