Some things are way better automatic.

Coffee makers. Direct debit. Toilets.

But other things, not so much. In fact, doing some things the old-fashioned way can be a HUGE improvement over having them automated.

And this is especially true in your business.

Not everything you do goes better when it happens all on its own – and unlike those automatic toilets, there are some things you want to just get your grabby little hands all over. Things like customer service, for example, practically demand a highly personal touch.

Source: https://www.groovehq.com/support/delivering-personal-customer-service

So what are some of the things we do the old-fashioned way here?

What are some of the things YOU can do the old-fashioned way to make a better connection with your fans and customers?

Getting personal on social media

Obviously, scheduling and automation can go a long way toward improving your social media strategy. You waste less time multitasking, you’re more consistent, and you’re able to easily use your evergreen content as an endless source of new traffic. Heck, you can even pre-schedule the type of real-time marketing posts that stand to double your usual engagement.

Once you start automating your social media, things can go one of two ways:

1. You use the time you’ve saved by automating some things on social to focus on other aspects of social. You might not spend less time on social media at all, but you’re spending it more strategically.
2. You take the idea of automation and run with it, automating literally every aspect of your social media for which there’s a tool that can do it.

And while that second way of doing things can absolutely save you a lot of time, it isn’t necessarily the best way of doing things.

Take the auto-DM, for example. Go a-Googlin’, and you’ll find no shortage of tools that’ll automatically blast direct messages to your audience:

Great, right? All the benefits of sending a one-on-one message to a follower, with none of the heavy lifting!

Except for the small catch that users hate automated DMs and cite them as the #1 reason they’d unfollow someone.

Whoops.

Chalk it up as one of those things that Twitter technically allows, but you shouldn’t necessarily do just because you can.

Social media automation is great for the everyday posts you’d share no matter what, but one-on-ones deserve a personal touch. And that means doing things the old-fashioned way – actually spending live time on social media and interacting with people on the fly. (Just like when cavemen first live-tweeted the invention of the wheel.) Fortunately, interacting live with people is the fun part of social media anyway – automating it would be like building a robot to eat all of your desserts. Sure, you can do it, but why would you want to?

And speaking of treats…

Putting pen to paper

When’s the last time any aspect of your business existed outside of a computer screen? Between your site, your marketing, and paying for literally everything online, it might seem like your business lives in some alternate dimension, completely siloed off from the tangible world.

Your company might live on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean it always has to stay there – and making an appearance in the real world can leave a real impression.

(So can making an appearance on MTV’s “The Real World,” but that wouldn’t necessarily be a positive impression.)

Edgar’s short-lived tenure in the Season 8 house was ultimately left on the cutting room floor. It was for the best.

Handwritten notes, for example, have made a serious comeback – they’re a way of creating a bridge between the online world and the real world, and to show your fans that they’re worth a little extra effort. (Because seriously, they are.)

At VidCon last month, web and entertainment pioneer Fred Seibert explained that traditional media values numbers, but the Internet values loyalty. The point? Despite the fact that data is more abundant than pretty much ever before, there’s a lot to be said for maintaining your humanity as a brand, and recognizing your fans as actual living, breathing, caring people – not just leads and clickthroughs.

Which brings us back to snail mail.

Here at Edgar, we make it a point to send out the occasional surprise using the good old postal service. Is it because of a study showing that it increases retention, or something? Nah – we just do it because it makes people happy, and that makes us happy, too.

Got a gift package of joy this morning from @meetedgar – THANK YOU http://t.co/qNdB7S4ZX7 pic.twitter.com/bKRhtSJ6GI

— Frances B (@Frances_M_B) July 15, 2015

Activities that reinforce your brand’s humanity are every bit as important as those that improve its bottom line – and taking your business offline is a great way to stay in touch with reality.

Checking in personally

Of course, you don’t have to stray from the security of your laptop screen to keep your brand’s sense of humanity strong. In some cases, it might be as simple as maintaining a personal connection with someone even after they become your customer.

For example, we send personal emails to our users to see how they’re getting along with Edgar – what they love, what might be throwing them off, and so on. When our users reply – and a lot of them do – it gives us a chance to continue a one-on-one dialogue, so we can learn more about how they’re using Edgar and give them personalized tips.

And while we are a SaaS company, personal check-ins are valuable even when you don’t stand to lose a customer. Touch base with the people who have given you business. Be sincere, and demonstrate that you value their opinions and care about their happiness. After all, you do – it’s just a matter of showing it.

Creating opportunities to interact

Social media isn’t the only place where it pays to be both hands-on and hands-off.

Everybody researches, learns, and processes information differently. Some people like to do it all on their own, while some prefer a little more interaction. Just ask anyone who’s ever worked retail and had to ask strangers, “Is there anything I can help you find today” – you just never know how someone will respond.

Make things easier for yourself by giving people the means to answer their own questions, and make things easier for others by helping those who want you to.

We may have a YouTube video that gives a quick tour/tutorial of Edgar, but we also offer live demos several times a month so people can see it in action and ask questions as we go. We have a massive, searchable database of help documents, but we also field a lot of questions via email, and in Edgar HQ. Our blog (you know, where you are right now) shares information and strategies for social media marketing every week, but we also offer live webinars that do the same thing.

An image used to promote one of our live webinars

You can create all the evergreen content and resources you want, but they’re no substitute for live interaction. By creating opportunities to engage live with your audience and allowing them to interact with you, too, you ensure that you’re reaching as many people as possible in the way that they like best.

You don’t have to do EVERYTHING the old-fashioned way…

No one’s saying you should invest in a butter churn or chisel your newsletters into stone tablets, but sometimes, doing things the old-fashioned way – without just letting automation run its course – has big advantages. When you do automate tasks that can be planned in advance, it just means that you have more time for the live, manual, good-old-fashioned stuff!

The post When You Should Quit Automating Your Marketing and Do Things the Old-Fashioned Way appeared first on Edgar.

Everyone struggles at least a little to figure out who they really are.

Knowing thyself is tougher than it sounds – it can take years of self-discovery and reflection! But when it comes to knowing your brand, you just don’t have that kind of time. (Sorry, but you can’t figure this out by pulling an Eat, Pray, Love.)

Figuring out your brand identity is tough for the same reasons figuring out your OWN identity is tough. You’ve gotta dig in and do some soul searching – so where do you start?

Forget about the industry standard

Unless you’re just one of those businesses that does something literally no other business in the world does, you have to keep other brands in mind when you’re finding your own identity.

That doesn’t mean you should do what those other brands do.

It can actually mean the exact opposite! Following in the footsteps of other brands in your industry is tempting. It reinforces the idea of doing the same thing as the other guys, but better. Problem is, when a bunch of businesses in the same industry have similar branding, they all kind of start to look the same.

Break your industry’s rules – the more you think you can’t or shouldn’t do something, the more impact it will have when you do.

Look at Planet Fitness, the health club franchise that skyrocketed to popularity in the United States by declaring itself radically different from the rest of its industry. Instead of catering toward the same small percentage of self-described fitness fanatics that other gyms try to attract, Planet Fitness focuses on attracting members who are more interested in a non-intimidating environment, and it shows in their branding. (They actually have a legit registered trademark on the phrase “Judgement Free Zone.”)

Standing out from your industry does have limitations – and you don’t want your brand to feel cheap or gimmicky. (Sorry, but being the wacky divorce lawyer may make you stand out in a not-so-good way.) If you can find even a small way in which you’re different from the other guys, though, you can use it as the framework for your brand. Worry less about being better, and focus on just being you.

Speaking of being you, remember…

Your personality is your brand (and vice versa)

Every brand has a personality.

When you’re struggling to define your own brand, then, start simple – what adjectives would you use to describe it?

For example, the gym we looked at earlier might be described as:

• Welcoming
• Non-judgemental
• Unpretentious
• Encouraging

They’re words that make you feel safe, and they’re also words that could just as easily describe a person, rather than a thing.

Don’t think of a brand as what you do or even who you do it for – think of it as who you are.

Here’s an example of two brands that target people with similar interests, but each with their own unique personalities.

Both The Middle Finger Project and Marie Forleo are websites for people living the independent entrepreneur lifestyle – people who want to be amazing at creating, building, and operating a business of their own.

Despite the similarities in their subject matter, though, these sites have personalities that are distinctly different from each other.

Homepages for The Middle Finger Project (left) and Marie Forleo (right)

How do two businesses targeting a lot of the same people and tackling a lot of the same issues stand out from each other?

Let’s take a look at their personalities. What are the adjectives you’d use to describe these brands?

For The Middle Finger Project, you might use adjectives like:

• Unapologetic
• Audacious
• Outspoken
• Sarcastic

Marie Forleo, on the other hand, may evoke descriptions more like:

• Cheerful
• Goofy
• Positive
• Inoffensive

Both brands are built around a personality, and those personalities are very different – and remember, being different can be a lot more valuable than trying to be the-same-but-better. (Because in the end, both of these websites are pretty awesome.)

Think about your own personality, and what ideals you want your brand to represent. Start small. Start with your adjectives, and go from there.

And when you do, there’s something you really need to keep in mind:

Those shoes had better fit

Your brand’s personality doesn’t have to be the exact same as your personality, but it should definitely be true to parts of your personality.

Injecting yourself into your brand doesn’t just keep you honest – it keeps you sane.

The cynical thing to do would be to engineer a brand personality you think will just be the most appealing, whether or not you actually identify or even agree with it. (AKA, the “Oh yeah, those suckers are gonna eat this up” approach.)

The better approach is to focus on what feels natural, and what you actually believe. The infamous Denny’s Tumblr, for example, wasn’t the result of focus group testing or data analyzing – it became successful because its manager used it as a brand the same way she would as an everyday user.

Your personality has a hundred different sides – choose the ones you want your brand to embrace, and work with them. If it doesn’t feel “right” or natural, take that as a sign – you’re going to be wearing these shoes for a long time, so you’d better be sure that they fit.

Everything is an opportunity to reinforce your brand – EVERYTHING

Let’s say you figure out what sort of personality you might like for your brand. You understand the other brands in your industry, you know what makes you different, and you’re ready to scream it from the mountaintops.

What do you actually DO with your brand identity?

(Hint: Actually screaming it from the mountaintops is not recommended.)

Some ways of expressing your brand identity are pretty obvious. The copy on your website, the look of your logo, and the way you speak on social media, for example, are kind of the usual suspects when you’re looking for places to express your identity.

Sometimes, though, it’s the unusual suspects that can make all the difference.

Everything your business does – no matter how small or mundane – gives you an opportunity.

For example, look at the onboarding process for the dating website OkCupid. (That is, if you haven’t seen it already, killer.)

Notation by UserOnboard: Source: UserOnboard https://www.useronboard.com/how-okcupid-onboards-new-users/

OkCupid injects personality all throughout what would normally be a long and tedious process, so by the time you’re actually inside the network and finding your next main squeeze, you’re feeling pretty motivated. (Instead of feeling bored out of your skull.)

We do the same thing here at Edgar.

We look at every piece of copy we write, from our job listings to our error messages, and find ways to make them more fun – which is exactly in line with our brand.

Don’t pass up an opportunity to reinforce your branding – no matter how small!

This is another one of those times when it can pay to break the rules.

Don’t worry about what you might think you’re “allowed” to do. If you want to be funny when you’re asking someone for their credit card details, be funny. If you want to send someone a haiku in a confirmation email, then send that haiku! Perform your brand’s identity whenever you can, wherever you can, and you’ll only make it stronger.

Getting to know yourself isn’t always easy

Remember that your brand is who you are – and branding can seem hard because knowing who you are is hard!

The only real trick is to embrace the things that make you unique, and to do it as often as you want without worrying about the other guys out there. When you’re okay with being different – instead of always trying to be better – you just might find that knowing yourself isn’t as hard as it once seemed!

The post Branding 101: Don’t Waste Time Trying to Be Better Than Your Competition appeared first on Edgar.

