Bailey, 42, most recently worked for big Richmond, Va., broadcaster Media General as director of programming and affiliate marketing in Los Angeles.
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The court held that the operator of an affiliate marketing network, LeadClick Media, LLC, unlawfully participated in the use of deceptive websites to …
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Through Socius Affiliate Services, Socius provides their Affiliates with business development, marketing, brand, and readiness support while the …
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The world of affiliate marketing is a colorful one, from which new magical creatures keep emerging. With the rise of the ‘get rich quick’ niche emerged …
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SMP: Affiliate marketing appears to have taken a back seat while newer buzzwords (content marketing, moment marketing, social media) have taken …
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Let your content do the talking Affiliate marketing has been seen for a long time as one of the most effective ways of generating income on the Internet.
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Posted by TomCaulton
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources.
Allow me to elaborate.
Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’ 404 pages.
Please note: In this post, I will be using Search Engine Land as an example to make my points.
Ready to dive in? Great, because I’m going to walk you through the entire link building process now.
First, you need to find your competitor(s). This is as easy as searching for the keyword you’re targeting on Google and selecting websites that are above you in the SERPs. Once you have a list of competitors, create a spreadsheet to put all of your competitors on, including their position in the rankings and the date you listed them.
Once the crawl is complete, click “Response Codes.”
Then, click on the dropdown arrow next to “filter” and select “Client Error 4xx.”
Now you’ll be able to see the brand’s 404 pages.
Once you’ve completed the step above, simply press the “Export” button to export all of their 404 pages into a file. Next, import this file into to a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs. On this part of the spreadsheet, create tabs called “Trust Flow,” “Citation Flow,” “Referring Domains,” and “External Backlinks.”
Now that you’ve imported all of their 404 pages, you need to dissect the images and external links if there are any. A quick way to do this is to highlight the cell block by pressing on the specific cell at the top, then press “Filter” under the “Data” tab.
Press “Clear,” like this:
This will clear all preset options. Now, type in the URL of the competitor’s website in the search box and click “Select all.”
This will filter out all external links and just leave you with their 404 pages. Go through the whole list, highlighting the pages you think you can rewrite.
Now that you have all of your relevant 404 pages in place, run them through Majestic [a paid tool] or Moz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) [a freemium tool] to see if their 404 pages actually have any external links (which is what we’re ultimately looking for). Add the details from Majestic or Moz to the spreadsheet. No matter which tool you use (I use OSE), hit “Request a CSV” for the backlink data. (Import the data into a new tab on your spreadsheet, or create a new spreadsheet altogether if you wish.)
Find relevant backlinks linking to (X’s) website. Once you’ve found all of the relevant websites, you can either highlight them or remove the ones that aren’t from your spreadsheet.
Please note: It’s worth running each of the websites you’re potentially going to be reaching out to through Majestic and Moz to find out their citation flow, trust flow, and domain authority (DA). You may only want to go for the highest DA; however, in my opinion, if it’s relevant to your niche and will provide useful information, it’s worth targeting.
With the 404s and link opportunities in hand, focus on creating content that’s relevant for the brands you hope to earn a link from. Find the contact information for someone at the brand you want the link from. This will usually be clear on their website; but if not, you can use tools such as VoilaNorbert and Email Hunter to get the information you need. Once you have this information, you need to send them an email similar to this one:
Hi [THEIR NAME],
My name is [YOUR NAME], and I carry out the [INSERT JOB ROLE – i.e., MARKETING] at [YOUR COMPANY’S NAME or WEBSITE].
I have just come across your blog post regarding [INSERT THEIR POST TITLE] and when I clicked on one of the links on that post, it happened to go to a 404 page. As you’re probably aware, this is bad for user experience, which is the reason I’m emailing you today.
We recently published an in-depth article regarding the same subject of the broken link you have on your website: [INSERT YOUR POST TITLE].
Here’s the link to our article: [URL].
I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind linking to our article instead of the 404 page you’re currently linking to, as our article will provide your readers with a better user experience.
We will be updating this article so we can keep people provided with the very latest information as the industry evolves.
Thank you for reading this email and I look forward to hearing from you.
[YOUR NAME]
Disclaimer: The email example above is just an example and should be tailored to your own style of writing.
In closing, remember to keep detailed notes of the conversations you have with people during outreach, and always follow up with people you connect with.
I hope this tactic helps your SEO efforts in the future. It’s certainly helped me find new places to earn links. Not only that, but it gives me new content ideas on a regular basis.
Do you use a similar process to build links? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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So you have created a great piece of content and posted it on your blog. Now, what?
Wait for the audience to discover it and praise it? Of course not. You must think of ways to amplify your content so that it reaches the right audience, at the right time.
Content is created to fulfill a specific purpose and if it fails to reach the audience at the appropriate time, it loses its value.
The secret to success with content marketing is to “provide value”. But in order to provide value, you need to deliver the content to the right audience.
Most businesses focus primarily on production (of content) but they forget about the distribution part. So how will you make sure your content reaches your target audience?
There is a huge amount of content competing for attention; how will you cut through the noise?
Fortunately, there are a number of tools that help businesses deliver content to their target audience at the right time.
By leveraging these content distribution tools, businesses can expand their reach and make a positive impact on their audience with the help of high-quality content.
However, you must remember that to leverage these tools to their maximum potential, you must create very high quality and valuable content.
Without a solid content distribution strategy, you are only trying focusing on half of the game. So to help you get started with content distribution and reach your target audience, we have listed the top 5 content distribution tools that will help you expand your reach and improve the visibility of your content.
According to Bryan Birsic, the president at SimpleReach, this content distribution tool helps publishers to identify and publish their content that will drive the maximum traffic through various social media channels.
‘The Slide’, which is their primary product, features the most shared (and most likely to be shared) content that the publisher has in his or her archives and persuades the users to share them. Publishers can also feature their highly shared content on various other high authority publishers’ sites.
Their intelligent paid distribution tool offers amazing features like audience targeting, which you can use to target the right audience to showcase your best content on popular channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Taboola and Outbrain etc.
You can even programmatically optimize your content for earned media. Better yet, SimpleReach allows you to shift your spend to drive traffic at a lowest cost.
Their analytics tool offers publishers real-time insights about content performance; while the predictive tool helps you realize which content is likely to perform the best so that you can focus on this content the most.
Image Source: Techcrunch.com
Thanks to its real-time dashboard, SimpleReach provides actionable insights to promote your best content. You can even segment your data using the custom dashboards, which also allows you to set email alerts for everything that’s important to you.
