6 Methods to Recycle Blog Posts to Grow Your Readership

Recycling is important, isn’t it? Though most of us aren’t going to chain ourselves to the base of an old oak tree in protest of its removal, generally speaking, people are happy to get involved in some sort of community-driven recycling program.

Sure, we’re not willing to go out of our way to build a cooperative raft from leftover Pepsi bottles or anything quite so extreme, but if it’s simple and effective, we’ll knock it out of the park.

Now for the random, content marketing tie-in – believe it or not, in a roundabout way, recycling old blog posts is somewhat similar.

No, it’s not as important as ensuring that dolphin snouts aren’t getting caught in plastic six pack rings, but the reusing of older blog content is still a worthwhile endeavor for content marketing experts.

Yup, I went there.

So, if you’re tired of old, out-of-date blog posts collecting digital dust in the darkest corner of your blog, do something about it. In fact, when done properly, not only are you able to gain experience with different content types, but your blog will start to drum up a bit of new readership.

A few things to keep in mind before getting started

There’s this idea out there that if an evergreen blog post (must be evergreen, by the way) performed well in the past, it will do so again when put to good use. Obviously, this is a safe bet.

That said, I tend to take things a step further – regardless of whether or not a post did well, it can be reprocessed for digital audiences. The big kicker? It’s got to be of the highest quality. If it sounds like a press release, you’re not going about things in the right way.

(Source: Marketoonist)

Anything else simply won’t suffice.

Seriously, why wouldn’t you give things a second shot? Essentially, by so doing, you’re killing two birds with one stone – a post gets a second shot at blog promotion and you’re doing all you can to grow your current audience.

What more can you really ask for?

6 Effective Ways to Recycle Long-Forgotten Blog Material

Alas, it’s time for the good stuff – the actual things you can do as a content marketer to milk each of your blog posts for the marketing value that they should innately provide.

Admittedly, with this kind of project, there’s bound to be a bit of trial and error involved, so don’t get frustrated should a specific method not produce mind-boggling results.

Just because one of the following tactics fails to work, doesn’t mean the whole lot is bad. Experiment and, in no time at all, you’ll have a good idea as to what works for your blog’s niche.

1. Original social images

You’ve heard it before and, more than likely, you’ll hear it a few more times before your career as a content marketer kicks the proverbial bucket – social images lead to substantially more user engagement. Doesn’t matter if it’s Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest, if you include an intriguing image with a post, more clicks are bound to take place.

Take Twitter, for example. If you took the time to conduct a survey for an older blogging project, create a simple graphic outlining the study’s more interesting findings, add the piece’s link at the end of some well-crafted social copy and send it out for your followers to enjoy.

Get creative with this and include seasonal events, societal happenings or influential quotes to create even more awesome social images – all referencing your blog’s original piece as the authoritative source, of course.

(Source: Style Estate)

Needless to say, though each social platform brings with it a unique set of norms and mores, all across the board, this is an awesome way to recycle past posts.

2. Video tutorials on YouTube

At this point, video marketing is about as trendy as it gets.

So popular is the use of audiovisual content that, this year, online video now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile web traffic. Seeing as how video is as big as it’s ever been, you need to make it an integral part of your repurposing efforts.

(Source: Nail Guitar)

However, this might not work  for every kind of evergreen post you’ve got tightly tucked away in your editorial archives. When converting aging blog posts into helpful content videos, stick with those of a how-to or step-by-step nature.

Not only will they perform better on YouTube or Vimeo, but you won’t chew up so much time producing the video copy.

3. Clickable LinkedIn articles

If you’re not regularly pushing content through your personal LinkedIn page, you might need to have your head checked. No joke – LinkedIn, even from an SEO perspective, is about as good as a publishing platform gets with both impressive domain and page authority scores.

By way of repurposing older blog pieces though LinkedIn, not only can you attract new niche readers, but you’ll do wonders for your professional reputation.

(Source: Dr. Travis Bradberry)

You don’t need me to tell you how important it is to be widely considered one of those “Thought Leaders” in today’s day and age. LinkedIn is great for doing just that.