The work that goes into building a brand new business can feel like a full-time job all by itself – and that’s before you even think about marketing it.

That’s what Tony Jacobson found earlier this year as he prepared to launch Winetracker.co, an app that allows users to easily track, rate, and review wine wherever they go. With three children and a day job to keep him busy, building and perfecting Winetracker on his own was a project relegated to evenings and weekends, leaving precious little time for actually promoting it.

In just six months, though, Tony has singlehandedly grown his Twitter following by about 125 users every single day, going from just 700 to more than 21,000 real, engaged fans. Twitter now accounts for about 80% of his website’s traffic.

I talked to Tony about his three secrets for building a massive, highly engaged audience on social media – all in about an hour or so a week.

Tweet with style and substance

Adding visuals to your updates is an easy way to boost their visibility and engagement – those with images score an average of 150% more retweets. Whether pulling an image from the source content he’s tweeting about (like a news story) or using image editing tools like Pixelmator and Sketch to create his own, Tony adds an image to everything he shares on Twitter.

“It’s critical to rising above the noise on Twitter,” he said in our conversation. “And it doesn’t have to be beautiful.”

To make the time he invests in creating images go even further, he also uses Edgar to share his tweets more than once, so they can be seen by new people.

“Some of my posts are getting retweeted 30 times even though they just got retweeted 30 times four days ago,” he said. “Sure enough, they get the same amount of traction every time.”

Before adopting this strategy, he only had time to create and share about three new updates a week. After signing up for Edgar in February and using batch-writing to build up a library of recurring tweets, he was able to eventually start sharing seven tweets every day, spending exponentially less time while watching his engagement levels soar.

Twitter engagement for @winetrackerco has steadily increased since February 2015

“Now I only spend maybe an hour a week finding new stuff, and I’m creating maybe one or two new posts a week,” he said. “Or some weeks I just go without, because I have a library of content already. People probably think I’m a full-time social media manager.”

But when it comes to building an engaged audience on Twitter, Tony’s found that it’s a matter of not just how you share, but what you share.

Give ‘em something to talk about

Of the seven tweets Tony shares in a day, only one is the type of self-promotion that sends traffic to his website. The rest are strictly the type of content that people love to share most on social – a strategy that helps his profile reach nearly 19,000 impressions per day.

“I’m just giving people things that give them social capital,” he explained. “They can say, ‘I learned this cool thing today.’ It arms people with nice, valuable, interesting information on a topic they care about. That’s the guiding principle of the content I’m generating.”

By tweeting facts, tips, links to other people’s content, quotes, and more, he gives his followers content that they’ll want to share – and will make others want to follow him, as well.

Prioritize interactions and outreach

While about 40% of Tony’s new followers are users who find him on their own, he also grows his audience by dedicating time to outreach.

By using Tweepi to track and organize users interested in wine, he’s able to proactively create new connections:

Winetracker uses Tweepi to find and organize people who may be interested in their content

Using the time Edgar saves him to focus on interacting live, he keeps the relationship between himself and his followers strong by engaging in conversations and responding to comments and questions.

“When you have your library set up, it frees you up to do true social engagement,” he explained. “That’s where the bulk of my time is, and that’s just bits and pieces, no different than it would be checking your personal Facebook feed throughout the day. You can always spend 2-3 minutes on your phone, checking your notifications, interacting real quick. Acknowledge their existence. Acknowledge their effort.”

“Outreach helps, but I think definitely people are sticking around because of the content,” Tony said. “Most people just don’t see it, because you’re mixed in with other people posting on their feed. They only see bits and pieces. So to them, even when you share things more than once, you’re giving them fresh, wonderful stuff all the time.”

Investing in your growth

Whether it’s using tools that make it easier to share updates and engage with your followers or just dedicating the time to create stronger content, knowing how to invest your resources is the key to growing not just a bigger audience, but a more engaged one.

“It takes upfront work to generate social content,” Tony explained, “but it’s not rocket science. Be empathetic. Be digestible. Be visual. Give people social capital. Once that exists, you’re free.”

Special thanks to Tony Jacobson for his insight. You can find Winetracker on Twitter, and learn more at Winetracker.co.

The post Three Secrets That Helped Winetracker.co Grow Its Twitter Audience by 20,000 Followers in Six Months appeared first on Edgar.

Did you hear the one about the big startup that suddenly went under?

No, the other one. No, the OTHER other one.

While that whole official “dot-com bubble” thing was going on way back when Y2K was still in the cultural consciousness – feel old yet? – it seems like startups are still going boom-or-bust wherever you look.

Which puts one big question on the mind of every business owner out there:

How do I make sure MY business isn’t the next one to tank?

Story time.

In early August, the virtual assistant company Zirtual announced that it was folding. Before being acquired by another business, they unceremoniously laid off their entire staff of more than 400 employees via email at 1:34 AM. Most of them had no idea that it was coming, to the extent that Zirtual is now facing a lawsuit alleging that it violated US labor laws.

A fiasco like that can make anyone feel more than a little skittish. To the outside observer – and apparently, most of their employees – Zirtual had been doing just fine.

And then poof, gone.

Kind of a scary thought, right?

Fortunately, though, there are steps you can take so that your business isn’t the next cautionary tale.

First and foremost?

Focus on sustainability – not just growth.

When it comes to your business, bigger isn’t always better – and growth you can’t sustain is a ticking time bomb.

Growing an unsustainable business is like having an enormous house you can’t afford to maintain. Yeah, it’s impressive on the outside, but it’s only a matter of time before it starts looking shabby.

Make sure your business model is scalable, or else you can burn yourself out. For example, a private coach or consultant may find that doing one-on-one client work is the bulk of their business when they’re starting out – but no matter how high the demand, you can only do so many consultations in a day. Its scalability has limits. (Using your expertise to create a course, on the other hand, or a series of books or videos, IS scalable.)

The other major distinction when it comes to sustainability versus growth? Be mindful of where your money comes from.

This is a lot easier when your business is entirely bootstrapped, or self-funded – because you really don’t have a choice. Your funding has to come out of your profits, because that’s the only money you have coming in.

Companies like Zirtual can get into trouble because they rely too much on the largesse of their investors, and when the investments stop coming, they don’t have the sustainability to turn profits on their own. (And in a case like Zirtual’s, news that you’re not getting the investment you were counting on might come almost literally at the last minute.) In the words of their founder and CEO Maren Kate:

https://medium.com/@marenkate/zirtual-what-happened-and-what-s-next-f9bd493ecc49

Even in our own company, sustainability is something we’ve had to pay attention to from day one. We started with a nest egg from another entirely self-funded business, but we’d have burned through it pretty quickly if we didn’t limit our growth to what we could sustain. Our team almost doubled in size in our first year, but it didn’t all happen at once.

Design a business that can grow, and grow only as quickly as you can sustain on your own. And that means you have to do one very, very hard thing:

Be patient.

Building a sustainable, bootstrapped business can be slow going.

No matter how clear your vision is on day one, it can take years before you really gain momentum.

That probably isn’t what you want to hear.

Patience is a virtue.

But bootstrapping can also force your business to become the best version of itself – and in the long run, you’re better off for it.

You get to see what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments along the way. Your business stays lean, agile, and adaptable – and isn’t that kind of independence one of the reasons you wanted your own business in the first place?

Depending solely on customers to confirm the value of your business in actual dollars may be frustrating at first, but it necessitates a keen sense of what you need to do to become profitable and stay profitable. (Sustainability, remember?)

And here’s the thing about that:

Always define your own success.

Don’t try to be like the other businesses in your field – even the big, successful ones.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

Because who they are is different from who you are, and the way they define success may be a lot different from how you do, too.

A business that relies on outside funding to stay afloat more than its own sustainability might not have the same goals you do.

While you build a business focused on attracting customers, they might build a business focused on attracting investors. While your goal may be to own your business for years, theirs might be to get acquired as quickly as possible and walk off with a big burlap bag full of cash.

Other businesses don’t get to define whether you’re successful. Only you do.

Which is exciting! Sure, you might feel like you’re missing out on some cool points. But when it comes to your business, how do you decide when you’ve made it?

Is it when you’re the biggest name in your industry, and you’re on a yacht gnoshing on roast koala with venture capitalists? When someone offers to buy you out for a gazillion dollars? Or is it when you have a business that makes more than it spends, and that affords you the independence and the lifestyle you want?

Staying focused on your own standards and goals – instead of trying to meet what you imagine are someone else’s – helps you make decisions that are healthier for your business.

What happens next?

Granted, this all makes it sound pretty simple.

It’s not.

Building and maintaining a successful business is really, really hard – and focusing on sustainability and responsible growth doesn’t actually guarantee anything. (Wouldn’t that be awesome?)

But at the same time, if you’re trying to avoid becoming a cautionary tale? There are certainly worse places to start than being responsible, being patient, and being yourself.

The post Why Growth Spurts Aren’t the Best Thing For Your Business – and What You Should Focus On Instead appeared first on Edgar.

No matter how long your business has been around, when it comes time to introduce a new product, you have to play one of the most distressing games of chance imaginable:

Setting a price.

On the one hand, it can feel like spinning that big wheel on The Price Is Right – you want to land on as high a number as you can without going TOO high, or you could bust. That feels risky.

On the other hand, your only other option is a LOT worse.

Because your only other option – and one that hobbles plenty of businesses before they can ever get off the ground – is to adopt a garage sale mentality.

The garage sale mentality kills businesses.

You know what it is – it’s when instead of pricing something for what you know it’s really worth, you set the price as low as you can and just hope for the best.

Works great for the Members Only jacket collecting dust in the back of your closet. Not so much for the product on which you’ve spent time, money, and a lot of effort.

It’s easy to think that the lower your price, the more competitive you make yourself. But offering something at the price you think is actually fair – instead of just as low as you can go – is better for your business in more ways than one.

There are three big reasons why.

Setting your price too low devalues your product.

Yes, you can get great things at ridiculously low prices. For example, look at this thing – not even 11 bucks!

Yes, please.

But that doesn’t mean people are motivated by price alone – and in fact, setting one that’s TOO low can devalue what you’re offering.

Price reflects your confidence in what you offer. Sure, everyone shops around for competitive prices – but ultimately, the quality and usefulness of what you’re selling is a much bigger factor than you may expect.

Undercutting your competition on price is a shortcut, but it’s one that undermines your own worth. Instead of asking yourself how low of a price you can squeak by with, ask yourself:

How can I add value to what I’m offering?

Am I communicating the value of what I’m offering effectively?

In what other ways can I differentiate myself from competitors?

These questions can be harder to answer, but over time, their payoffs – both figurative and literal – are a lot bigger.

One reason for that?

A price that’s too low inhibits your company’s growth.

It would be kind of silly to say that the freemium business model doesn’t work. Heck, in 2014, Kim Kardashian’s free-to-download mobile game made a cool $74 million.

We had to delete the Kim Kardashian game from Edgar’s phone, for productivity’s sake.

But whether you’re trying to squeak by on the lowest price possible or you find yourself offering more and more freebies, you’re working with limited bandwidth, and you should be using it on things that actually help you grow.

The time you spend on freebies – whether it’s creating, marketing, or offering support for them – is time you’re NOT spending on developing a better product and a more profitable business. And focusing on growing without considering financial sustainability has dire consequences.

Again, freebies and even freemium products can be incredibly useful – if and when you have the bandwidth. (After all, we spend a LOT of time on things like free webinars, downloads, and guides.) But if it’s taking away too much of the time you need to make your business, you know, a business, then you have to reevaluate its worth.

Especially because of this next thing:

You need to know that you’re creating something people are actually willing to buy.

Creating a free product is completely different from creating a paid one.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a course, an ebook, software, whatever – your audience’s expectations vary by price, and when your price is too low, those expectations are dangerously easy to meet.

Plenty of things are worth no money and no risk, but is what you offer worth paying for?