Finally, this tool provides historical reports, which you can use to identify the most effective channels and plan your content strategy accordingly.
Outbrain offers a pay-per-click model of content distribution, starting as low as $10 per day.
It helps businesses reach a bigger and more targeted audience. The publishers submit links or RSS feeds of their content, which is then featured at the bottom of leading stories on a number of high authority media sites. These links are labeled as ‘Sponsored’ or ‘Related’ posts.
Using Outbrain, you can promote your own content as well as press coverage related to your business. This content distribution tool accepts almost every content format including articles, slideshows, videos, and infographics. However, Outbrain does not accept any kind of direct sales landing page or even your home page for promotion or marketing purposes.
You should use this tool to target your audience and reach out to them on desktop, mobile or tablet. You can even geo-target your content by region or state and optimize your content for publishers that deliver the best ROI.
One of the most striking features of Outbrain is that it allows you to optimize your campaign directly from the dashboard as well as analyze your spend, traffic, and conversions easily. You can adjust campaign settings as it suits your needs and launch or pause a campaign at any time.
The marketing team at Outbrain claims the links are highly targeted and posted under relevant posts, so it generates 44 percent higher page views per session compared to any other referral program.
Some highly reputable sites like Mashable, CNN, Fox News, etc. are included in the list of publishers under Outbrain, so you can get more eyes on your content by publishing your content on these sites. Outbrain has also introduced a self-serve platform to enable small businesses and blogs to publish their content easily.
Taboola’s content discovery platform helps businesses and publishers drive more traffic and improve lead generation by getting their content recommended by top publishers.
Similar to Outbrain, once the publishers submit their links, Taboola’s algorithm matches the content with one of the hundreds of premium publisher sites such as USA Today, NBC News, Business Insider, etc.
This content distribution tool provides a great way to monetize your site. The targeted recommendations from Taboola’s sponsored content marketplace will help you generate revenue from your website or mobile app.
Better yet, you can even increase your revenue from native advertising campaigns. With this tool, you can provide a performance-based pricing model to your clients to maximize revenue.
Even businesses selling products and services can generate and improve their revenue using the real-time bidding environment of Taboola-X. And your editorial team is perhaps going to fall in love with this content distribution tool.
Taboola provides complete visibility and inline editorial controls to your editorial team over the website content, allowing them to decide when to refresh content, filer and promote content. Besides, it lets your visitors filter content according to their preference and indexes both articles and videos.
Whenever a visitor clicks on your content, it is showcased through social media, YouTube, your site/blog or other third party sites. Taboola also offers analytics, performance stats and one-on-one support to help businesses achieve their business goals.
Xink is an exclusive cloud-based email signature management software that helps marketers leverage their email signatures to improve the visibility of their content.
Are you wondering how can you distribute content through email signatures?
Just include the link to your best content, news, or any form of content and improve its visibility among email subscribers. Depending upon the size of the contact database, you can create a huge impression for your content.
Use this tool to improve your brand management across organizations, regardless of the device, as Xink also allows marketers to connect email accounts of team members to expand distribution and ensure better and increased impressions for their content.
This means you can not only automate email signatures but also ensure that all your employees have a professional email signature, resulting in thousands of brand impressions each day.
This undoubtedly creates a great branding and marketing opportunity for your business.
Xink makes email signature management very simple with three easy steps. You can either design a custom email signature template or use an existing one; once done, start adding your employees to Xink.
Finally, when you have added all your employees, launch an email signature campaign to boost your brand impact.
Inbound.org started as a small project initiated by Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot and Rand Fishkin of Moz, but it quickly evolved to be the best community-curated hub where the highest quality marketing content can be found.
As a marketer, it is often hard to stay up to date and keep a track of everything, given the large quantity of content published each day. It is humanly impossible to do dozens of blog and email subscriptions and keep a tab on them.
This is where Inbound.org comes in; it is a feed where you can read about things that matter most to you as well as share ideas and participate in discussions.
In addition, you can get answers to your questions from an expert in that particular domain, thanks to the large and ever-growing Inbound.org community.
However, this content distribution channel is not recommended only for self-submissions, but it can be leveraged to share your most newsworthy pieces of content. After posting your content you must encourage the community to comment and reply to your thread.
If you can properly use this tool to showcase your marketing achievements and contributions, you can even win clients or get noticed by industry players. This, of course, is an added bonus making Inbound.org a clear winner.
Content marketing is not only about creating amazing content, it is about what happens after you publish it. Creating great content is only half the war won; the next half involves the proper distribution of content. So with these amazing content distribution tools, you will have to worry less about delivering your content to the most targeted audience.
Now you can focus more on producing high quality and valuable content for your target audience and feed them with the most relevant content at the most appropriate time. With these advanced content distribution tools, the distribution becomes more streamlined. So get ready to feature your posts on the highest authority sites and leverage your content to their maximum potential!
Did we miss out something? Tell us your unique experiences about content distribution in the comments.
Guest Author: Kunjal Panchal is a Digital Marketer at E2M, the fastest growing digital marketing agency in India. She is a social media geek, a complete foodie and enjoys trying varied cuisines. A perfect day for her consists of reading her favorite author with a hot cuppa coffee.
The post 5 Powerful Content Distribution Tools To Reach A Massive Audience appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Marketing is one of those things every company needs but not every company can figure out. And if you’re fascinated by the way affiliate marketing …
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The market for affiliate marketing is booming. Consumers are warming up to the idea of discount coupons and cashback when they shop online.
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To generate more sales, LeanSpa hired LeadClick to act as an affiliate marketing manager. LeadClick coordinated promotion of LeanSpa’s products …
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View details & apply online for this Client Development Manager - Global Affiliate Marketing Leader vacancy on reed.co.uk, the UK’s #1 job site.
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The court held that the operator of an affiliate marketing network, LeadClick Media, LLC, unlawfully participated in the use of deceptive websites to …
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It covered topics related to marketing on the Internet in various ways such as: affiliate marketing, lead generation, search engine management, social …
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Dollar Store Crafts is a blog that provides tips and instruction on cheap and easy crafting projects. The site is an affiliate for merchants that sell craft …
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It covered topics related to marketing on the Internet in various ways such as: affiliate marketing, lead generation, search engine management, social …
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Steve Bailey joins Weigel’s WCIU Chicago from Media General, where he most recently was director, programming and affiliate marketing.
