We had a blast doing our first show, if you missed it, you can watch it here in its entirety.
Below you’ll find the show notes, including links and as much as we could capture. As always, your feedback is welcome.
The Marketing Download. Episode 1 show notes.
Air Date: Wednesday February 9, 2016
Who was on it?
Hosts:
Invited Guests:
- John Chow, blogger at JohnChow.com
Open seat participants:
- Craig Carpenter from Relay
- Marla Schulman
On the news
Superbowl stuff
- Advertising : Super Bowl 50 Ads – Best according to Mashable
- AdAge counts the top 10 of all time
- Watch all 35 ads playing during SuperBowl 50 complied by AdMeter
Social media stuff
- Research of Facebook’s almost 1.6 billion monthly active users (MAUs) in Q4 2015, more than 800 million (or 52%) were mobile-only Monthly Active Users. That’s more than double the share from 2 years earlier, when mobile-only users represented just 24% of total MAUs. –
- Related: Techcrunch,
- ActivateInc slideshare on the state of Social Media 2016
- Instagram “began running its first 60-second video ads, starting with T-Mobile and Warner Brothers.”
- Instagram – Multiple Accounts. — I wrote a quick and dirty tutorial on this, you can see it here.
- Twitter — Buzz about Twitter dropping the 140 character limit and changing the timeline. The timeline has changed for some users to be more “facebook-esque” what are your thoughts on that?
Guest related info
Our guest for this show was John Chow. He has risen to internet fame by having one of the most popular personal blogs in the planet. In the blog, he teaches people how to make money by blogging.
Tips and advice
- Every business should have a blog.
- Have a content plan and a coherent message.
- Don’t stop creating content – John attributes a big part of his success to being consistent. Blogged 2 times per day for over 5 years before expanding the operation to include staff writers.
- Didn’t make money for the first 8 months of the blog’s life.
- You can find sources to pay for content. Seek out freelance writers for long term contracts.
- Backlinks can be a good thing for your Google ranking.
- Example of a business using blogging to their advantage, www.bodybuilding.com, started as an ecommerce site, but now provides tons of information via the blog. The blog attracts new customers and continues to nurture existing ones.
Questions, Answers and other tips.
- How do you go retargeting and managing all the different places to retarget with?
- The short answer is to use a middle man to handle this for you, we have used Adroll in the past.
- Make once, and re-use. There are ways to create a piece of content and repurpose it for multiple situations and platforms. This saves you time, and helps you spread the message, brand, or product.
- How can a small business use blogging for their business?
- Blog about stuff in the industry. Blog about stuff that the target audience would be interested about. We talked about the example of a local dry cleaning business.
- What are backlinks?
- Backlinks are the links that you would put on a blogpost that link back to another blog or website. The more of these that you have coming into your blog, the better you are off generally.
- How do you attract guest bloggers?
- Two ways, if your blog already has traction and reputation then guest bloggers may come to you naturally. Then you just have to vet them and make sure the posts they submit are original and meet your quality and content standards. Second way is to offer incentives like payment for their articles.
- How do you approach A/B Testing?
- We could do a full show just on this topic, but the approach I take is to make 2 drastically different pages first. Send traffic to both at equal amounts. One of those pages should convert better than the other. Then you pick that winner as the main page and create a new split test where you change things gradually and repeat the process.
- The tools I use are: Linktrackr, and Leadpages.
- John is using and suggested Clickfunnels.
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