If you’re giving too much away, or offering it at too low a price, this is a tough question to answer. Of course it’s worth having for the cost of nothing, but you can’t build a business on that.

The money you’re making – or NOT making – is your best indication of whether you’re on the right track. Maybe you find that the thing you’re offering is way more enticing than you’d anticipated. Maybe you find that your value proposition needs work. But you’re not going to find out anything you can use to become more profitable if you’re setting the bar too low from the start.

Figuring out the right price is still super tricky.

Trying to land on the right price can take a little trial and error – and figuring out where to start might still feel as haphazard as spinning that giant Price Is Right wheel.

The important thing to keep in mind when you do, though, is to not sell yourself short – and to make sure that the successes you plan for are the kind that will improve your business in the long term.

(header image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bransonmo/9465791679)

The post How Your Low Prices Are Killing Your Business appeared first on Edgar.

For businesses, bloggers, and tweens alike, Twitter is one of the most important social media platforms in terms of marketing your content, sharing new features, and just letting your followers know what you’ve been up to. (Okay, tweens probably aren’t using it for those first two reasons.)

But if you’re only using Twitter to build your audience there, you’re not getting the maximum value out of your following. You should also be using Twitter to massively grow your email list.

Here are 5 easy ways to make this happen with just a few tweaks.

1. Link your Twitter bio to a call to action page

Rather than link your Twitter bio to your website, like most people do, link it directly to a landing page that has a call to action.

This will have a much higher conversion rate than just directing people to your homepage. Chances are that if someone has shown enough interest in you based on your Twitter, they’ll also be interested in subscribing to your email list.

Noah Kagan, founder of SumoMe and an email-building connoisseur, does this on his Twitter:

His Twitter bio leads you directly to the landing page of his blog OkDork, where the first thing you see is his call to action to subscribe.

Noah uses SumoMe’s Welcome Mat as a friendly and inviting template to get people to subscribe. This makes it easy for users to opt in right away without having to spend extra time on his site looking for more information. He has seen Welcome Mat get 3x the amount of conversions you might have with a conventional call to action.

If you want to make it even easier for people to access your landing page, include a link directly in the body of your Twitter bio, as opposed to in the section below. Now it will show up in the truncated description of you whenever anyone searches for you.

This simple tweak is sure to get you more exposure and a bigger email list.

2. Use Start a Fire to promote your own content with curated shares

On Twitter we are all regularly sharing posts from other bloggers and other publications in order to circulate the best content possible. While this is important to your social media presence, it creates a problem.

When your followers click on that link they are directed away from you or your brand. Their attention is now elsewhere and they have left you behind.

start A FIRE is an app that allows you to add your presence to external links that you share on social media. When a follower lands on an article that you shared, but didn’t create, a little box will pop up in the corner with you or your brand and some recommended reads from your own content.

This is the article that entrepreneur Hiten Shah of CrazyEgg and KissMetrics shared:

At a closer look you can see that the link back to his Twitter pops up, as well as some recommended reads from his own blog:

This is an effective tool because it increases exposure for your brand and your content, and can drive traffic to your site. You can link people directly to previous articles you have written or to your landing page.

Remember to include your call to action in whatever links you are recommending, and you are good to go.

3. Use Twitter Lead Generation Cards to promote a new eBook

Twitter’s lead generation cards are a great marketing tool. These Twitter ads allow you to plug CTAs directly into your Twitter feed. You get access to emails with one simple click.

Use these cards to advertise an offer such as an eBook, which is an excellent tool that helps you grow your email list all on its own. At iDoneThis, we used Lead Generation Cards to market our eBook, and it’s helped us gain over 10,000 emails for our list.

Create your card under Twitter Ads in the ‘Creatives’ tab. Choose ‘Cards,’ and you will be left with the basic template to fill in, which will look like this:

Here is a finished example from Webtrends:

You will be left with a beautiful lead generation card that will simplify the process of capturing emails over social media.

4. Reply to tweets using TweetDeck to drive people to a call to action

Use TweetDeck to surface moments when you are mentioned on Twitter in order for you to easily reply and engage with people supporting your content.

Do this by clicking on the “Add Column” symbol from the sidebar, and click to add mentions. You can organize it so that you see when you and the sites you write for are mentioned.

Then, every time you tweet something new, take the time to go back and reply to everyone who retweets or mentions your post thanking them for the attention. More often than not, they will reply again in appreciation that you took the time to do so.

Now is the time to act. Take this opportunity to plug in your lead generation card to capture their email with one single click. This tactic has shown a 60-80% conversion rate.

People will respect that you took the time to get back to them, and will feel inclined to subscribe to your email list since they enjoyed the content.

5. Use analytics to make sure none of the above go to waste

Lastly, use Twitter Analytics to make sure you can optimize the results of the above tips.

If you find that you have a small following on Twitter or that your tweets don’t regularly perform well, you’re left without what can be a very powerful and effective distribution channel for your content. That’s why even if you aren’t a social media manager, it’s absolutely critical that you understand how you’re performing on Twitter and how you can improve.

These analytics help you track rates of impressions, retweets, engagements, link clicks, and favorited items, as well as your number of new followers. Focus on when new followers are joining, what content you’re tweeting during those times, and why new followers are joining.

Once you’re on Twitter Analytics, the analytics are easy to access and understand. Clicking on the “Tweets” category from the menu bar will provide information about how many people interacted with your content.

If you scroll down, you will see your specific breakdown:

This information should allow you to immediately assess the effectiveness of your Twitter content. You can then take the next steps to get more followers and create better content using the above four tools, so that more people engage and you can build your email list.

Hint: if you find your numbers are anything like the ones above, you have a lot of work to do.

If you find that these numbers could use some work, try these additional tweaks to your tweets:

• Add images
• Ask a question
• Tag influencers or relevant users with many followers
• Use hashtags

Don’t just use Twitter to build a Twitter following

Use your Twitter following to cross-promote your relationships on other platforms (and vice versa), and you’ll create massive leverage.

Email is still one of the most personal and powerful ways to communicate with your customers and fans, so move folks from Twitter to your own site, where you can capture their email addresses and strengthen those relationships. You’ll find that all of your networks will reinforce themselves, grow your following, and drive success for your business.

About the Author

Walter Chen is the founder and CEO of iDoneThis, the easiest way to share and celebrate what you get done at work, every day. He blogs about management, entrepreneurship, and happiness on the iDoneThis Blog.

The post How to Use Twitter to Massively Boost Signups For Your Email List appeared first on Edgar.

When it comes to growing an audience and driving consistent traffic to your website, there’s nothing quite as useful as a big ol’ email list.

How useful is it? Next month, we’ll be sending our 350th edition of our weekly newsletter – and since we launched this blog in January, those newsletters have been responsible for driving more than a third of its traffic.

(So yeah, email is a lot more than just a way for your weird uncle to send you his political conspiracy theories.)

No matter how big your email list grows, though, and no matter what tips and tricks you use to build it, it won’t do you any good unless you know what to actually send people.

So what are the ingredients of an email newsletter that your audience can’t resist opening? What can you send people that’ll make them click week after week?

Here are a few must-haves:

Updates to your site

Back in the day, you probably had all your favorite blogs saved in your bookmarks folder.

You probably also had a mailbox crammed full of free trial discs from AOL. Point is, the Internet has changed.

Now there are a million ways for content to come to you. You don’t have to bother periodically checking your favorite sites to see if they’ve updated – because they’ll just let you know when they do.

That’s what you have to do for your own fans.

Promoting your latest blog post via email might feel a little redundant, or even like you’re going to annoy people.

“They obviously already know my blog exists! They don’t want me bothering them with an email every time there’s a new post – they’ll find it on their own!”

The thing is, though, they kind of DO want you bothering them, and they probably WON’T just find your latest post on their own. Your business is your life, so you spend a lot of time focused on it – but for most of your fans, it’s just not something they think about that often unless somebody reminds them to.

The idea that people will just magically find your content on their own is one of the biggest myths in marketing.

Read a little about content marketing, and you’ll come across the term “magnetic content” a lot. Magnetic content is content that’s so good, it just pulls people in. An “if you write it, they will come” sort of idea. All you’ve gotta do is write something really great, and boom, your work is done! It’s like magic.

Problem is, content isn’t a magnet.

It’s an electromagnet.

An electromagnet is super strong, but only when you turn it on. Otherwise, it just sits there like a big useless lump.

Your blog content is an electromagnet – and sharing that content is how you switch on the power.

Sharing it on social helps, but those updates are way too easy for the people in your audience to miss. You need email to pick up the slack.

Emails like the ones Product Hunt sends to its subscribers! Want to keep up with their latest? You don’t have to go crawling through their site every single day – they’ll send you the highlights via email.

Help Scout does the same thing with their emails. Their blog has a lot of fans here on Team Edgar, but none of us know to check it until they send the email promoting a new post. (You can always tell when the email goes out, because we’ll all start talking about the latest post simultaneously in Slack.)

Even our own blog traffic typically gets an enormous boost on the day we promote a new post via email. Take a quick look, and you can probably guess which was newsletter day:

That’s electromagnetic content in action!

Don’t be shy about using your newsletter to promote your latest and greatest content. Your readers will thank you for it!

Announcing what’s next

The people on your email list haven’t just demonstrated their interest in what you have to say – they’ve shown you a serious amount of trust.

Someone’s email address is a serious gift, and you should repay it by giving that person the inside scoop.

Don’t believe it? Imagine this.

When you’re at Bath & Body Works scoring a sick deal on Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin gentle foaming hand soap, and the cashier asks you to enter your email address for coupons, do you hesitate? You love autumnal-scented bath products, but your email address is sacred.

When you give someone your email address, you expect a little something in return.

Giving up your email address isn’t always an easy choice – so if someone has given you theirs, the least you can do is make it worth their while.

(And you don’t have to do it by offering lucrative deals on hand soaps, either.)

Clue your subscribers in on what’s coming up. You already know that they’re interested – if they weren’t, they sure wouldn’t have subscribed!

Our weekly newsletter often gives subscribers advance notice about upcoming events and deals, including those offered by us and those being offered by other people. Sometimes we share stuff in our newsletter that we literally don’t share anywhere else!

For another example, travel blogger extraordinaire (and Team Edgar’s very own) Amanda Williams uses her monthly newsletter to tell her blog’s readers about her upcoming adventures:

What you choose to announce in your newsletter depends on what you do – and why people are your fans!

And once again, Product Hunt uses their newsletter to make sure subscribers always know about upcoming events:

When someone gives you their email address, reward them with a little insider info – they’re interested in what you have to say!

Curated content

We’ve written about OPC before. It’s hugely beneficial to your social media marketing.

It’s also a serious value-add for your newsletter.

The short version? The people in your audience don’t have time to read dozens of articles and blog posts every week all about one subject. You’re the expert – curate the best of the best and serve it up in an email.

That’s what Hiten Shah does in one of our faves, SaaS Weekly. He puts together a list of links to insightful content – content that he didn’t write – and shares it with his subscribers. He even breaks it down into categories, so you can easily pick out the articles most relevant to your interests.

It doesn’t matter that you didn’t write all the content you’re linking to – point your audience toward reading material that will interest them, and they’ll keep opening your newsletter to see what you’ve got for them time after time.

Unique content

You’re noticing a trend by now – your newsletter should provide people with stuff they’re not going to find somewhere else.

Not on your blog. Not on your social media.

Just in that one place.

One of the ways you can do that is by writing something special for the newsletter, and for the newsletter alone.

It doesn’t have to be huge or complicated, either! Hiten Shah adds a Tip of the Week to each of his newsletters – a one-or-two-paragraph exercise you can do. We actually do the same thing in our own newsletter:

It doesn’t take much time, but it can add a lot of value to your newsletter. We’ve even noticed that in our case, at least, a lot of our readers take the advice we offer – so keep an eye out for next week’s tip, “Send five dozen cookies to Edgar Headquarters.”