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Earth911 also teams up with other affiliate marketing partners to help keep … There are plenty of outdoor deck maintenance products on the market.
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MEDIA BUYER - AFFILIATE MARKETING POSITION OVERVIEW: This is a rare opportunity to gain valuable experience in all aspects of affiliate …
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Posted by sergeystefoglo
Content marketing has been discussed and researched more in the last 5 years than ever before.
Source: Google Trends
There are various kinds of content marketing strategies out there. Blog promotion, infographics, video strategies, and creative content are some. Depending on your goals, some are more effective than others.
At Distilled, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on many creative content pieces with some incredible clients. This article is going to focus on a piece of content that my team and I created for a client. We’ll take a look at both the creation process and the tangible results of the piece we made.
Note: In general, you don’t want to rely on one piece of content for link acquisition. It’s recommended to focus on multiple pieces throughout the year to add link diversity and give your content pieces a good chance to succeed. The following is simply a case study of one piece of content that worked well for my client.
Our client is Ginny’s (shoutout to Matt and Cailey). Ginny’s is an ecommerce business based in the beautiful state of Wisconsin.
We knew that regardless of how much optimization was done on the site, their lack of incoming links would be a huge barrier to success. This quickly became a topic of discussion for us.
The general rule of thumb: the more linking root domains (LRDs) your site has, the stronger the domain authority should be. And the stronger the linking root domains are, the better it is for your DA. In other words, it’s better to get 1 strong link (DA 80+) than 10 weak links (DA 20-). Kudos if the links are topically relevant to your website/brand.
So, my team and I sat down and started thinking of different ways we could accomplish the task of increasing LRDs and (hopefully) DA for my client.
Here are the steps my team and I went through for this particular client.
Note: For an extensive look at creating creative content, please see the following articles:
The first step in the creative process is ideation, because without great ideas you can’t a have a great piece of content. It’s important to give yourself enough time for ideation. Don’t rush it, and be sure to include various team members with different backgrounds to get as many ideas as possible. Note: stock up on coffee/Red Bull and snacks for this.
Typically after an ideation session you’ll have many potential ideas. It’s important to go through and validate them. When I say “validate,” I mean making sure others haven’t already done something similar, or that creating the piece is actually possible (you have access to the right data, etc.)
Note: For more information on researching and validating your creative ideas, read this post titled “Researching Creative Ideas: 10 Dos and Don'ts.”
At this point you’ll have a handful of ideas that are not only on-brand and interesting, but have great potential in being picked up by various sources. Put together a nice deck and pitch your ideas to the client. The goal is to get your client to pick one (or a few, depending on the budget).
Note: Here’s an awesome write-up on a framework for pitching creative ideas to your clients.
Once your client signs off on a piece, it’s time to dive into the data! Depending on the piece you’re creating, this might look like scraping websites and doing a ton of research to get the right data you need. Take your time on this, as you want to make sure your data is accurate and relevant.
During this part of the process, it’s a great idea to start mocking up some potential designs. If your piece is smaller, this might be a quick and simple task. If you have a data visualization, this will be longer. Typically, it’s a good idea to create 2–3 mockups and give your client some options.
Once your client signs off on a particular design, it’s time to dive into development.
The actual copy for the piece doesn’t have to happen after the development, but it’s usually a good idea to allow the copywriter to see how much space they have to work with. What you don’t want is for your copywriter to write 500 words when the designer has made space for 100. Communication is key in this process.
Once the piece is built, it’s important to test it out on various browsers and devices. Ask people to give it a run and try to fix as many errors/bugs as possible.
Depending on your timeline, you might want to start promotion sooner than this. The important thing to note is to consider pre-pitching and reaching out to contacts to gauge their interest in the piece as soon as possible. Keep your contacts updated and be sure to give them everything they need for their stories.
Note: For further reference on pitching journalists, please see this post titled, “Beyond the Media List: Pro-Active Prospecting for Pitching Creative Content.”
It’s time to launch!
On the day the piece launches, be sure that you are reminding journalists, reaching out to contacts, sharing the piece on social media, and making your social campaigns live.
There are a lot of steps to building a creative piece, so don’t underestimate the work that goes into it! After you launch the piece be sure to have a beer, give yourself a pat on the back, or do whatever it is you need to do to celebrate.
After the process outlined above, our team came up with 50 States of Bacon.
The idea was simple: Everyone likes bacon, but who likes it the most? Ginny’s caters to a lot of people who love deep frying, so this was on-brand. We decided to use Instagram’s (now difficult to access) API to extract 33,742 photos that were tagged with #bacon and located within the USA. To normalize for population distribution and Instagram usage, we also collected 64,640 photos with the tags #food, #breakfast, #lunch, and #dinner.
To make this data more visual, we made it interactive and included some fun facts for each state.
So, what happened after we launched the piece? Let’s dive in.
Here are some of the larger websites 50 States of Bacon got picked up on.
Website |
Domain Authority |
Other |
|---|---|---|
|
US News |
94 |
Tweeted from account (115K+) |
|
Mashable |
96 |
Tweeted from account (6.95M+) |
|
AOL Lifestyle |
98 |
Referred 1,200+ visitors |
|
Eater |
85 |
N/A |
|
Daily Dot |
85 |
Tweeted from account (274K+) |
Here is what the LRDs and DA looked like before we launched the piece, and then after 4 months of it being live:
Before Launch |
4 Months Later |
|
|---|---|---|
| Linking Root Domains | 450 | 600 |
| Domain Authority | 29 | 36 |
Let’s break this down by metric. Here’s a graph of the LRDs over time (we launched the piece at about the start of the uplift).
The domain authority didn’t budge until about 4 months after we launched the piece. We weren’t actively pursuing any other link-based campaigns during this time, so it’s safe to say the creative piece had a lot to do with this boost in DA.
Note: Since DA is refreshed with new pools of data, this observation wouldn’t have been as valid if the DA only moved one or two positions. But, since it moved 7 positions so close to the launch of this piece, I feel like it’s safe to assume the piece contributed greatly.
Does this mean if you do a similar piece that your DA will also increase? No. Does it give us a good example on what can happen? Absolutely.
Setting expectations with clients is hard. That’s even more true when you both know that links may be even more important than user engagement with your campaign. To make sure expectations are reasonable, you may want to encourage them to see this campaign as one of many over a long period of time. Then there’s less pressure on any individual piece.
So, it’s important to set expectations upfront. I would never tell a client that we can guarantee a certain number of links, or that we guarantee an increase in domain authority.
