We have some great news. Today marks the first day of How to Make Money with Social Media Week.
Each day this week, we’re uploading a blog post from a well-known social media expert and author.
It’s all part of our initiative to help you learn how to grow your sales and revenues using social media. (It’s also a blatant attempt to promote the launch of the new edition of my book, How to Make Money with Social Media, which is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon in the U.S. and Amazon in the U.K.)
This week, you’ll hear from Erik Qualman (author of Socialnomics, What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube and other books), Martin Shervington (a leading Google+ expert who also has over 625,000 Google+ followers), Phyllis Khare (Co-Author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and Social Media Marketing e-Learning Kit for Dummies) and Lon Safko (author of The Social Media Bible as well as The Fusion Marketing Bible).
You’ll also hear from Ian Cleary, who a) is one of the world’s leading experts on social media tools, b) runs RazorSocail.com, which generates 150,000+ visits per month, and c) is one of the most likeable guys you’ll ever get to know.
Ian was kind enough to kick-off How to Make Money with Social Media Week with a blog post and infographic below.
Ready to get started? Great, here goes.
Are you able to get 1,000 shares on any piece of content?
You can certainly get over 1,000 shares on any good quality piece of content, but the quality of the content is not the only factor — you also need to promote the content so that other people see it.
In the infographic at the bottom of this post, we go through ways that will help maximize the reach of any content you share.
Here’s a quick summary of what you’ll find in the infographic.
Create a compelling title
It’s amazing how important the title is. You noticed that I mentioned a number in the title of this post. On average, RazorSocial will get twice as many shares just because we have a number in the title.
The title to my post for the 60 Second Marketer is also very specific, which makes it crystal clear what we’re talking about. I’ve also designed the post to be a How To post so that people walk away with clear, actionable information.
I also use the emotional headline analyzer tool which is a great tool for evaluating your titles. You enter your title and it will give you a score based on how well you will engage your reader on an emotional level.
Long story short — Make sure to spend time on getting the right title.
Make it easy to share
When you upload a blog post, you don’t have to do all the sharing. You want to encourage visitors to your site to share out your content on your behalf. There are some really good social sharing plugins that you can use to encourage sharing, for example Digg Digg or Flare.
With social sharing tools like Flare you can set up your sharing so there is a horizontal share bar at the top or bottom of your post and/or a vertical bar which moves with the user as they scroll.
Too often we don’t give our visitors enough encouragement to share. In my opinion, one vertical bar across the top of the content is not enough.
Social Media Optimization
This is becoming increasingly important in the world of social media. When someone shares out your content on your website to social media channels you can provide additional information so the social media channel can interpret this data better.
For example, when someone shares your content on Twitter you can add additional Twitter card information. The Twitter card information will provide additional information related to the content such as the description and image.
Twitter can then display this correctly within Twitter.
Optimize for Google
When you write content that ends up ranking in Google search results this means you get some organic traffic.
If you keep getting this traffic you have more and more opportunities to get your content shared. You could end up with content that ranks well for particular keywords for many years to come.
Make Your Images Pinterest Friendly
Providing good imagery and providing an easy way to share to Pinterest will result in a lot more sharing to Pinterest. The imagery should also bring people back to your website.
Automated Sharing
When you originally write your content there are always certain channels you would like to share your content out to. There are some good tools (e.g. dlvr.it) that automates this process.
Manual Sharing
You may need to create some scheduled posts for sharing out to other channels and these posts could be specific to the channel so may not suit an automated sharing approach.
Share to your email list
When people subscribe to your email list they are typically subscribing because they like the content you provide. Informing them of your latest content will bring some of them back to your content where you can encourage them to share.
Do outreach
Everyone in the world of content marketing is always looking for good content. So why not reach out to a relevant audience online and tell them about the content you have?
For example, if you’ve written a better piece of content than what’s out there already, find who is linking to that content (use ahref or a similar tool) and reach out to them and tell them about your content. A good percentage of these companies will adjust their link and link to your content instead.
Monitor results
To make improvements to your social sharing you need to keep track of results to see what’s working or not working.
You may find that some channels lead to a lot more traffic than others or some types of content are resonating better with your audience.
By monitoring results on a regular basis you can implement incremental improvements.
Push Again
Quite often when we promote a piece of content we forget about it and then move on to the next piece of content.
If it’s evergreen content (doesn’t go out of date) you should promote this on a regular basis. For example socialoomph allows you to create a queue of content and it automatically picks off content off the queue to send out .
So don’t forget about older content!
Summary
Don’t think for a second that you can’t get 1,000 shares on a piece of content. If you have a large audience it’s easier to get 1,000 shares but it’s still possible irrespective of the size of your audience.
With a great piece of content and a good promotion strategy you can do it, yes you can!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Ian Cleary is founder of Razorsocial.com which provides online education focused on the tools and technology side of social media. Sign up his free blogging course on the Razorsocial Academy