Ways to get more – and less

Whether your newsletter’s readers want a whole lot more of you or a whole lot less, you should make it as easy as possible for them to get it.

(And don’t take it too hard if they want less. Happens to everyone.)

For those who have an insatiable appetite for more you, make sure you have all your relevant social links right where they’re easy to see. For those who need just a teensy bit more space, on the other hand, make sure they can unsubscribe with the click of a mouse.

Let’s look at Product Hunt one last time for a perfect example of each:

Social? Check. Unsubscribe? Check. And our personal favorite: they allow you to fine-tune just how often you actually get their emails, so you can control how often their updates show up in your inbox.

Not giving your readers an easy unsubscribe option is a surefire way to get yourself flagged as spam. When that happens a lot, your delivery rates can drop. People who want to stop seeing you in their inbox will make it happen one way or the other, so you’re better off just allowing them to unsubscribe on your own terms.

And the most important thing…

The biggest thing to remember when you’re fine-tuning your newsletter?

There’s no one perfect way of doing it.

Sure, there are lots of things like these that you should seriously consider including – but that doesn’t mean there’s a perfect template out there that everyone should use!

Experiment with what you offer your readers on a regular basis. Try new things, and see which ones resonate with them – and which ones don’t. The more you can tailor your emails to your audience, the better they’ll respond!

The post Debunk the Myth of Magnetic Content by Writing a Better Newsletter appeared first on Edgar.

Just how long does a blog post last before it’s forgotten about forever?

Turns out, not that long.

A recent study from Izea and the Halverson Group shows that while a blog post’s popularity spikes right after it’s published, it isn’t long before that post is buried and all but totally ignored.

After studying 500 posts published between 2010 and 2012, they found that a blog post gets 72% of its total impressions within 30 days of publication. From then on, it gets barely any traffic at all.

Source: http://www.clearslide.com/v/nzs728

See that long, skinny tail along the bottom? It shows that it doesn’t take long before a blog post’s daily impressions are a teensy fraction of what it got when it was brand new.

That’s bleak.

Here’s a closer look at that first month or two:

Source: http://www.clearslide.com/v/nzs728

What they call the “Shout” phase – the initial burst of popularity – only lasts about three days. After that, it’s all downhill for that blog post you worked so hard on.

Blog posts don’t die because they’re bad. They die because they’re forgotten.

So how do you stop your blog posts from meeting a fate like this? How do you make those impressions spike again and again, instead of dwindling off into nothingness?

Social media

It’s okay to admit it: sharing the same old content on social over and over can feel boring and pointless. You have so much new stuff all the time – and that stuff is way more fun to share! It’s so shiny!

Don’t let shiny new content make you forget about your older stuff. Otherwise, nobody will find it.

For example, our Facebook page grows by more than 1,000 fans per month. If we share a blog post today that we shared 30 days ago, it could be seen by 1,000 brand new people or more!

But does sharing it over and over actually work? Let’s take a closer look.

One of our very first posts on this blog was a guide to figuring out when you should post on social media. We posted in on January 2, 2015 – as of right now, just over 260 days ago. According to the average lifespan of a blog post, you’d expect this post’s traffic to peak early and fizzle out over time. It should look like this:

But instead, it looks like this:

Instead of going through an initial “Shout” phase and then growing a long, sad tail, this post peaks again and again over the course of nine months. Most of those peaks aren’t as high as when the post was first published, but they’re still a lot better than traffic numbers that do nothing but shrink day after day.

Even though we published this post months ago, it’s evergreen content that we can share on social over and over. And because we share it on social over and over, it keeps getting new visitors all the time.

Social media isn’t everything, though. There’s also this next thing you shouldn’t forget:

Email

You know that a well-constructed email newsletter can drive crazy traffic to your blog.

Who said it can only drive traffic to your newest stuff, though?

Relate new information to older content to give it a boost.

For example, on August 12, Twitter made a change to its DM function. By talking about that and relating it to a post we wrote about their last change to DMs – one we’d published all the way back in May – we pumped new life into a post that was still relevant, but had been buried.

Though the post was originally published in May, its traffic started spiking again in August.

It doesn’t have to just be your newsletter, either.

For example, when someone first signs up for your mailing list, you might make sure they get an email directing them toward your best blog posts. Similarly, we point new users toward blog content that we think will help them get the most use out of Edgar.

Driving new traffic to older posts isn’t something you have to do so actively all the time, either – in fact, it’s something you can make happen pretty passively, by doing things like this next one:

Interlinking

Ever gone down the Wikipedia rabbit hole?

You know the feeling – you start out reading about one thing, then you see a link to another page that sounds interesting, and another, and another, and before you know it, you’ve spent 20 minutes reading about the cultural impact of the Spice Girls. (Dang, how did we get here from an article on the Ottoman Empire?)

It happens. When you’re reading about something interesting, you want to read more about it! (And more, and more.) Your audience wants to read more, too – so make it easy for them.

When you’re writing a blog post, look for opportunities to link back to older posts that are relevant to your topic. Don’t make your reader wonder if you’ve ever written more in-depth about these subjects, and definitely don’t make them go to Google to look up someone else’s blog posts about them! Turn your blog into a giant Chutes and Ladders board that will help them go from one post to the next.

How can you make this easier? Keep track of what topics you’re covering and where those posts live. Blogging platforms like WordPress make it easy, because you can categorize posts as you publish them.

If you’re not comfortable with that, though, just maintain a list or a spreadsheet somewhere. That way, when you’re writing a post about a business that gained 20,000 Twitter followers in six months, you can refer to your list of other Twitter-related blog posts and find places to link to them in your new one. (See what we did there?)

But when it comes to driving traffic to your older blog posts, though, it isn’t all up to you – you can actually make it a lot easier for your readers to help keep those things alive, too.

Shareability

This is another example of how you can make it easier for people to do things they already want to do.

People want to share content online – all you have to do is make it simple.

Set up your blog with the tools that make social sharing easy – you’ll see on the side of your screen right now and at the bottom of this post, we have buttons that make it as easy as clicking the mouse:

These aren’t real buttons. They’re pictures of buttons. That might be confusing.

The simpler you make sharing, the better off you’ll be – whether you’re experimenting with plugins, generating Click-to-Tweets, or just giving people an easy way to share via email. (It all sounds so simple, but you’d be amazed how often people skip this step!)

Don’t let a good blog post shrivel and die

There’s no reason a good, evergreen blog post should peak just once and then disappear. By promoting your posts consistently and keeping it up long after they’re published, you’ll help them live longer, attract more traffic, and keep on kickin’!

The post Why Blog Post Traffic Drops So Fast – and How to Make Yours Last appeared first on Edgar.

Growing your business to the point where you need to hire someone new is a great problem to have – but it can still feel like a problem.

After all, hiring isn’t just a financial investment. It can also feel like you’re putting that part of your business at risk – not to mention making yourself responsible for someone else’s financial well being! It’s like adopting a baby, then letting that baby gamble with company stock at an Atlantic City slot machine.

Or, you know, something like that.

Point is, hiring can be scary. But after nearly doubling our team in just our first year, we’ve learned a few things about how to make hiring LESS scary – and how to hire better people right off the bat.

Want to make building your business feel a lot less risky? Here’s what we’ve learned.

Make your listing stand out

Way too many job listings look like they were written in a Mad Libs book.

This is ridiculously boring.

If your job listing sounds just like the million other job listings out there, then you’re not going to stand out – and if you don’t stand out, you won’t attract the right people.

You want to attract people who are enthusiastic about your business and the job you’re offering, not someone looking for whatever they can get. Strong job listings attract strong candidates, and if you want to improve yours, you need to stop focusing on all the wrong things.

Certain skills and expertise are important to mention up front, but they aren’t what your job is, and they aren’t what your ideal candidate is, either.

What we’ve learned? Focus less on the adjectives and the bullet points, and more on painting a picture of the day-to-day demands of the job.

It may feel like you’re going in reverse order, but worry about the adjectives and the bullet points later on in the hiring process (keep reading – we’ll explain).

Use your listing to create a more holistic overview of what someone might expect coming into this job, and be specific. If you’re hiring someone to manage your Facebook ads, what kind of budget should they expect to work with? If you’re hiring a developer, what kind of workflow can they expect? If you need an assistant for your photography studio, should they expect to primarily work weddings, or shoot pet glamour shots?

Help Scout, for example, used one of its job listings to give candidates a preview of who specifically they would be working with. This is the kind of specificity that helps someone imagine themselves in that role, and what their day-to-day might be like.

Along those same lines, remember that you’re not just selling a job – you’re selling yourself.

What makes your business unique and exciting? Why would someone want not just to do this job, but to do it for you?

Don’t just think of the traditional selling points either, like pay and perks. Think of the non-tangible things that just make your business special! For example, we make sure that all of our job listings show off our sense of humor, because we want to attract candidates who have one, too.

Even the things that might feel to you like negatives could be huge selling points for someone else. Feel self-conscious that your company is small? You’d be surprised how many people actually prefer the level of responsibility that gives them. Wish you could offer someone more than just a few hours per week? For some people, that’s all they’re looking for!

Focus on what makes your business and the job unique – even if you aren’t sure that those things are positive. They might not be to some people, but those aren’t the people you want to hire anyway.

But who do you want to hire? Good question, and it’s the one you’re going to answer next.

Know what you want – and what you DON’T want

Ever go to the grocery store without a list? You end up leaving with a cart full of stuff you didn’t really need, while forgetting half the things you actually went there to buy.

Hiring the wrong person is a much more costly mistake than leaving Costco with a 5 lb. bag of Tootsie Rolls, so before you go shopping for a new hire, you’d better know exactly what you’re looking for.

Establish clear criteria for who you want to hire before you ever even write your job listing.

What qualities does your ideal candidate have, both professionally and personality-wise? What would it be like working with that person every day? What are your deal-breakers?

For example, our team is 100% remote, and that means we know anyone we hire has to be a stellar communicator – especially in writing, because that’s how most of our communication takes place. We set up our applications so that everyone has to answer at least a few questions in writing right away, which gives us a more accurate preview of what it would be like working with them than just a resume and a cover letter.

The more you know about your ideal candidate, the easier it is to identify them when they come along. Otherwise, you’re just comparing people to each other without considering how they compare to your actual needs.

Speaking of wants and needs, though, the next step is one of the most important, but it’s something a LOT of businesses skip:

Set realistic expectations

Everybody loves the idea of hiring someone for cheap. Here’s the thing, though:

There will always be someone who will do it for less money. That doesn’t mean you should hire them.

Like Sherry Smith Gray writes in this excellent post on hiring writers, the reason most web content is so terrible is that people don’t want to pay for better quality stuff. That’s true of any number of other jobs, too, from graphic design to development to project management – if you want someone to do the job well, you’re probably going to have to pay for it.

Does that mean that a person who charges more is always better? Of course not! But a person who’s amazing at what they do probably knows that they’re worth more than a bottom-of-the-barrel price.

Every person you hire represents a percentage of your company. If you’re going from a three-person team to a four-person team, that new hire represents 25% of your business – are you really comfortable with the idea of 25% of your business being lackluster?

Naturally, there’s one huge problem here. Even if you’ve done the market research, you know what quality hires expect to earn, and you’re willing to invest in your company by paying a solid wage, you might feel limited by what you can actually afford to offer, right?

That’s natural – but it’s not something you have to live with. Heck, we’ve been there! We’re successful and all, sure, but we’re not Google, or Facebook, or any one of those tech mega-companies that can offer every new hire a six-figure salary, a stock portfolio, and a pony. It’s very, very easy to give yourself an inferiority complex because you think you can’t compete with bigger, better-funded businesses.

But it all goes back to what we said earlier about focusing on what makes you and your business unique. Money matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters.