Instead, we can guarantee a piece of content that is well-built, well-researched, and interesting to their target audience. You can go one step further and guarantee reaching out to X amount of contacts, and you can estimate how many of those contacts will respond with a “yes” or “no.”
In fact, you should set goals. How much traffic would you like the piece to bring? What about social shares? What seems like a reasonable amount of LRD’s you could gain from a piece like this? Benchmark where you currently are, and make some reasonable goals.
The point I’m trying to make is that you shouldn’t promise your client a certain amount of links because, frankly, you’d be lying to them. Be upfront about what this looks like and show examples of work you’ve done before, but make sure to set their expectations correctly up front to avoid any conflicts down the road.
There’s a lot to be learned from the results of creative campaigns. The goal of this article is to share one piece that I’ve worked on with a client while highlighting some things that I learned/observed along the way. If you’d like to see more campaigns we’ve worked on at Distilled, take a look at our creative roundup for last year.
To wrap things up, here are the key takeaways:
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The single most important strategy in today’s content marketing world is using video.
Whether it’s video on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or YouTube, the content you need to be thinking about creating and marketing on social media for your business is video. Period!
No matter what you’re selling, no matter what your company does, if you don’t have a video marketing strategy for the biggest video platforms, you are going to lose out. And in case you haven’t noticed, the platforms for distributing video content online have shifted drastically over the last 18 months.
Facebook is getting more daily minutes watched than YouTube, Snapchat’s daily views are now in the billions, and video on Twitter has taken listening and one-to-one branding to a whole new level.
Here are some more shocking video marketing stats…
Now, maybe I’ve scared you a bit, but don’t worry because I’m here to make sure you understand the landscape of all of the biggest, most important social platforms right now. By the end of this article, you’ll have the information you need to dominate at video marketing. I promise.
Social media marketing along with making videos is easy due the flexibility of both components. All you need to know is the right way to use them.
The term “social media” covers a lot of territory. Each social network has a unique audience, social videos need to be optimized for different channels.
A video that works on Facebook may need a serious editing before it can work on Instagram. And you might have to take an entirely different approach for a video on Snapchat or Twitter.
If it’s pre-recorded, social videos need to be shareable. You’re not just optimizing for the channel, but for shareability as well. Different things make content shareable, from the emotions it induces, to the traditional story structures it uses.
Live social videos need to be about authenticity and real-time engagement. They should feel like a conversation between you and the viewer.
Many people confuse social media-videos with viral videos, but there is a key difference.
Watch this video of Gary Vaynerchuk as he talks about the power of social media marketing.
Almost all the social media platforms leverage the power of video and now it’s a well known fact that each of these platforms work differently with video.
To master in video marketing and social media strategies, it is very important for you to know the nuts and bolts of each site individually.
Let’s get started at the top with the obvious grand daddy of online video “YouTube.” Yes it is huge, with 300 hours worth of video content being pushed to YouTube every minute.
YouTube is valuable for business, for growing brands, and for reaching new audiences. So, it is clear that over the years, YouTube will continue to be a video content giant for businesses and personal brands.
But the problem with YouTube is that it’s in a downward trend compared to Facebook’s 4 billion daily video streams; a number that’s only going to continue to grow with time.
Due to its sheer size, there’s a ton of competition amongst videos on YouTube and all fighting to be seen. When you have a platform with over a billion users, all wanting the same thing (exposure), it’s going to get noisy. And that’s been figured out.
In short, marketers have ruined it. Because of that, it’s much harder to break through the noise which makes hosting your content on the platform much less valuable.
Additionally, YouTube doesn’t have the capabilities of some other growing video platforms, and so far, they haven’t shown signs of catching up.
“So, what exactly are those capabilities other platforms have?” you might ask.
Well, here’s the big one: data. Data, data, data. And the leader in that domain is, without a doubt, Facebook.
Image Source: Skyword
Facebook content is smart, shareable, and personal. Facebook video for my brand has become the best way to reach my fans on a large scale.
Couple that with their new video ad products for sales and direct response marketing, and the fact that they’re the greatest data company of all time for marketers, and you have some serious reasons to spend some big money on Facebook video ads, and video content.
Just give it a thought. If you’re creating video content for YouTube, and not putting those videos onto Facebook as well, your brand or business is losing distribution on a powerful platform.
Image Source: Warren Knight
And I don’t mean cross channel promotion by simply pasting a link to YouTube on your Facebook page as a status update. I mean uploading the video natively to Facebook, so that it lives in your Facebook page’s video content.
Why? Because right now,Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm is placing an enormous amount of weight on videos, otherwise known as “reach.”
When you upload videos natively, instead of linking out, you have a much higher chance of your video being seen by your community (and new fans, too). Google and Facebook are competitors, so if you think Facebook wants to have YouTube links perform well in their Newsfeed algorithm, you better think again.
Image Source: Skyword
YouTube should honestly be concerned; Facebook is already on its way to becoming a massive competitor when it comes to video marketing and content distribution. They are sitting on an enormous amount of targetable consumer data. It creates the ultimate marketing machine.
For example, let’s say you upload a video natively, like I talked about before, about “the best places to eat ice cream outdoors in your town.” You could then spend money on a sponsored video to directly market your brand’s video to people who:
Automatically, you’re reaching the audience who is the most interested and most profitable to your business.
But while Facebook should be an enormous priority, don’t ignore the other social channels that might be more in tune with your brand. There are a ton of other social channels to be creating video content for that offer what marketers love — reach and attention.
Image Source: PostRocket
Let’s go into a couple of the big ones.
Twitter’s new video product, which was released late January of this year, has changed the way people use content on this platform.
Video on Twitter is truly “social” and the best way to use Twitter video is by connecting and engaging, rather than just pushing.
As Twitter has grown in size, it’s become a listening platform. Six years ago, I could send a tweet and get more engagement on it than I do now. I had less of an audience, but the audience was paying closer attention. It was more serious. Now the amount of information and users on that platform have become so intense that it’s hard to have that same engagement. It’s diffcult to get anyone’s attention.
That’s why the game, the real way to win with Twitter video, is through engagement — using it as a “pull” rather than a “push.”
The truth is, people respond to the effort. With Twitter’s new video feature, they’ve been able to take that feeling to the next level.
All you have to do is get in there and engage. Reply to a tweet using the camera option, select video, and start talking. It takes me nine to twelve seconds to make a video and reply, but those extra seconds hold a lot of meaning.
Not to mention it’s more personal, visual, and we are living in a world where the visual is often regarded as a better engagement than the written.