Even better, this doesn’t have to be a lengthy activity.

Simply start with an evergreen post you’d run months earlier and summarize its content in a LinkedIn post. After you’ve highlighted some of the original post’s finer points and added a few images and screenshots to spice things up, link back to the article on your website.

4. SlideShare presentations

PowerPoint? Too old. Prezi? Too complex. SlideShare? Just right.

No, this isn’t a second installment of the timeless classic, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Moreover, it’s yet another killer way to transform old blog posts into exciting material for mass consumption and widespread appeal.

With upwards of 60 million active users and 17 percent of B2B marketers using the image-sharing outlet for marketing purposes, you should too.

(Source: Artillery Marketing)

Don’t have the time to create a full-blown presentation? No worries – simply find an infographic you’d created in the past to accompany a post’s written text and upload it to SlideShare. The program automatically detects that it’s an infographic and files it accordingly.

5. Informative answers via Q&A sites

Q&A sites are awesome. If you haven’t given them a whirl, repent and get to work.

What was once a social sliver dominated by Yahoo! Answers is now currently bigger than it’s ever been before, thanks to the likes of Quora.

To work your blogging magic on Quora or a similar site, create an account and start following topics of which you’re fairly knowledgeable – in other words, the very thing your blog is dedicated to covering.

Do a bit of browsing and once you’ve found a user question that can be accurately answered by one of your older posts, hop on and provide a well-constructed response.

(Source: Quora)

Only, instead of using purely the information you’ve managed to store in your brain’s hippocampus, cite the aforementioned blog post as a source with a well-placed backlink.

6. Webinars, podcasts and Google+ Hangouts

Relax, Google+ isn’t as dead as some so-called “marketing experts” claim it is. Honestly, the best part of the social channel comes from the Hangouts feature.

Says Kristel Cuenta of Search Engine Journal, “Google+ hangouts present an incredible follower-building opportunity for marketers and professionals because it lets you show your expertise through live discussion/Q&A.”

Furthermore, webinars and podcasts - built directly off of your past blogging brilliance – are two additional content forms that users love to engage with.

(Source: One Man’s Blog)

Admittedly, they’re harder to produce, but take the time and effort to create something worthwhile, and you’ll have already distanced your blog from lazier competitors.

Sooner rather than later, make it happen

As the above subheading indicates, the best time to start with the repurposing of your blog’s content was yesterday. Don’t delay. Blogging is an important part of the overall content marketing blueprint.

There’s some urgency with this stuff.

Also, one last tidbit before signing off—feel free to use some creative crossover to really take your repurposing game to the next level. If you see it best to create a SlideShare presentation and then subsequently run it on LinkedIn or Twitter, that’s perfectly fine.

Listen, don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that the repurposing of your blog content is as important as making certain that lions like the late Cecil can roam the Sub-Saharan desert without stepping on trash.

Why? Well, it just isn’t. In fact, it pales in comparison. Yet, as far as digital marketing is concerned, using old blog content to further build a digital audience is nothing short of essential

So, make it happen.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Whatever the case, hop on down to the comments section below and share your thoughts and feelings. Rest assured, once an engagement has taken place, in no time at all, I’ll make certain to keep the conversation going as best I know how.

Guest Author: Lucas Miller is the Founder of Echelon Copy. When not writing, editing or running, he's working tirelessly to perfect what he claims is the "World's Greatest Pompadour." Additionally, for what it's worth, his editorial works have been featured on Social Media Today, Business2Community, Ragan's PR Daily, Spin Sucks and many other top-tier PR publications.

The post 6 Methods to Recycle Blog Posts to Grow Your Readership appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

How to Run a Successful Twitter Contest

Do you want to boost engagement on Twitter? Have you thought about running a Twitter contest? Twitter contests are a creative, fun way to attract more followers, engagement and shares on the platform. In this post you'll discover how to run a Twitter contest for your business. #1: Identify the Objective Successful marketing starts with clear goals, [...]