Remember when you started your own business because you thought the freedom it would give you was more valuable than making way more money to be a cog in a giant machine? A lot of people feel that way, and are much more interested in making a big difference for a small business than they are in making a crazy salary at a job they don’t love. Just because your business can’t compete for new hires on price alone doesn’t mean you can’t compete!

So let’s say you wrote a really enticing job listing, you know what you’re looking for in a candidate, and you’ve attracted someone who fits your needs AND your budget.

What do you do with them to make sure they’re really the one for you?

Simulate your work environment

Sometimes a really cool pair of shoes just doesn’t fit you right – but the only way to find out is to try ‘em on.

Odds are, the person you’re hiring has to be good at more than just acing job interviews, and that means you need to find out what it would be like actually working with them.

Usually, this takes the form of someone completing a test assignment, like editing a sample blog post or working on a development project. When we reach this stage, we do as much as we can so that the person working on it does so the same way they would as an actual hire. But in these cases and others, it isn’t just the quality of the work you should pay attention to – it’s your overall compatibility.

This is your opportunity to answer questions like:

• How much direction do they need from you, and how much are they able to figure out on their own?
• Is their style of communication compatible with yours?
• How do they respond to and apply feedback?
• Do your personalities click?

This is where you focus on the adjectives that you left out of your job listing. Anyone can say that they have the qualities you’re looking for, but it isn’t until this point that you can really put them to the test and see if this is someone you want to actually hire. (Think of it as a “show, don’t tell” approach.)

Simulating your work environment is also a test of attitude. Skills like using a certain software program are things you can teach – and good hires are interested in learning anyway. But attitude isn’t something that can be taught, and if you hire somebody with the wrong one – even just the wrong one for you – it’s not going to be a good working relationship for either of you.

The trick? Remember that when it comes to attitude compatibility, “finding the right fit” isn’t the same as “finding someone just like you.” The people who contribute to your business should represent a range of perspectives, feel strongly about their convictions, know how to communicate and express them clearly, and have enough humility to keep the discussions constructive. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on everything – it matters if they complement you. Putting them in a situation that simulates the actual job is the best way to find out if they do.

Know when you’ve found “the one”

While steps like these can make the hiring process less scary, in the end, your instincts are as valuable as anything.

If you don’t feel like a potential hire is someone you could trust with your business from day one, or if you feel like you could do the job better than they can, they may not be the best overall fit for you. And while that could mean you’re in for a longer search, it’ll also mean you end up making a choice that’s better for the long-term – and that’s always worth the extra time and effort.

The post Dread the Hiring Process? Here’s How We Fixed Ours appeared first on Edgar.

The stats don’t lie – if you want to share better tweets, you need to think visually.

Images score your tweets more clicks, favorites, and retweets, so it’s no surprise that 55% of all tweets sent by brands include them.

Source: Simply Measured | http://get.simplymeasured.com/2015-06-state-of-social.html

But just like you get writer’s block when you’re trying to outline your next blog post, you might get creatively blocked when you’re trying to think of an image to attach to a tweet.

Everybody gets a little stuck sometimes. Not sure what kind of visual would go best with your next tweet? One of these classics is sure to do the trick.

Quotes

Twitter is literally made for sharing soundbite-sized thoughts, making it just about the perfect venue for quotes. They’re super-shareable, which can help you reach tons of new fans in a short period of time, and since they so rarely become outdated, you can put together a list in one sitting and then share them in a trickle over time.

Putting your quote of choice on an image makes it more noticeable (and, statistically, more shareable), it gives you the freedom of not adhering to the 140-character rule, and it allows you to add your own commentary. The image doesn’t even have to be particularly bold – all you really need is an attractive typeface, and you’re done.

All there is to it!

Of course, you can always add a snazzy background if you want, too:

The headline is one of the most important parts of any blog post – treat it that way! pic.twitter.com/4cxfK8PsZM

— Edgar (@MeetEdgar) September 11, 2015

Just make sure that your quote is easily legible, and you’re good to go! (Looking for images that make for great quote backgrounds? We’ll have a list of resources at the end of this post.)

Blog Post Pics

Images are perfect for drawing attention to the links you tweet – which is pretty important when you’re using Twitter to drive traffic to your blog.   How are big names on Twitter doing it? Usually, in one of two ways.   First, treat the image like a header to your post – and that means including the title. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger does it for his podcasts:

WRITING CHALLENGE: Write a ‘How I Do It’ Blog Post (here’s how to do it) http://t.co/XMvEEzWOs5pic.twitter.com/jxBVEaFrH9 — Darren Rowse (@problogger) September 25, 2015

That image doesn’t exist at the destination link – it’s something that was created specifically for promoting it on social.

Social Media Examiner, on the other hand, creates images for each of its blog posts that are designed to be used both as a header for the post itself and as a shareable image on social:

NEW: How to Use #Snapchat for #Business http://t.co/WuOv6rWv23 by @EvaGantz pic.twitter.com/9naGCvSwuT — SocialMedia Examiner (@SMExaminer) September 25, 2015

And for one more example, Career Contessa takes the headers to its blog posts and modifies them, creating a consistent aesthetic for its blog promo tweets:

Don’t want the tweets promoting your blog posts to be so, well, promote-y? There’s another way to do things, too.

Just like we mention in our guide to writing better blog posts, your posts should already have images throughout – they’re useful visual aids, they break up huge walls of text, and they give you material for your social sharing.

This tweet from Help Scout is the perfect example:

“Writing is improved by being broken down and rebuilt.” http://t.co/rCNdSmGLv6 pic.twitter.com/bwjx4ODilB — Help Scout (@helpscout) September 23, 2015

That image itself isn’t explicitly promotional – it was created to go in the body of the blog post – and that means it promotes the post indirectly. We do the same thing with our own tweets that promote blog posts:

What Aristotle and ice cream can teach you about building a social fanbase: http://t.co/vyjkfb9Ym2pic.twitter.com/8nmkB399aV — Edgar (@MeetEdgar) August 27, 2015

(Plus, that one promotes a blog post AND features a quote! Score!)

Charts, stats, and graphs are perfect for this, too. Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media frequently uses these types of visual aids in his blog posts, and they’re perfect for catching someone’s attention on Twitter, too:

There are 97,386 divas on Twitter. http://t.co/Je4Xj7ptZV ← Some other things that worry me about #socialmedia pic.twitter.com/yVqzRJNVRR — Andy Crestodina (@crestodina) September 24, 2015

Keep your social media in mind while you work on your blog posts – that way, you’ll have images that perfectly complement the links you’re tweeting all lined up and ready to go!

Behind the Scenes

Twitter’s handy for casual, conversational, off-the-cuff kinds of updates – and that includes giving your followers a peek behind the scenes of what you’re doing!

Sometimes a behind-the-scenes pic is a way of sharing special insights. Case in point? Most live events like conferences and seminars actually encourage people to share using a branded hashtag, so anyone interested can easily find more content from other attendees. (That could include you!)

“Design for ideal” by @oligardner #ctaconf pic.twitter.com/YfaTHrjkmr — Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) September 14, 2015

You don’t have to go to special events to tweet behind-the-scenes pics, though.

Sometimes it might just be a look at your workspace, like this one from author Maureen Johnson:

Or a glimpse at what keeps you going, like this one from author Bethany Jett:

(Clearly, authors have got this Twitter thing down.)

Lifestyle and travel bloggers are also total role models when it comes to tweets like these. On the one hand, yes – their type of behind-the-scenes image is especially relevant to their brand, and may not be as good a fit for just any business.

On the other hand, though, a tweet like this one from Little Miss Katy shows how you can take something simple, sprinkle in some style and personality, and turn it into an eye-catching peek at what goes on in your biz:

Muesli, music + pink juice COME AT ME WEDNESDAY. #breakfast #thinkpink http://t.co/EvR7utRnaQ pic.twitter.com/VRLrmMPRCo — Little Miss Katy (@MissKatyEnglish) September 23, 2015

Even if your everyday lifestyle isn’t your business quite the way it is for bloggers like these, they’re still a great source of inspiration for this type of tweet!

Promotions

Promotions are one of those things that you can easily tweet without an image – but given how effective images are, why would you?

Even if you could make the same point using text alone, an image tweet is more noticeable and likely to get better engagement – and whipping one up is easy no matter the occasion.

Melyssa Griffin of The Nectar Collective, for example, uses them to draw attention to her upcoming Twitter chats:

Join us in 2 weeks for the next #NectarChat! We’ll be dissecting your brand’s strategy + design for better results. pic.twitter.com/371gG8J9xd — Melyssa Griffin (@NectarCollect) September 24, 2015

Cat Crawford uses them to announce webinars:

Want to learn how to set up your first Twitter ad in 60 minutes? http://t.co/RyRR6qpuhhpic.twitter.com/Fb69cbQsyn — Cat Crawford (@CatCrawf) September 17, 2015

And Amy Schmittauer of Savvy Sexy Social uses them to bring extra attention to upcoming appearances:

Hey #Chicago! I’m speaking at Content Jam! http://t.co/k4Fhi66stk#content#marketingpic.twitter.com/edvgJdFRUe — Savvy Sexy Social (@SavvySexySocial) September 27, 2015

Whatever you’re promoting, an image is the perfect way to share relevant details that might go unnoticed in a text-only tweet. Like in the case of the Nectar Collective tweet above, you might not even be sharing a link – just using the image to spruce up an announcement, though, can make it go a lot further.

Our Favorite Resources

Ready to start whipping up some images of your own? Try these free resources:

Image editing

Canva 

PicMonkey

Free images

Pixabay

Unsplash

Barn Images

Pexels

Magdeleine

Picjumbo

The post Are You Using These Mega Popular Types of Images on Twitter? You Should Be appeared first on Edgar.

Murphy’s Law is the idea that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

It’s named after the Murphy siblings, whose trip to Jurassic Park went very, VERY wrong.

(Totally true. Don’t look that up.)

Even if you never visit a dinosaur-themed nature preserve, though, Murphy’s Law can really ruin your day – because no matter how careful you are, things are gonna go wrong for your business.

Payments get processed incorrectly. Deliveries get lost. Social networks crash.

The worst part? It’s not always your fault – but you have to deal with it anyway.  Because if it affects you, it’s gonna affect your customers.

And they’re probably not gonna like that.

The question is, what do you do when something goes wrong and you’re left holding the bag? How do you handle it when people are looking to you for answers, and you just don’t have ‘em?

(No, the answer is not “curl up under your desk and breathe into a paper sack.”)

When things start going wrong, take a deep breath, and keep the following in mind:

It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t your fault

When something goes wrong, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is – an unhappy customer is an unhappy customer, whether it’s because the shipment you sent them got lost in the mail or your web hosting crashed right at the worst possible time.

But in a way, that’s kind of a good thing.

Because when something goes wrong and it wasn’t your fault, there are two ways you can approach that situation:

First, you can point the finger at the true culprit. In business school, they call this “The Shaggy Principle.”

At least, that’s what they should call it.

You can say, “Hey, man, I did my part just fine – point that dissatisfaction at the other guy, because I’ve got nothing to do with this!”

It might be objectively true! And it might feel awesome to just wash your hands of the whole mess, because someone else dropped the ball.

Problem is, that’s putting your own feelings above your customer’s. Which is why you should approach the situation in the other way:

You can be as helpful as you are honest.

Does that mean you’re cleaning up after someone else’s mess? Yeah, a little bit – but what’s most important is that the mess gets cleaned up at all. You don’t have to actually take accountability for what went wrong if it isn’t your fault, but you can still keep the situation from turning into a net loss.

No matter the problem or who may be at fault, when your customer service goes beyond the usual call of duty, people notice:

@Starbucks I’ve got to give a big shout out to Starbucks for going above and beyond to fix a problem. Thank you Starbucks for great service!

— Mandy (@EternalAngel21) September 30, 2015

That might mean rushing a replacement order on something that got lost or damaged in the mail. It might mean providing a courtesy freebie, or a partial refund. And sometimes, it’s as simple as remembering this next thing:

Being proactive rules

Sometimes, a bad situation is 100% out of your hands.