Image Source: CashSherpa
Snapchat marketing is huge right now. More than 60% of U.S. 13 to 34 year-old smartphone users are Snapchatters.
They now have more than two billion video views a day, and there are a few interesting things about Snapchat regarding their platform and how it works.
Snapchat gets your undivided attention because of the individual stories available. It’s also one of the only platforms in which you can draw creative on top of the video, creating opportunities for some awesome Snapchat exclusive artists like Shonduras.
Most importantly, videos have a maximum life of twenty four hours or less if the users choose to make it so. A video can last as little as a second. The urgency to see something before it disappears can be a huge factor.
I had a very successful start on the platform by advising Snapchat users to screenshot the snap before it disappeared and post it to Twitter to get a reply from me. People respond to that kind of urgency.
Image Source: MediaKix
Now, marketers are getting really serious about Snapchat as a platform to reach an enormous number of people due to some key changes Snapchat has made.
Earlier this year, Snapchat launched the Discover section of the app. It’s a feature that allows users to receive content provided by media companies. Current participants include National Geographic, Vice, ESPN, and more. Eleven participants in all. It’s a very serious play on the company’s part because it puts it in a very aggressive place with the overall user interface of the app. It completely changes how the app is both perceived and used.
I might also mention that Snapchat is now basically handing brands the 13 to 34 year-old demographic through the use of their Discover feature. Brands can have ads pre-roll before the content.
And while you may not be able to afford the pre-roll program that they have, just the mere fact that these big brands and media companies have signed on should tell you something. Teens and young adults use Snapchat all day and night. It’s one of their main forms of communication, and because of that, you need to care about it and learn to talk to them on on the platform.
Convinced?
Image Source: 451heat.com
Instagram was bought by Facebook on April, 9, 2012. At the time, Instagram had only 30 million users and introduced advertising for selected brands in October 2013, but didn’t open up for all marketers until September 2015.
48.8% of brands are on Instagram and by 2017, it is predicted to rise to 70.7%.
Video ads offer the same visually, immersive quality as photo ads on Instagram – with the power of sight, sound and motion. And now, you can share videos up to 60 seconds long and in landscape format. When Instagram first introduced videos, more than 5 million were shared within the first 24 hours!
So, if your brand is not on Instagram yet, it’s time that you revise your Instagram marketing plan.
Image Source: Incredible Marketing
If you are not using video in your social media marketing yet, you should be. A third of all online activity is spent watching videos and with 90% of users saying that they found product videos helpful while making an online purchase decision, you want to make sure your hat is in the social video ring.
These statistics can help you build a strong marketing plan with the perfect video distribution strategy for each platform.
Guest Author: Mehroz Khan is an Entrepreneur and Co-founder at Videoexplainers-Video production company. He is a blogger, strategist, social media marketing specialist and growth strategist. His expertise includes marketing and video production. He regularly writes on Videoexplainers where he talks about explainer video, its various business advantages (increased website conversions, high sales, qualified leads, and facilitating customers’ understanding level) and the massive video impact on customers. Follow Mehroz on Twitter: @mehrozanwer, connect with him on LinkedIn: Mehroz Khan or email him at mehroz@videoexplainers.com.
The post How To Share Compelling Video Storytelling In Your Social Media Marketing appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
“Boost this post to get better results!“
Facebook hounds you with this supposedly important message.
You scoff. Why would anyone pay to boost their posts?
You might even consent to Facebook’s badgering and fork out the $5 needed, and what happens? Facebook becomes even more irritating, now blasting you with confusing messages about retargeting options.
Facebook ads? Pah, it’s just a fad and the internet will soon get over it.
This is how myths begin.
Facebook Ads are a powerful platform with incredible potential. It’s also complex and surrounded by myths and misconceptions.
Let me show you how to see past those myths and unlock the real power of Facebook advertising.
Facebook doesn’t cost any money, but it’s far from free.
This massive people-search engine sits there quietly, collecting every detail of your life and your friends’ lives, storing everything as searchable data for advertisers.
While that might sound like something even George Orwell would lose sleep over, it’s a dream scenario for every marketer. Imagine targeting anyone you want to target: No more wasted money on showing irrelevant ads to the wrong people.
The Facebook ad-platform, with its ample targeting power and complex features, is quite a handful even for the most seasoned marketing professional. Many are content in simply scratching the surface and taking what results they get.
Such variance in user experiences has lead to different ideas about what Facebook Ads is and isn’t.
We have no problem purchasing the latest MacBook for work, or the latest lead generation plugin for WordPress. We’ll gladly pay for a landing page service or domain hosting, or hire someone to help us design an image.
Spending money for advertising though? Nope. Most of us would rather sweat away at guest posts (yes, guilty as charged) and other forms of free promotion before even looking at paid advertising.
Let’s talk about that.
Perhaps you should save your money and keep doing the free promotion.
This was my thinking. Then I opened up my calculator.
An average guest post takes 20 hours to write. On average, that brings in 100 subscribers. Let’s say my time is worth $10/h. Whoops, I’m paying $2 per subscriber. Even then, I’m risking that no one takes an interest and I’ve wasted my time.
Mary Fernandez, the self proclaimed blogaholic, used Facebook advertising to grow her subscriber list. She gained 532 subscribers in 43 days, after spending a total of $227.05.
That’s $0.43 per subscriber. AND you can still write guest posts at the same time.
What about sales? At Thrive Themes we had a massive 900% ROI on Facebook ads during a period of 11 months. That’s $9 for every $1 spent.
These ROI-figures are tough to achieve and require a lot of experimenting, but it just goes to show that Facebook ads can be extremely lucrative. Question is, can you afford NOT to spend money on advertising?
The absolute minimum daily budget based on Facebook’s pricing is $2/day, or $5/day for manual bidding. That’s $60-150/month on advertising. Hardly more than your internet bill.
Granted, it’s the absolute minimum budget, and probably won’t bring in massive results. But for someone with a minimal advertising budget, any positive result is welcome.
The minimum budget for your campaign depends on your campaign goal, but it’s safe to say that Facebook advertising doesn’t require a massive budget to get started.
Facebook Ads won’t work for YOUR business because of one of the following reasons:
If reasons like these are preventing you from dipping your toe into the Facebook advertising pool, you might be looking at it completely backwards.
The marvelous thing about Facebook is that, much like Soylent Green, it consists of real people. Every account, if not for a tiny percentage of fake accounts, is a real person. Real people are generally interested in a variety of different things, including your business.