This post How to Run a Successful Twitter Contest first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

Yes, You Can Track Print Advertising Using Google Analytics

In digital marketing we understand the importance of tracking. We spend money getting people to our site with hopes they’ll do what we desire them to do and that we’ll learn something about how to improve our digital marketing efforts. While we’ve seen a consistent trend of print spend be allocated to digital spend, we often forget that print advertising is still a channel worth understanding.

In fact, one study shows that print ads are more likely to engage users and prompt action. This begs the question, if print can be a strong channel, why don’t companies invest in it?

The answer is likely because companies are now used to understanding what their dollars are doing. When print, TV and billboards were the primary ad spots, attribution was not an easy task. But today, companies have built a habit of understanding how much revenue is generated by their ad spend dollars thanks to the Internet and Google Analytics.

Currently when print ads list the website on the actual ad in the hopes that users will check out the company at home on their desktop, users usually do just that—they’re likely to type it into their browser. This would then mean that the traffic is classified as Direct, which is not a fun traffic source to analyze or understand in Analytics.

Or maybe the user does a Google search for the brand and clicks on one of their pages in the search results, which would classify the traffic as Organic Search. Unfortunately, both of these metrics are wrong. The print ad should get the credit for bringing the user to the site. So how can we track print advertising digitally?

To help make sure you can track print advertising digitally in Google Analytics so that you can better analyze the success of your ads, below is an easy four-step process.

How to Track Print Advertising

Decide on a vanity URL

Most print ads include a domain name or URL, but if you want to know which website visitors saw this ad you’ll need a vanity URL. Vanity URL’s are unique, short and/or simple URL that demonstrates the brand or ad campaign. For example if the company EntoBento, a San Diego based dog treat company, ran a promotional ad in Time Magazine, the vanity URL might be “entobento.com/time.”

Create and apply UTM parameters to the landing page URL for the ad

UTM parameters are tracking codes appended to the end of a URL that allow you to customize your tracking sources. You can use the Google UTM builder to create the tracking URL for the ad in just a few minutes.

Continuing with the previous example, the tracking URL for EntoBento’s ad might look like:

entobento.com/?utm_source=time%20magazine&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=promo

We got this URL by using the UTM builder mentioned above. We simply plugged in the URL of our website and the tool generated this new URL with UTM parameters for us.

Redirect the vanity URL to a URL with custom UTM parameters

This part is a little technical.  A developer will have to create a redirect to send traffic from your vanity URL to the tracking URL. This means, taking the example from above once again:entobento.com/time would redirect to entobento.com/?utm_source=time%20magazine&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=promo).

Check Google Analytics real-time reports

After the redirect is setup, paste your vanity URL into the browser to test the redirect and that the UTM is working properly.  Open Google Analytics and navigate to Real-Time reports on the left side. Select traffic sources to confirm you see the tracking. Below is a screenshot of what the report looks like:

Why It Matters: The Benefit of Tracking Print Ads Via Google Analytics

By implementing print ad tracking you’re reducing the amount of traffic that is wrongly classified as Direct or Organic search and gaining insight into how your different print efforts are working. With this practice you will be beyond most companies who do print advertising with little understanding of how their ad performs.

Extra: This same process can be applied on your business cards, handouts, fliers, billboards, stickers, or your banner at an event / tradeshow. Wouldn’t that be interesting to see how much handout traffic you get? Or what the bounce rate is on your business cards? Get creative. If your business is using print, don’t be scared to track it digitally.

Do you have experience with tracking print ads through Google Analytics? Let us know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comment section below.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Google

This article, "Yes, You Can Track Print Advertising Using Google Analytics" was first published on Small Business Trends

How to Curate Your Social Content With Reddit

Are you looking for new content to share to your fans and followers? Have you considered Reddit as a source for valuable content? Using Reddit will reveal unique and interesting content that helps you stand out from the crowd. In this post you’ll discover how to use Reddit for content curation and inspiration. #1: Find [...]