Maybe you’re supposed to have a video conference with a client, but the video conferencing program is down for maintenance. Maybe you can’t open your bakery today, because the guy who delivers your flour was abducted by aliens.

Stuff like that happens.

And when it does, it’s very tempting to hide – to ignore the customer questions you can’t answer, and the problems you can’t actually fix, and instead just bury your head in the sand like an ostrich.

Oh, great. Now we’ve offended the ostrich community.

The worst thing you can possibly say is nothing.

As much as you want to just unplug and remove yourself from a situation that you have literally zero control over, doing so would be another case of putting your own feelings before your customer’s. They need someone to take ownership of the problem, and even if you can’t fix the problem, you can still meet that need.

So what do you say? What do you do?

It’s okay to admit when something is out of your hands – but you can still empathize with what someone else is going through, and update them to the best of your ability.

We want to inform y’all of bad weather in KY that’s affecting the main hub for UPS. There are possible weather delays on shipments!

— Zappos.com (@Zappos_Service) June 26, 2015

Is it frustrating watching your customers feel disappointed because of something you can’t control? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share what you know, even if what you know doesn’t solve the core problem. You being incommunicado would just be another problem on top of that one.

And when you do keep those lines of communication open, there’s one thing worth keeping in mind above all others:

Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt

When people aren’t happy with you and your business, it can feel a little…well, less than awesome.

(It’s okay to admit that. We all have feelings.)

But no matter how someone expresses their unhappiness, it deserves to be taken seriously – no matter how uncomfortable that can be.

What’s the opposite of something being sugar-coated?

People might express themselves in ways that make you feel uncomfortable, but it’s not up to you to decide whether that disqualifies the point they’re making. The issue isn’t how they’re saying something – it’s what they’re saying.

Don’t take it personally when someone expresses their frustration – even if they’re expressing it in a very personal way. There are virtually unlimited reasons they could be doing so, including plenty that have nothing to do with you at all!

Maybe they’re upset because your credit card company accidentally charged them twice. But maybe they’re upset because they were late for work, they spilled coffee on their favorite shirt, their dog is in the hospital, and then your credit card company accidentally charged them twice. (You’d be in rough shape too, don’t you think?)

So don’t take it personally when the going gets rough. Easy as it is to feel a little affronted at times like those, look past the way something is being said and focus on what the message actually means. Being defensive doesn’t solve problems, but being proactive does.

Recommended reading

These may be a few highlights, but there’s a lot to learn about providing stellar customer service. You could write entire books on the subject – and in fact, a lot of people have.

Here are some of our favorites:

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service

Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion, And Purpose

If It Wasn’t For The Customers I’d Really Like This Job

Check these out, and if you have faves of your own, let us know in the comments!

The post How to Do Damage Control When Murphy’s Law Kicks Your Business Square in the Teeth appeared first on Edgar.

Seasonal promotions are great and all, but at the same time, gearing up for one can feel like opening your box of Christmas lights and finding miles and miles of knotted wires.

You sigh. You shake your head. You say, “I barely survived this last time. Please, don’t make me do it again.”

Ugh.

Here’s the thing, though – seasonal promotions don’t HAVE to be tedious. In fact, when you do ‘em right, they can be one of the easiest ways to market your business.

We’ve done enough of them to know.

Long before Edgar ever existed – back in the ancient year of 2009 – our founder Laura launched an annual business course called Creating Fame. Enrollment opened up once a year, and since then, thousands of people have completed it. And while it was pretty awesome, we won’t talk it up too too much…

…because you can’t take it anymore.

2015 was the last year the course was offered – it had an amazing run, but Edgar had become the bigger priority. On October 19, we closed enrollment for good.

Au revoir, Creating Fame.

But despite all the work that went into actually RUNNING the program, marketing it actually had a tendency to be super easy.

Like, suspiciously easy, in that “I’ve GOT to be forgetting something, because I’m not frantically yanking out clumps of my own hair” way.

(You know the feeling.)

So, how do you do it?

How do you organize a seasonal promotion so that it gets easier and easier every time you offer it?

It’s actually pretty simple.

Here are some of the things you should focus on:

Social media

Saving and reusing your social media status updates gives you a huge advantage when it comes to managing a seasonal promotion.

When you’re promoting a recurring event, you can fill some serious hours by forcing yourself to start from scratch with brand new updates every single time it rolls around. But why would you?

For one thing, your followers can change a lot over the course of a year. A lot of the ones you have now? You didn’t have ‘em last time you ran this promotion!

And for another, even if some of your followers saw some of your promotional updates last time around – and sorry, but they probably didn’t – that was a long time ago. How well do you really remember the status updates you read a year ago?

Here’s how we do it.

Because we schedule our social updates with Edgar, they get saved in categories that we can add to and remove from our posting schedule. In 2014, our social strategy looked like this:

1. Write and save all of our updates in a category called “Creating Fame Blosts” (short for “blog posts”)
2. Add those categories to our social schedule during the promo period (see picture below)
3. Remove those categories from the social schedule at the end of the promo period

We told Edgar to post our Creating Fame updates during the promo period, then took them off the schedule after.

This not only made it simple to make sure our promo updates were spread out enough during that period – it also set us up for success a year later.

Edgar saves updates even after they’ve been posted, so when our Creating Fame enrollment period started again in 2015, all of those updates we’d written and used a year earlier were ready and waiting for us. Instead of starting from scratch and writing an entire new batch of promo updates, we had a strong foundation of existing ones to build on.

But we didn’t just add those updates to our schedule again and call it a day. You absolutely could, and that would be fine – but you can do even better.

Because your promo updates can lead somewhere just as valuable as your sales page – and in some cases, even MORE valuable. Where is that, exactly?

Your blog

It might sound kind of ridiculous to say that your blog posts can be more valuable than your sales page. Nobody buys anything on your blog!

But that doesn’t matter. It’s still massively important to your promotions – maybe more important than you realize – and we’ll explain why in a second.

In 2014, Laura wrote an epic series of blog posts about her entrepreneurial journey. At eight parts long, it was a total doozy, but it was also massively successful as a place to drive traffic from social media.

A sample from the Creating Fame blog

(Because no matter how amazing your sales page is, it probably isn’t as fun to read as a well-written blog post. After all, people can tell that you’re trying to sell them something.)

These blog posts gave us something to point our social media followers toward – so we decided to do it again.

Between the 2014 and 2015 promo periods, we took those eight posts down from the blog. Then, for our 2015 enrollment, we published them again, one by one, just the way we did before.

And it worked. Like crazy.

Just like before, those blog posts were the perfect place for us to send social traffic – and not just because they’re more fun to read than a sales page.

It’s because of this:

You can create one of these with a simple WordPress plugin.

Your blog gives you a place to turn a casual, curious fan into a subscriber – and if you consider just how valuable email marketing really is, then that’s huge.

When you don’t collect an email address, your marketing flow probably looks like this:

It’s like you’re giving yourself just one shot to make your sale! Heck, even bowlers get two chances to knock down all the pins. Are you really so confident that you’ll only need ONE visit to convert people into customers?

When you DO collect an email address, your marketing flow can look more like THIS:

See that step with the stars? Those stars are there because that step and the ones after it can happen again and again.

You don’t just point someone toward your website once and hope for the best – you get to reach out to them directly, with multiple opportunities to catch them at the right moment, send them to your site, and close your sale. Whether you’re sending someone to the latest post on your blog or directly to your sales page, email is consistently one of the most reliable ways to drive traffic.

In fact, let’s talk more about that.

Marketing emails

There are two types of emails you can send: those promoting your blog posts, and those promoting your sales page.

A sales email from the 2015 Creating Fame promotion period

That image is an example of the latter – it was sent to people who had signed up on our website to learn more about Creating Fame.

Because this was the final time we’d be offering the program, we DID write some new emails for the occasion – but just like with the social updates, we weren’t starting entirely from scratch.

We had not only the emails we’d sent in previous years to work with, but also the statistics for those emails. This gave us a good idea of which subject lines and messages would be most successful before we ever sent them.

And who actually GETS these emails?

When you run an annual promotion like this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only thinking about it once a year. If you think about your recurring promotions all year round, though, you can set yourself up for bigger wins.

Outside of our enrollment periods, we still used the Creating Fame website to collect email addresses for people who were interested in learning more, or in being notified when it became available. Just leaving that signup form on the site allowed us to grow our email list over the 11 and a half months between enrollment periods.

Between that and new subscribers to our company newsletter, we grew our list by tens of thousands of people between enrollment periods – people who hadn’t read our marketing emails in previous years. (Again, you can feel less guilty about using the same messaging more than once.)

If passively building an email list sounds easy…well, that’s because it is. But that’s why content marketing – especially newsletters – matters so much! It creates pathways that can be very, VERY valuable later on, and even if you only use it for actual sales a few times a year, it’s more than worth the time it takes.

But let’s be real – it never hurts to put a little muscle behind your content.

(Wait, did we say “muscle?” We meant “money.”)

Paid ads

Just like with your marketing emails, you can both learn from and reuse your paid advertisements.

Keeping in mind that your Facebook audience changes over time – and the different audiences to which your ads may be targeted – you can still take a look at how past ads have performed. (You may be surprised to see that headlines, photos, and captions you thought were sure things turned out to be duds – and vice versa!)

There’s also the matter of knowing the difference between boosting posts and using the Ads Manager, too – but that’s its own story.

While the learning curve can be intimidating, there’s a reason that 92% of social marketers use Facebook for advertising – it works! So while social media marketing itself is technically free – you don’t have to pay just to use Facebook – a little investment can take you a LOT further.

Once you launch a paid campaign, your turnaround times for learning from and changing your strategy can be pretty short. (As in, days.) And your spending doesn’t have to be as crazy as you might imagine – it might be as simple as spending $10 on an ad, seeing how it goes, and deciding whether to increase your investment or try another approach. The longer you’re at it, the easier it is to learn from your successes (and your not-quite-successes), so commit to a little experimenting, and you’ll find that using ads in your promotion strategy isn’t nearly as scary or as costly as it might sound!

How you spend your time

There’s no way around it – no matter how often you have to manage a “big push” type of promotion, it’s gonna take some work. And no matter how much you can learn from or reuse older content, you can’t get out of creating new stuff altogether.

The more you take advantage of the work you’ve done in the past, though, the more time you can spend on the new stuff – and the better you can make it! So learn from the past, and save your work as you go. It’ll make your life that much easier the next time that big promotion period rolls around!

The post Dread Your Seasonal Promotions? You’re Probably Doing Them Wrong appeared first on Edgar.

There was a time when the greatest thing you could do with a webcam was this:

Case in point? Making broadcasts and webinars part of your marketing strategy.

Now, if you’ve never done something like this of your own, it’s easy to write it off as one of those extra fancy things that only extra fancy marketing types do – like sending out nifty swag, or sponsoring a space jump.

(Because who doesn’t have the resources for that, right?)

But broadcasting your mug and your wisdom all over the Interwebs isn’t necessarily as niche as you think – in fact, more than 60% of marketers use webinars and webcasts part of their overall strategy. If you don’t, you’re officially in the minority.

Knowing that this sort of thing is a good idea doesn’t tell you how to actually DO it, though. So what exactly do you need to know if you’re going to put something like this together? What are the actual steps to hosting a webinar or broadcast of your own?

Let’s start at the start!

Choosing your topic

It’s easy to forget how good you are at what you do – but boy, you’re good!

(Okay, no more ancient memes. This is starting to look like an email forwarded from a weird uncle.)

Seriously, though, you’re darn good at what you do – it just doesn’t feel like it because, well, it’s what you do!

While the things you know about your industry may seem rudimentary to you, and while the things you do may feel routine, they’re actually really interesting to other people. It’s easy to take your own expertise for granted!