1.65 billion people have a Facebook account. This means a member of your potential audience is browsing Facebook at this very moment and you’re missing out on an opportunity to get in front of them.
In short: If your business provides a benefit to your audience, Facebook Ads will provide a benefit to your business. Whether it be in leads, subscribers or sales.
If you’ve heard the myth that Facebook ads are only good for collecting “likes”, you’ve heard the misconception that follows: You need a huge audience to get any true results from Facebook advertising.
The great thing about Facebook is that you already have a huge potential reach. Facebook will gladly serve your ad to any of its 1.65 billion users.
All you need to do is tell Facebook what sort of person you want to target.
You can build an accurate target group for your ads quickly, starting from absolutely nothing. All you need to do is specify the type of person you want to target, and Facebook will do the rest.
Here’s how:
Boom – audience from nothing.
If you already have a group of engaged followers in the form of a mailing list, you can turn that into a custom target audience for Facebook. Facebook can then expand on that with the Lookalike Audience-function.
Here’s what you do:
If you don’t have a mailing list, but still have a fair amount of traffic to your website, you can:
It’s helpful if you already have a large list of subscribers, but you can use Facebook’s provided tools to build an audience from nothing and still be successful.
Your Facebook ad needs an image, that’s true. To be successful, it needs to be:
That’s it.
Sure it helps to be relevant to your offer, but that’s in no way a requirement.
At Thrive Themes, we’re always trying to optimize and increase our Facebook ad-ROI. This means going to some extremes in image choices.
A standard stock photo. Note the cute baby pondering and looking. Your eyes are automatically drawn to the corner with a feeling of getting ready to learn.
Using humor and a striking graphics style, this image brings home the message and stands out from the crowd.
A professional brand colored design, built by our team of designers. Your attention is drawn to the product logo in the center of the image.
Using similar copy and target audiences, which one do you think brought a positive ROI? (Answer below.)
As Sketchdesk concluded in their mythbuster-case study about Facebook images, people respond to images in surprising, often counter-intuitive ways. American Marketing Association was quick to criticize Sketchdesk’s case study as inconclusive and lacking targeting data.
Sketchdesk and AMA agree on one thing: you must test different images. It’s the only way to really know what your audience responds to.
So don’t worry if you’re not a professional designer or a studio photographer. If you want to create something from scratch, Adespresso has a great guide on using Canva to create amazing Facebook ad images.
Here are a couple of image ideas you can easily make:
Then test. Test two or three images on the same advert. You might be surprised by the result.
If you’re stuck looking for images, here’s a few good sites with free or cheap images:
If you want to quickly edit an image, try these sites:
In short: As long as you have an image that’s visually appealing and attention grabbing, you’re good to go. Don’t get stuck on the idea that the image has to be perfect.
Answer: ALL of those three images brought a positive ROI after testing.
Remember when banner ads were all the rage? Yes, the flashy and annoying ones, informing you of the iPhone or million dollar prize you’ve won. You don’t see them anymore. I mean, you literally don’t see them anymore.
This dreadful ad format was so annoying that people became blind to it.
Irrelevance makes an advert annoying. They’re trying to sell you something you don’t need and end up robbing you of your time. On the other hand, if an ad offers you something you find truly beneficial and helpful, you’d love to find out more.
Now, Facebook is an evil corporation only interested in money.
(Just to point that out.)
But they know where that money comes from: the users. Facebook’s primary goal has always been to attract and keep users on the platform. Keeping users requires constantly engaging them with relevant information and keeping irrelevant information out of sight.
In other words, Facebook has no incentive to let marketers ruin the platform with spammy ads.
Sure, once in a while a spammy ad or annoying post slips through, but it soon disappears if not enough users engage with it. Properly targeted quality ads take precedence because they’re the ones people tend to click.
Facebook’s humongous user base keeps on growing because of the perceived value users get from continually being presented with relevant content.
Bottom line – Facebook ads is designed to favor showing relevant ads, and keep irrelevant ads out of your Newsfeed. That’s why it’s so damn effective.
There are other myths, and Facebook’s lackluster communication about new updates and features doesn’t exactly prevent new myths from forming.
Truth is, you’re losing a ton of profit if you let misconceptions keep you out of this advertising platform. Now you know the myths. You can start your journey into Facebook ads with a fresh mind.
When you create your first Facebook campaign, remember to pair every ad set with a conversion optimized landing page. If you need a quick and simple way to create converting landing pages, check out the Rapid Landing Pages course!
Guest Author: Jay is passionate about copywriting, inbound marketing and turning marketing jargon into something humans can understand. When he isn’t waxing lyrical about conversion optimization on the Thrive Themes blog, you can find him roaming the streets of major European cities looking for business opportunities.
The post 5 Facebook Ad Myths That Are Killing Your Profits appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
A rogue affiliate operator based somewhere in central Europe is believed to be responsible for an extended … News of the hack was recently revealed by eTraffic, an online-search and marketing firm, including online gambling.
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iStack Holdings operates some of the largest and most highly-rated properties in the digital and affiliate marketing communities. With a goal of driving …
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The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared.
While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found.
Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a Whiteboard Friday from last year, Rand talks about this trend. BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links – not just articles – this number rose to around 90 percent.
We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldn’t be the case with high-quality links we’ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) didn’t get any social shares:
On average, our campaigns get 110 placements and 11,000 social shares, yet a single link accounts for about 63 percent of total shares. This means that if you exclude the top-performing link from every campaign, our average project would only get 4,100 social shares.
Since most links don’t yield social shares, marketers with goals of both link building and social engagement should consider a strategy for gaining social traction in addition to a strategy for building a diverse link portfolio.
The social strategy can be as simple as targeting a few key websites that routinely yield high social shares. It’s also helpful to look at target sites’ social media accounts. When they post their own articles, what kind of engagement do they get?
Of all the sites that covered our campaigns, the following five sites had the highest average social shares for our content. We know we could depend on these sites in the future for high social engagement.
Some content can definitely accomplish both high engagement and social shares. The BuzzSumo and Moz study found that the best types of content for attracting links and social shares are research-backed content or opinion pieces. Long-form content (more than 1,000 words) also tends to attract more links and shares than shorter content. At Fractl, we’ve found the same factors – an emotional hook, a ranking or comparison, and a pop culture reference – tend to encourage both social sharing and linking.