This post How to Curate Your Social Content With Reddit first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

11 Photo Post Ideas That Your Business Should Use Today

Having your post go viral on social media – getting hundreds of Likes, Shares or Retweets as a response to your efforts – is the one thing that excites every social media administrator. But in order to get one step closer to achieving that, you have to understand what triggers people to share in the first place.

The New York Times Customer Insight Group published a fascinating study called the Psychology of Sharing, and defined 5 top reasons that motivate people to share content with others online:

• To Inform and Influence - 49% say sharing allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage action
• To Show Your Identity - 68% share to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about and to reinforce the image they would like to present
• To Connect with Others - 78% share information online because it lets them stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with, and 73% share information because it helps them connect with others who share their interests
• To Feel Valuable - 69% share information because it allows them to feel more involved in the world
• To Show Support - 84% share because it is a way to support causes or issues they care about

Although social media is about communicating and sharing your thoughts, stories, experiences and ideas; it’s important to understand that sharing them in the form of a simple, written post is often not as effective as when you include beautiful and eye-catching visuals.

We live in a time where more than 2.5 billion camera phones are used every day and where images have become the “universal language”.

Photo posts generate 53% more likes and 104% more comments than the average text post, because the message communicated via images is much easier to notice, understand and share across different social media networks.

Today, even if you have no design experience, you can rely on simple and free applications, such as Content Creator that enable small business owners, agencies and social media executives to create professional looking social media posts from their iPhone and iPad in a couple of minutes.

Here are few photo post ideas that will help you cut through the noise and make your brand standout on social media:

1. Give

It’s not a secret that people who like brand pages expect to receive some sort of discount or exclusive offer to a product or service they are considering to purchase. So, make sure to use photo posts and communicate your promo offers, discounts, deals or contests that are being organized for your fans.

If you are investing your time and money in prize game make the most out of it by creating posts that promote prize game rules or available prizes, share prize game uploads and encourage further participation of your fans.

At the end of the prize game don’t just announce winners with simple written posts, but invest some time to create beautiful photo posts and in that way congratulate and thank all your fans for their contribution and participation.

2. Advise

If you want to establish yourself as a leader in your business category you should first of all be a great advisor, and provide tips and tricks that will help your fans resolve problems or be more knowledgeable about your industry.

Use photo posts to draw more attention to your blog posts, share quick and easy ideas, tips or answers to the most frequent questions about your product or service. Be knowledgeable, useful, positive and people will appreciate and respond.

3. Warn

In the sea of information available on social media, negative forms of verbs and nouns (such as “No”, “Without” and “Stop”) have greater impact and attract more clicks, so try to use them in posts and warn about dangers that can affect anybody.

4. Amuse

Humor can appeal to a large audience, so occasionally include in your posts funny pictures and quotes that are relevant to your business industry or refer to some local situation or event.

5. Inspire

Motivational quotes always work, whether you choose famous quotes from poems, movies, songs, or simply decide to go with testimonials of your customers or business partners. It is the subtlest way to communicate values of your brand, have people recognize themselves in them and because of that be inclined to share with their friends.

6. Amaze

Knowing information, facts and interesting stats before others is a great motivating factor for your fans, so make sure to share with them something that will make them look knowledgeable and in touch with things that are happening in the world now.

7. Unite

Social media platforms are a perfect place to communicate your support to causes and issues you care about and extend invitations for membership to others. It will enable fans to see a human side behind the brand, get to know you better and perhaps even actively participate.

8. Educate

The best way to engage customers in a conversation about your product is to show interesting ways they can use it. Not only will such a simple format make any task look achievable and manageable but you will inspire fans and encourage them to share information to friends.

9. Celebrate

Throughout the year there are hundreds of different holidays, celebrations and special days that run from overexposed Valentines Day, to silly Doughnut Day. So go beyond traditional holidays and choose a few of those that are interesting, fun and resonate with your brand. You will be surprised by the response and definitely learn a thing or two about your fans.

10. Start a conversation

There is nothing more contagious then a good conversation, so break down the wall between you and your audience by encouraging them to share their opinion. Simply, ask a question or leave a blank space in your image for your fans to fill it with their thoughts, stories and ideas. For optimal engagement, write a question that opens a larger discussion not just with your fans, but also between your fans.