Don’t write off an idea for a webinar just because you think it isn’t impressive enough – odds are, it could be jampacked with insights your audience would love.

In fact, your audience can tell you exactly what you should be talking about, if you know how to listen.

We get ideas for our own webinars based on what people in our audience ask about the most – things like how to find the best times to post on social, or what types of content you should be sharing on Facebook.

Our users ask us about these things in emails, in blog comments, and via social media, so we get a sense of the business challenges they face on a regular basis.

Even if your fans never ask you questions about your industry explicitly, you can still get an easy idea of what interests them the most – a quick look at your Google Analytics, for example, can show you which of your blog posts are the most popular. (That’s how we decided to do a webinar on finding the best times to post on social – our most popular blog post addresses that very subject.)

(Hint: Don’t choose a topic that’s too big for a single lesson! Most people prefer webinars that are 30-45 minutes long, and on average, a viewer tunes in for less than an hour.)

When you’re choosing a topic, though, don’t just think about what information you want to share – think about how you want to share it.

Finding the right program

The good news is, you have a lot of options for hosting a webinar.

The bad news is, you have a lot of options for hosting a webinar!

Don’t let the whole tyranny of choice thing stop you before you get started, though – the different platforms you can use to broadcast yourself on the web all have unique things to offer. Ultimately, the right program for you depends on what type of webcast you want to host.

Take WebinarJam Studio, for example – a program we’ve been using for some time ourselves. While it comes at the cost of an annual subscription, it also has serious horsepower. WebinarJam makes it especially easy to do things like:

• Set up a registration landing page
• Track stats for signups and attendees
• Broadcast a screenshare (perfect for slideshow presentations)
• Record and share webinar replays

These are all things that matter to us specifically because of our goals and our presentation style – but that doesn’t mean they have to matter to you.

An example of the type of statistics provided by WebinarJam.

For example, if you’re looking for something a little more casual, a program like Blab might be just the thing.

Blab allows you and another person to create a webcast of a video chat, then gives you a link you can share to invite other people to watch and participate. Your viewers can request to join the webcast, or can participate in a chatroom that runs alongside it – you also still have the option to record everything so that you can share a replay with others later.

While Blab isn’t as robust as a program like WebinarJam, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – its off-the-cuff style may be a better fit for natural born improvisers, and its informality can make the connection with your audience more intimate.

These are just two examples, but they demonstrate just how different webcasting programs can be – and that no matter what sort of webcasting you think you’ll be most comfortable with, there’s a program out there for you. Whether you want something in-depth like WebinarJam or GoToWebinar, or something super casual like Blab or Periscope, you can easily find a program that suits your strengths.

Once you know what you’re going to talk about and how you’re going to talk about it, it’s time to get yourself an audience! (Because, you know, that’s kind of important.)

Promoting yourself

Even if your webinar/hangout/webcast/whatever doesn’t require attendees to register beforehand, you should still give them plenty of notice ahead of time.

(After all – they’ve got lives to plan.)

Email is ranked as the top method for promoting a webinar, with stats saying it can be useful to start promoting as early as three weeks before you broadcast.

This is one of those moments when you’ll be glad you invested the time in boosting signups for your email list, and in establishing a newsletter that people will get excited about reading. Without a captive email audience, you’re cut off from one of the most valuable ways to promote a live event!

But that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you can do.

Social media is a darn powerful tool for promoting your webcasts, particularly because even more so than email, it makes it easy for your followers to spread the word. While programs like Blab and Periscope are especially focused on the social aspect of a webcast, even those like WebinarJam allow you to include a sidebar chatroom for your viewers to use while they watch.

The result? Tuning in to a webinar or webcast is increasingly social and interactive. Gone are the days of sitting quietly and being yammered at – webcasts are participatory events, and the people in your audience will want others to participate with them!

Promote yourself in a way that makes it easy for those people to get others to join them. Take a cue from one of our fave webcasters, Ian Cleary, who uses Twitter to grow an audience before he goes on air (take note of the retweets):

(You can get more social promotion tips for webinars from Ian and other pros in this post from Socially Sorted.)

Before you ever get that far, though, you have one big mystery to figure out.

Knowing what comes after

Long before you ever even announce your webcast, you have two big questions to answer.

First, what happens to your audience after it’s over?

Once you switch off your webcam and enjoy the most cathartic exhale of your life, what becomes of the people who tuned in?

Do they get…

• Added to an email list?
• A special offer or promotion?
• A replay link (either via email or social)?
• Solicited for feedback?
• Invitations to future webinars?
• A pony?

This may be easier for you to determine after you answer the next question:

What do you hope to accomplish with this thing?

Maybe your webcast is promoting something specific, like a new course or a product launch:

Maybe it’s a way for you to build your email list, or to gather demographic information about your audience.

Even if all you want to do is reinforce your expertise and authority, that’s a HUGE deal.

78% of businesses say that determining the ROI of social media is difficult, and this is a prime example of why. If your webcasts aren’t directly promoting something specific, you might not be able to figure out a clear, direct, concrete number that explains just how “worth it” they were.

But just like sending a free newsletter or publishing blog posts, hosting live events can do a lot to build trust between you and your audience, and to help establish an ongoing relationship. The ROI for this type of marketing may be indirect, but that doesn’t make it any less worth the effort. Even if nothing “happens” to your audience after your webcast, you’ll still have done something that made a difference – you just might not realize it right away.

Recommended reading (and viewing, of course)

Convinced you should be taking this webcasting thing a little more seriously? Good – because there’s a lot to learn, and a lot of great resources for learning it!

Here are a few of our faves for getting started:

Conquer your fear of public speaking with these foolproof techniques – We love Ramit Sethi because he tells it like it is (and offers darn good advice). His public speaking tips are perfect for introverts and first-timers.

Savvy Sexy Social’s livestreaming playlist – Amy Schmittauer is one of the best webcasters in the biz. This vlog playlist serves as a great introduction to livestreaming via tools like Periscope.

21 Periscope Tips for Winning Broadcasts – Donna Moritz of Socially Sorted shows up in this post yet again, and with good reason! Her tips for making the most of your webcasts will make you look and feel like an old pro on your very first go-around.

Got a favorite webcaster of your own? Someone whose webinars you never, ever miss? Let us know in the comments below (so we can watch ‘em)!

The post Why You Should Webcast, and How to Get Started appeared first on Edgar.

Running a business can feel like a never-ending exercise in looking ahead. You’re always planning for the next promotion, the next ad campaign, the next product.

It’s like how they say that sharks have to always keep swimming or else they’ll die, right? If you don’t keep moving, you’re done for!

Here’s the thing, though:

Sharks don’t ACTUALLY have to keep swimming nonstop.

(Not all of them, anyway.)

Plenty of sharks are able to just stop, sink on down to the ocean floor, and chill out for a while. Doesn’t make ‘em any less, you know, shark-y.

That’s the kind of shark you want to be. Not the kind that’s always zipping along full speed ahead, sniffing out its next meal, but the kind that can sit still sometimes and just breathe.

It’s only when you take the time to stop and assess what’s going on that you can make sure you’re planning ahead effectively. Every now and then, you just have to take stock of what you’re doing!

Once a week, we set aside time to ask ourselves three big questions. (Literally. We write down our answers and everything.) It gives us the insight we need for planning whatever comes next – and asking these questions of yourself can do the same for you.

So, what ARE the three questions you can ask yourself weekly to make sure you’re planning effectively?

#1 – What went well?

This is a good one to ask first – and not just because it does wonders for your ego.

(Even though it does.)

If you ever worry about not being good enough at what you do, or about everything you’ve built falling out from under you – pay attention.

It’s perfectly normal to feel like you’re just not enough, whether that’s good enough, smart enough, or successful enough. It’s normal to look at the other people in your industry and want to compare yourself to them – especially when it seems like they’re lightyears ahead of where you are.

It’s actually so normal to worry about this stuff that it’s weirder if you DON’T. Even the ridiculously successful have a way of convincing themselves that they’ve only gotten as far as they have by sheer dumb luck, and that they’re one goof away from blowing everything! It’s actually a sign that you set high goals for yourself – which you totally should.

This is a big reason why you should make it a point to recognize your successes.

What did you do in the past week that went well? What did you really just get right?

(It doesn’t have to be huge, either, so don’t get all self-critical and say “nothing.”)

Maybe you worked out a really good system for assigning tasks to a VA, or for giving feedback to the people you work with. Maybe you came up with an awesome idea for your next project, or you dealt with a customer service crisis like a pro. Heck, maybe you just installed a browser plugin that’s making your life easier.

Whatever you did, make a point to acknowledge it, so that you can recognize the cause-and-effect relationship between what you do and your own success. It’s the things you’ve done that got you where you are – and don’t you forget it!

But like we said, identifying your successes is about a lot more than your ego.

The better you are about recognizing the things you do right, the easier it is to do those things again and again. It’s hard to repeat your successes if you don’t identify what those successes are!

Using sports metaphors in business is super lame, we know, but this is one of the reasons athletes watch film of their previous games. If you’re going to do what works and ditch what doesn’t, you need to know what those things are.

And speaking of that second thing…

#2 – What could have gone better?

This question isn’t as fun to answer as that first one, but it’s still important.

When you make a mistake, your brain recognizes it almost immediately – it’s an instinctive way of teaching you not to do that thing again.

Unfortunately, our brains are also really good at rationalization and denial. We ignore things that make us feel uncomfortable, like the memories of mistakes and failures, and that makes us more likely to repeat them.

The more you confront the things that could’ve gone better, the easier it gets – and the more helpful it becomes.

Normalize the idea that things are going to go wrong. Make it less a question of if there’s something you’d like to improve, and more a question of what you’d like to improve.

Whether a certain task took longer than you’d hoped, a project didn’t turn out quite the way you wanted, or a deal you’d been hoping to land fell through, you need to recognize what could have gone better so you can identify how to improve in the future.

Which actually leads into the most important thing you need to ask yourself on a weekly basis:

#3 – How can you improve?

Chin up – there’s no point in dwelling too long on the things that haven’t exactly gone your way.

You’re much better off shifting your focus toward what you could have done differently – in fact, that may make you realize that the things you thought were big deals didn’t have to be in the first place!

For example, we frequently realize that the thing we should have done differently was ask for help sooner. Somebody got stuck trying to figure out a piece of code or a plugin all alone, instead of asking someone else to step in. Somebody hit a creative wall on a blog post or an email, and instead of getting someone else’s feedback, they stared at the blinking cursor and fretted.

When you point out what you could have done differently, it makes you realize that you don’t have to be afraid of that bad thing getting in your way again. Because if it does, you know what to do!

Going back to that example, we often find that we do our best work when we collaborate – and recognizing what happens when we don’t is encouraging, in its own way. It shows us that there is, in fact, a right way and a wrong way to handle a less-than-ideal situation, and when we run into that situation again in the future, we’ll know what to do.

Make the things that haven’t gone well into teachable moments, so that you don’t have to worry about running into them again – it’s like taking that whole “hindsight is 20/20” thing and actually making it work to your advantage!

(Hint: This is especially useful for learning how to deal with situations in which something went wrong and it wasn’t your fault.)

Sometimes the mistakes we make aren’t very dramatic or conspicuous – in the moment, they might not even feel very much like things we did wrong! But if you set aside time on a regular basis to look back at what you could have done even better – and how you could have done it – you might find more room for improvement than you realized was even there.

Getting started

Remember – you don’t ALWAYS have to keep pushing forward in your business! It’s okay to stop and reflect sometimes, instead of charging full speed ahead.

Set aside regular time for looking back at the your recent wins, your recent setbacks, and the things you could’ve done differently, and you’ll be able to move forward more prepared and more confident than ever.

The post These Three Questions Drive Every Decision We Make appeared first on Edgar.

Working with a remote team – whether it’s just one other person or more than a dozen – has some serious perks.

Wearing your jim-jams ‘til noon, for example.