To ensure you’re building a natural link portfolio, it’s important to keep track of how sites link to your content. You’ll learn if you’re earning a mix of dofollow links, nofollow links, cocitation links, and brand mentions for each campaign. We pay close attention to which types of links our campaigns earn. Looking back at these data, we noticed that publishers don’t consistently link the same way.
The chart below shows a sample of how 15 high-authority news sites have linked to our campaigns. As you can see, few sites have given dofollow links 100 percent of the time. Based on this, we can assume that a lot of top sites don’t have a set editorial standard for link types (although plenty of sites will only give nofollow links).
While getting a site to cover your content is something to be celebrated, not every placement will result in a dofollow link. And just because you get a dofollow link from a site once doesn’t mean you should always expect that type of link from that publisher.
There’s an ongoing debate within Fractl’s walls over whether or not creating a lot of visual assets positively impacts a campaign’s reach enough to justify the additional production time. To settle this debate, we looked at our 1,300 top placements to better understand how publishers covered our campaigns’ visual assets (including both static image and video). This sample was limited to articles on websites with a DA of 70 or higher that covered our work at least four times.
We found that publishers in different verticals had divergent tendencies regarding visual asset coverage. The most image-heavy vertical was entertainment, and the least was education.
Some of the variation in asset counts is based on how many assets were included in the campaign. Although this does skew our data, we do receive useful information from this analysis. The fact that top entertainment publishers used an average of nine assets when they cover our campaigns indicates a high tolerance for visual content from outside sources. Verticals with lower asset averages may be wary of external content or simply prefer to use a few key visuals to flesh out an article.
Keeping these publisher vertical preferences in mind when developing content can help your team better allocate resources. Rather than spending a lot of effort designing a large set of visual assets for a campaign you want to be placed on a finance site, your time may be better spent creating one or two awesome visualizations. Similarly, it’s worthwhile to invest in creating a variety of visual assets if you’re pitching entertainment and health sites.
Analyzing our entire link portfolio taught us a few new things that challenged our previous assumptions:
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The process of creating content for your website in hopes of attracting a wave of traffic has changed in recent years.
In the past you’d be able to throw up a simple 500-word article onto your blog and get a stream of traffic. As long as it provided some semblance of value and had a few keywords thrown in, it was good enough. Ah the good ol’ days!
Try doing that today and watch that piece of content be buried on the 800th page of Google’s search results.
In today’s race to produce content that hits the front page of the Google search results, your content must be more than stellar. It must be AT LEAST 10 times the value anyone’s looking for if you want it to hit the front page of Google, attract traffic, shares, and mentions.
In this article I want to share with you 4 dead simple ways you can 10X the content you’re producing to drive more traffic.
There are several roads to a 10x piece of content. One of them involves plenty of visual content.
Stunning photography and eye catching graphics build on top of the typical written blog post and help drive home the points you’re making.
Lots of readers on the web are visual learners and the added visual aids help to elaborate on the points you’re making. Web readers want their information quickly and in the most simple format. Why write a 500-word explanation when something like an infographic would suffice?
Take for example, Neil Patel’s Advanced Content Marketing Guide, an extensive step by step guide for those looking to improve their content marketing strategy.
It is jampacked with graphics, visuals, and text that clearly and succinctly explain everything involved in the content marketing process.
Image Source: QuickSprout
Aside from it being a visual masterpiece, the Advanced Content Marketing Guide perfectly blends both graphics and text in the best of ways for the reader. There are subsections that are explained with text and others that can be explained visually.
A content marketing newbie would be hard pressed to find another resource offering up more value than this one.
The tips and strategies Neil offers up are supported with visual aids that boils down a complex topic for the reader. It covers the content marketing gamut and delivers 10x the value of anything else on the web.
When we’re discussing 10x content we’re thinking of ways to offer up more value than anything else that’s available on the web.
It can mean starting from a blank slate and building something awesome OR it could mean building on top of what has already been made. The later being the path of least resistance.
Allow me to explain.
If you’ve managed to create a healthy stable of content surrounding one subject you’ve already done most of the 10x work.
Take a look back through your analytics to see what has garnered the most traffic and engagement. This will be the content you’ll be doubling down on and recycling into another format. Maybe one of your articles on DIY desks performed above expectation and it would do well as an infographic on Pinterest. Maybe you’ve written all you can on the topic of french bulldog grooming, why not compile it into one big ebook.
One example I can share with you is Wishpond’s article 100 Growth Hacks Learned as 5 Years as a Startup. This was an article we came up with, with the idea of creating a 10x piece of content.
After taking a look at the content on the web surrounding “growth hacks”, we set out to create a list that was 10x the value. We contacted popular influencers and brands to give the article a lift, and it took off spectacularly.
After the success of the article began to taper off we recycled it into a SlideShare presentation to hit an additional audience. The press began rolling again and the SlideShare presentation was featured on the front page!
It didn’t stop there. We assumed our readers would be interested on how we were able to get featured, so we wrote a blog post explaining just how we did it.
It’s all about finding product market fit for the content that you’re producing. The more you know about your target audience, their likes, dislikes and problems, the greater you can 10x that content and recycle it into more content.
As I mentioned before, 10x content can be created off the back of another piece of content. But if you’re really looking to shake things up there are types of content that are 10x the value unto themselves.
This type of content includes…
An example of this comes from the SEO/keyword tool company Ahrefs. In a research-backed article (previously) entitled On-page SEO is Dead the company analyzed over 2 million random keyword searches and presented the data to its readers. Ultimately stating that on-page SEO is dead.
The article attracted a wave of comments and thousands of shares due to its findings. The fact that it was original research performed by a qualified and respected company made all the difference. Ahrefs was able to use the data only it had access to, to present something fresh for its audience and ended up with a 10x piece of content.
Let’s imagine that you’ve done your research, wrote some outstanding copy, and included a few helpful visual aids. A 10x piece of content is not complete without a post-publishing, outreach and amplification schedule.
Just because you’ve created a valuable resource does not mean it will magically be discovered and promoted. You need to get it in front of influencers and others in your industry.
One technique we employ is to make a measured effort to include influencer names, quotes, and techniques within our content, which increases the likelihood of it being shared by the people mentioned.
After we publish an article, we shoot off a quick email or tweet to the influencer letting them know we’d mentioned them. We found that if the content is within their realm of interest, is professional and is helpful to their audience, there’s a high likelihood they’d give it a share.
The key here is ensuring that the content is helpful and valuable to the influencer’s audience.
Alex Turnbull, the CEO & founder of Groove, a help desk software company, wrote an extensive article detailing how Groove got 1,000 blog subscribers from one blog post. In the article Alex details what he did to engage with influencers in his industry and leverage those relationships further down the road.