11. Show gratitude

If you are reaching an important milestone, such as a certain number of fans, a birthday or the end of a successful business year share, the joy with your fans and show them how much they have contributed to your success. It will encourage the sense of community and show fans that you appreciate them.

Before you decide on your next photo post think about your business objectives, and ways in which particular visual content will fit your overall marketing strategy. Think also about your audience: are they on your page to learn something or to have fun? What type of content provokes their reaction?

In the meantime let us know what types of visual posts have worked for you? Are there some others you think should be included on the list? We would like to hear from you!

Guest Author: Aida Gadzo is a Social Media Strategist at contentcreatorapp.com. She helps small and medium businesses master the “what”, “why” and “how” of producing and delivering engaging digital and social media content that will activate audiences and drive sales.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Content Creator.

The post 11 Photo Post Ideas That Your Business Should Use Today appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

86 Percent of Companies with B2B Referral Program See Growth, Study Says

What’s the best way to boost sales and acquire new customers?

Marketing-led referral programs that are supported by relevant technology, says a new study (PDF). In fact, 84 percent of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.

Heinz Marketing surveyed 600 B2B professionals from across North America to understand the impact of formal referral programs on sales pipeline growth and revenue acceleration. It found that “referrals convert better, close faster and have a higher lifetime value than other types of leads.”

Key Highlights

The study reveals a number of useful insights about B2B referral programs.

It has found that the most successful organizations:

• Have a formal referral program in place.
• Have referral programs managed primarily by marketing.
• Use tools or software specifically for referrals.

It also reveals that:

• 71 percent of companies with referral programs report higher conversion rates.
• B2B companies are three-times more likely to reach their revenue targets when the marketing department has primary responsibility for a formalized referral program, or when referral tools or software are used.
• Formal referral programs help B2B companies generate two-times more high-quality referrals.

Fewer Companies Have a Formalized Referral Program in Place

Despite realizing the many benefits of a marketing-led referral program in boosting sales and marketing, only 30 percent of the surveyed B2B companies said they have a formalized referral program in place.

This is surprising because referral programs are not just nice to have; they are a key contributor to revenue growth. As the study finds, 86 percent of companies with formalized referral programs experienced revenue growth over the last two years, compared to only 75 percent without them.

Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing Inc. says, “The findings of our research are clear: if you want to accelerate revenue growth, a referral program must be a key part of your strategy, marketing must own that program, and you should leverage technology to create a better referral process.”

Winning Big With Referral Programs

If you need a compelling reason to consider having a formalized referral program in place, consider this: 84 percent of B2B businesses start the buying process with a referral, according to Edelman Trust Barometer.

It goes without saying that engaging customers and giving them the incentive to refer your business can go a long way in strengthening your sales and marketing efforts.

Jim Williams, marketing vice president at Influitive, a company that also participated in the study, says, “The responsibility for generating referrals can’t rest solely on the shoulders of front-line sales reps. Simply asking individual prospects and clients for one-off referrals won’t get you to your revenue goals.”

He adds, “Instead, sales leaders must turn to their counterparts in marketing, who have the budget, creativity and technology to generate referral business at scale.”

Images: Influitive

This article, "86 Percent of Companies with B2B Referral Program See Growth, Study Says" was first published on Small Business Trends

How to Gain 100k Monthly Twitter Impressions

Twitter offers a chance for brands to actively engage and interact with audiences in 140 characters or less. To say that it’s an effective method of reaching out to people would be an understatement – which is exactly why every business should be constantly looking at ways to boost their reach.

To substantiate this further, there is no other platform in the world offering such active engagement, where consumer feedback can be measured so instantly and with such accuracy. A newspaper ad does not get favourited, a billboard cannot be re-tweeted; TV commercials, even with large viewing figures, do not indicate genuine engagement. You cannot directly and rapidly reply to any of these forms of advertising.