Image Source: Groove
Alex is a big believer in spending equal amounts of time promoting and creating each piece of content you create. By putting in the time to promote content it extends the life of each piece, allowing him to spend less time creating content.
We all would love to spend our time only creating content but it’s all for naught if no one sees it. If you have the opportunity to include more opinions and input from influencers, jump on it, that way your content can become a part of the larger conversation.
In your quest to create 10x content, don’t expect your first attempt to hit the front page of Google and sky rocket you into a seat at the head table. Not all swings are going to be home runs.
Remember that 10x content does not happen without a little experimentation to see what sticks. Once you find content that works, double down on it by:
Before you hit the publish button, make sure your content is…
If you can confidently answer yes on all these points, your content is well on it’s way to becoming a 10x piece of content.
What strategies do you follow to create 10x content?
What works for you and what doesn’t?
Leave a comment for me below and weigh in!
Guest Author: Jordan Lore is a Content Marketer at Wishpond in Vancouver, BC. Wishpond makes it easy for marketers to run lead generation and marketing automation campaigns, all in one place. When he’s not writing he has a camera attached to his arm. Follow him on his budding twitter account @jordanlore6.
The post 4 Dead Simple Ways to 10x Your Content and Drive More Traffic appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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I just want some joy in my life. That statement made me sit up and think. It was a cry for help.
And it made me ask……what is success and what does it look like?
That is a big question. Many of us don’t know if we have arrived or even qualified to answer that with a yes. Or say…..”I am now successful”.
Is it money, fame……power? Is the path to success a destination?
Watching the grown ups is our first yardstick. Then television gave us a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous. Fame and fortune seemed to be something to aspire to.
Social media arrived and made everyone’s lives visible and in plain sight. Other people’s adventures and achievements were on display for all to see.
This glimpse into the heartache and happiness of a planet has made success envy real and visceral. Often we just want to click away because……..their apparent lives are so much better than ours.
So comparisons are made and judgements about our level of apparent happiness and achievement are felt. Big cars, big houses and a big paycheck seemed to be the answer.
Also the statement “When I grow up I want to be like “him” was very real to me.
When I turned up to school at the age of five the success question was a burning personal query. Just hidden inside. I just didn’t know it yet.
Leaving the relative safety of home to start school was a revelation. Mum’s hugs and the quiet haven of home were replaced with the free for all of the playground.
Faster, further and stronger was often determined over a schoolyard fight, how far you could throw or a kicking competition.
Then the schoolroom.
Learning to count to 10 was the first metric. Then it was how well you could spell. This was success at seven.
Standing in front of the class and being tested on the power of your memory to recall the right spelling of words like “unique” was the next step to being seen as a success.
Mum and dad were provided with your ranking in the latest test sent home in the yellow envelope. Dad’s response to being second in my class was confronted with this “why couldn’t you do better”.
It was obvious to me. I hadn’t achieved success yet. More to do
Arriving at “big” school put another twist on the burning question. Dating the prettiest girl in the class, being invited to parties or hanging out with the cool crowd were now in the equation.
If that wasn’t happening then……?
The arrival of hormones had suddenly changed the game. It wasn’t so simple anymore.
Competition was now everywhere. Grades, getting into the football team and popularity.
So we stumbled and groped our way through a myriad of emotions and situations. But then it got more serious. Graduation loomed and career choices were starting to be confronted.
Accountant, doctor or teacher.
We boarded the train and headed towards a career and a college. Just wasn’t sure what that was. But a step had to be made and decision was required.
One year in and accounting was looking like a serious mistake. I was good at adding up numbers in my head but didn’t enjoy the discipline of detail.
So we pivoted. Just like a startup.
Teaching was the new career choice. People rather than numbers and learning instead of poring over spreadsheets and software seemed much more attractive.
Four years later we graduated and headed off to help teenagers grow up and prepare for life. But on looking back, I don’t think that I was yet wise enough to help them.
It was small junior college and in general it was fine but as the years rolled by there was no passionate desire to become a headmaster or even a deputy.
Something was missing. So….I exited. We
The choice of leaping into the tech industry was working and the money was great. We moved between companies and ascended the ladder.
Climbing the corporate rungs looked attractive at this point. I thought about an MBA, applied to work at IBM and received a rejection. But sometimes you need to be careful of what you wish for.
The cubicle where you show up every day and the treadmill of countless meetings was looking more like a prison. I started making a ton of money but I was screaming inside.
Joy had disappeared.
Then the company I was working for crumbled around me. My big six figure paycheck looked in danger.
I had no control.
We all think we can do it better when looking from the inside. So starting out on my own looked like the next path to “success”. So…..the first faltering steps of independence were made.
I had money in the bank and partnered up with an old business colleague.
It lasted about 3 months as our common vision started to dissolve and diverge. It was short nasty business divorce that forced me to step out on my own. Time to be a real grownup. To leap into the unknown on my own.
My “new” business grew fast. Sometimes hyper growth is sometimes seen as a measure of success. But as we ran out of capital it imploded. It was all about sales and revenue. I wasn’t working at what I either loved and I discovered too late that I was a much better salesperson than a businessman.
Chasing the money wasn’t working. But I now knew that independence was something that felt like success for me despite the pain of a failure.
Then the Internet happened. Discovered the Netscape web browser. I was hooked.
We leapt into this exciting ecosystem and I knew that I had to play there. Then the social web emerged and that intersection of technology and humanity resonated.
The path now had clarity. My experience, innate ability and expertise had found a home I just needed to make the first steps.
I started writing and creating on the social web and shared it. I didn’t care about the money but just the journey. It was my passionate purpose and I had stumbled onto it.
But I hadn’t arrived, I had just discovered my path. It started to feel like true success.
Many of us are still looking for joy……..for success.
It means that you don’t need to accept where you are but to keep stepping into the unknown. In life we need to keep searching. Despite the setbacks, challenges and failures you will find it if you make the time and the effort. It’s all about persistence.
“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it” – Steve Jobs
It applies to life, business and relationships.
For me freedom is the real metric. Freedom to do what you want when you want. To spend it with family. To travel. To learn and grow. To have the time to spend creating the art you are meant to be sharing with the world.
To make that dent that is yours.
Success for me? “To be free to be me”. Not someone else.
Have I arrived? No……that will never happen. But I am on the right path. Now the challenge is to keep following it.
So……don’t settle.
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