We recently revised our Twitter strategy and have since seen our monthly impressions grow fivefold, from 20,000 per month to well over 100,000. Engagement levels and audience numbers are growing as a result, and we’re confident that we’ve learnt a thing or two about social media optimisation.

Here’s a few best practice tips to get you started:

Learn the lingo

Whoever is behind the tweets should have a personal account themselves; being aware of the intricate subtleties of creating content that stirs a reaction is part of what makes Twitter so successful for businesspeople.

If you are not actively doing this in your own life on a daily basis, you are unlikely to have a clue how to engage correctly in the business arena.

At best, it will come across forced. At worst, your followers will vanish in droves.

Discover your audience

To engage with an audience you have to understand what it is to be that audience.

Do you know who’s following you? To know what you should be posting depends on who you are trying to appeal to, but going through each of your followers’ profiles and learning their interests would take forever.

Followerwonk could be the answer; it’s a great tool that creates a word map that summarises the interests of your followers based on their personal information.

The Analytics tool on Twitter also summarises information based on individual tweets, providing helpful graphs to define your demographic.

Once you have this information you will be able to get an idea of the most suitable content for your tweets.

The aim of the game

So what’s the point of all this engagement and following stuff if it’s all going round in a mad circle, leading nowhere?

More than anything, you want to take your followers off Twitter and onto your blog or website. Don’t you? So make your profile your best CTA. We regularly post relevant content on the e3 blog, but focus on quality over quantity.

Just like in the advertising world, it makes sense to base your tweets and corresponding content on the interests of the audience. It’s no different, but it is where people go so badly wrong.

Engaging content

A good Twitter feed doesn’t just focus on the publisher’s own work. You will need to source content from across the web and post it directly to your followers. Good content, not just anything you can find that roughly fits.

Establish yourself as an authority on your subject, displaying a wider awareness of industry trends.

You can only do this by not relying alone on the creation of your own content. This also means you are able to tweet more. You gain more impressions and responses and you don’t have to do very much.

If you are currently tweeting five times a day, then double it by using third party material and see if you receive more interaction.

Sourcing content

Scouring the web for interesting articles and features can be nearly as time consuming as writing them yourself.

To help you: Feedly is a content aggregator that will base its searches on your specifications. By using the information gained from Twitter and other analytical tools you will be able to find items that genuinely interest your followers.

Buzzsumo’s trending function gives insight into trending stories and articles from across social media. Whilst functioning as a good way of discovering quality content, it also means that you can be up to date and relevant when it comes to writing your own blog posts or general opinion tweets. The ‘Most Shared’ section allows users to find content based on specific terms, Buzzsumo will organise content based on the relevance and overall popularity.

A picture paints a thousand words

Images are an essential accompaniment to any tweet; they draw attention and make a great visual summary of posted content. Tweets with images get 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more re-tweets.

Unsplash hosts hundreds of amazing images with no copyright, whilst Pablo allows you to customize pictures with simple edits and quotes. Use these two together and watch engagements rise.

Posting methods

Tweetdeck is a free app courtesy of Twitter. It is a scheduling tool, the main function of which is the dual management and monitoring of multiple accounts; this is a superb way of keeping up to date with follower activity. Sprout Social is a paid social media tool which handles reports, scheduling, monitoring and feed plug-ins, excellent if you don’t feel the need to constantly monitor your account.

The most useful feature is its ability to plug-in with a bitly account to keep links tidy and short; having an automated function saves time.

Social media presents a brand and its consumers on an equal footing; it gives an audience a method of communicating with brands in the public sphere, making their opinions heard with the potential to bring about real change.

By following these steps and more, we increased our engagement by 80,000 monthly impressions. Read our full case study on boosting Twitter followers to find out how we achieved it in more detail.

Guest Author: Neil Collard is the Managing Director of digital marketing agency, e3. With studios in London and Bristol, his award-winning team produce campaigns for clients including Unicef, Clarks, the Royal Navy and the National Trust. You can connect with e3 on LinkedIn and follow @e3_media on Twitter.

The post How to Gain 100k Monthly Twitter Impressions appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.