But despite advantages like that one, there are any number of problems that any remote business has to overcome, too – and we’re not just talking about developing better eating habits.

Here at Edgar, we’ve been a 100% remote team for years, and that’s meant finding creative solutions to the different problems teams like ours have to deal with. (And as our business has changed, our solutions have had to do the same!)

So whether you’re managing a small team of part-time employees or you’re responsible for a bigger staff, what are some of the challenges all remote teams have to deal with – and what are OUR solutions?

Keeping everyone in the know

In a traditional office setting, getting people to put their heads together and collaborate on a project in real time is pretty easy. Lure everyone into the same room – usually with snacks – and allow them to crowd around a computer or a whiteboard and put their combined expertise to work.

In a remote team, however, that doesn’t really fly. (You’d need a lot of snacks to lure someone across the continent for a meeting.)

The people you work with have to be capable of operating independently of one another – more on that later – and that means they need to be able to access a lot of information on their own.

Our solution? A company wiki.

Our wiki is a constantly evolving information hub where we document everything from team member contact info to Edgar’s design elements. (Insider intel: Edgar’s signature teal is #6DBDC5! So prettyful!)

This isn’t an employee handbook – it’s an employee atlas, that maps out everything anyone might need to know about the company at any given time. It’s always up to date, it’s editable by anyone on the team, and it’s never crammed into the bottom drawer of anyone’s desk next to an old granola bar wrapper.

Plus, a company wiki gives you the benefit of things like adding multimedia to how-to pages, or interlinking related pages – it’s like going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, but in a way that’s actually super useful!

Adding images to your wiki posts can make instructions a lot easier to follow.

Whether we want to equip a new hire with everything they need to know during orientation or we just need a place to post our retrospectives, the wiki is our go-to place for keeping each other up to date – and it’s a perfect solution for any remote team. (We built ours using Atlassian Confluence, in case you were wondering.)

Communicating efficiently over long-distance

You can’t manage your business without communicating.

A lot.

If you and your team were in an office, you could just holler at someone down the hallway or peek over the top of their cubicle when you need them – not an option when you work remotely.

Instead, you need to create a system for staying in touch. And not a “never ending game of phone tag” sort of system, either – like, a real system.

Ours depends on a few ground rules:

1) Everyone works set hours. (Just like in a real office!)

That whole “make your own hours” thing sounds pretty cool, at first.

Until it ends up meaning “your hours are pretty much all the time.” Or just as bad, “my hours are whenever I want, and you’ll never know if I’m available.”

The structure of regular hours is the type of agreement that benefits both parties – your team knows they’ll have the work/life balance that comes with set start/end times, and you know when you can get in touch with the people you need.

Our team members are spread out across North America, so everyone works regular hours relative to their time zone. It means that East Coasters and West Coasters don’t overlap as much as they could, but it also means that everyone gets to have a normal life. (Being normal can feel so good.)

2) Everyone hangs out in Slack.

While we trust each other to work at the hours we’re committed to, when you’re on the clock, you’re logged in to Slack – it’s basically our version of showing up to the office (and leaving at the end of the day).

Our different chatrooms in Slack make it easy to drop into and out of conversations, and to ignore the ones not particularly relevant to what you’re doing.

Need a quick answer to a question? Pop into Slack and ask! And if someone else needs to get a hold of you, they know they can find you there. It’s as convenient (or more so) than actually sharing an office, but also saves you from that “twiddling your thumbs while waiting for an email reply” feeling.

3) We hold meetings when they matter. (And skip ‘em when they don’t.)

Virtual meetings are perfect for things like retrospectives and project kickoffs – they give you a chance to get everyone on the same page, and to encourage teammates to communicate with each other directly instead of always using you as a go-between. (Sound familiar?)

Because really, even when you’re in charge, you don’t need to be in every single meeting. Our developers have regular meetings to talk about what they’re working on, as does our marketing team, and our customer service team. There isn’t a single person on our staff who has to sit in on all three.

While we do host a company-wide meeting once a week just so everyone can touch base, we also compartmentalize where we can, just so people can spend more time actually working on things instead of being forced to sit around the campfire all day long.

(Tip: We also hold informal monthly one-on-one meetings with each member of our team, so everyone has an opportunity to share questions, concerns, or ideas for improvement in private. These often end up being the meetings that influence our company the most, so give the people who work for you the chance to voice their opinions! Even an anonymous survey every now and then can give some much-needed perspective.)

Staying sane

Extreme isolation can take a toll on you. You might start to feel…a little lonely.

In general, it’s best to foster a little workplace camaraderie before people resort to anthropomorphizing and befriending inanimate objects.

It’s a well-documented fact that people who have friendships at work are both happier and more productive, so don’t allow the geographic distance between you and the people on your team get in the way of sharing a bond.

Remember Slack? We keep one room in there dedicated to non-work-related talk, so we can actually, you know, be sociable with each other.

We also get everyone together twice a year for a weeklong retreat – a popular way for remote teams to spend time together on things other than work!

June 2015: Team Edgar reaches peak hipsterdom with Polaroids on the boardwalk.

Even if getting together in the real world isn’t an option, you can still have fun with your coworkers. Every now and then, we’ll set aside a few hours so we can all connect via Rabbit and watch a movie together – not a bad way to make up for the fact that we can’t gather ‘round a watercooler every day!

Whether you’re arranging IRL meetups or finding creative ways to have fun long-distance, building a stronger bond with your remote teammates improves your job satisfaction AND the quality of your work – so make it a priority!

Growing (and growing, and growing)

Scaling a business, adding new members to your team, and relinquishing control are hard enough when you’re up close and personal with other people. When you’re dealing with a remote team, it can seem even scarier!

Building trust is complicated stuff as it is – when you factor in the fear that the people working for you might not actually be giving it their all, it can seem impossible. The words “out of sight, out of mind” strike straight at the heart of many work-from-home entrepreneurs.

If growing your remote team sounds scary, it’s time to rethink your hiring process.

After all, the type of people you need for a remote team can be way different from the type of people you’d need in a more traditional setting.

Remote workers have to deal with unique challenges. They have to be highly self-motivated, excellent at time management, able to cope with distraction, and perhaps most importantly, they have to be amazing communicators.

One of our requirements for anyone we hire is that they excel at written communication – because most of our communication is written! If any member of our team can’t articulate themselves in writing, then working together will be a guaranteed struggle.

Don’t wait until after hiring someone to find out if they’re a reliable telecommuter – put them to the test, and see how you fit. The process will almost certainly take longer than you want, but you’ll be better off for it, and that’s worth the extra time and trouble.

What we’ve learned

There are about a million things you can try in a remote business – or any business, really – to build a happy, productive team.

In the end, we’ve found that however you do it, the best thing you can focus on is making the people you work with feel like they’re a part of something.

It’s easy in a remote environment to feel disconnected from everyone else, and that makes leadership a matter of working a little harder to eliminate that disconnect. It’s something you can start doing before you ever even hire a remote worker – and if you have a team already, it’s never too late to introduce new systems that will set them up for success!

The post How We Tackled the Biggest Problems In Our Remote Team appeared first on Edgar.

There’s a staggering amount of stuff you can do for your business all by your lonesome.

As technology evolves, more and more tools are suddenly at your fingertips! For perspective, this is what a fancy phone looked like 10 years ago:

And nowadays, you can use your phone to do everything from hosting webcasts to shooting and editing photos to share on social media! (It’s also way easier to take quality selfies now.)

But this blog post isn’t about phones.

It isn’t even about all the cool stuff you can do to run your business as a one-person show.

It’s actually about all the stuff you SHOULDN’T do.

Because even though there are all kinds of tools and apps and programs and gizmos that give you the power to do almost literally anything your business needs by yourself, actually DOING it is about as practical as SOMETHING.

Meaning?

Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you should.

Sometimes, you need some good old fashioned expertise on your side – the type of know-how that comes from training and practice in things outside your wheelhouse.

Think of yourself like a movie director.

Your job is to have the vision and the overall strategy for your business, not to actually run around doing every single job just because you can!

(Steven Spielberg probably knows how to use a hammer, but that doesn’t mean he’s building his own sets.)

That’s why you need to fire yourself – from one job at a time.

It’s a matter of letting go of certain tasks, and entrusting them to people who know how to do them well and do them efficiently.

(But what tasks ARE those, exactly?)

When you’re figuring out your #SquadGoals, who are some of the first people you should think about enlisting?

Whether they’re part-time, full-time, or freelance, here are some of the pros you’ll definitely want on your side sooner rather than later:

A Developer

Building a website (or even just a blog) using WordPress is like building furniture.

Sure, you can use the plug-and-play themes and whatnot to put something together on your own with no coding experience. That’s like the Internet version of building a table from IKEA – it’s foolproof, and you don’t need to do much other than put the round peg in the round hole.

But your business didn’t come from IKEA.

It’s unique! It has authority! You didn’t just pick it up in a warehouse along with some meatballs and lingonberries – so why be all boring and cookie cutter?

Don’t settle for a plug-and-play website just because you can build it yourself. Your site should be more like one of those fancy oak tables that an Amish craftsman made in his workshop – a gorgeous, functional investment that you can tell was made by practiced hands, and smells kind of like fresh varnish.

A WordPress developer will save you serious time and headaches.

Because even once the site is built and running, you’re going to need stuff. Adding or changing plugins, making tweaks here and there, implementing quick fixes when things change or unexpectedly stop working the way they should – these are things you could technically learn to do yourself, but by going to a professional instead, you can get them done faster and know they’re getting done properly.

(Like changing your car’s oil, or getting a tongue piercing.)

Having a developer on your side – even just a reliable freelancer – is one of the most worthwhile investments you can make in your business, especially early on.

And speaking of people who know how to make something look all nice and professional…

A Designer

Graphic design is another one of those things you can absolutely do yourself – but probably shouldn’t.

“It’s not like I don’t know what looks good,” you might think. And you’re not wrong! You totally DO know what looks good. (We weren’t going to say anything, but your outfit today? On point.)

There’s a big difference between recognizing that something works visually, though, and understanding why. And unless you have the training and experience of a professional graphic designer, using that understanding to create something brand new is darn near impossible.

You might not need a professional designer often – but that doesn’t mean you don’t need one.

Having one on your side at the beginning – or even just during a rebranding period – can have an enormous impact in the long term. Take a look at this old logo we decided against for Edgar:

It’s not the look we ultimately went for, but we fell hard for the designer’s color scheme of choice and kept it as part of Edgar’s branding!

It shows up across our blog posts, our images on social, our Facebook ads, and in other one-off projects for which we hire designers, like this birthday card we sent out when Edgar turned one:

The design elements determined and/or created by a professional live on in our team wiki, so they’re accessible to us and to any designer we hire for future one-off projects – because we know that projects like those are best left to people who do it for a living.

Okay, who else?

A Writer

We know you can write words. Heck, you’re reading ‘em right now!

But keeping up with the trend here, writing is something that anyone can do – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you ought to.

For one thing, writing takes a ton of time. Just consider the sheer volume of writing that goes into any business, for things like:

• Blog posts
• Social media updates
• Email newsletters
• Marketing emails (announcements, offers, thank-yous, etc.)
• Landing pages
• Your homepage
• Dirty limericks

And that’s just scratching the surface! Bottom line is, you can easily fill your hours with nothing but writing – and that wouldn’t leave much time for anything else.

It isn’t only a matter of time, either – effective writing just isn’t as easy as it looks. Specifically because the easier it is to read, the harder it is to write.

Content marketing like blog posts and conversion copywriting for things like sales pages are surprisingly complicated disciplines, so finding somebody to take writing jobs off your plate one by one won’t just save you a ton of time – it can make a significant direct impact on your bottom line.

A Customer Service Superstar

Since we don’t have an office, we don’t get to do fun stuff like pinning inspirational notes on the wall of the break room.

We do, however, have this tweet embedded in our company wiki:

Customers may forget what they bought, they may forget what it cost, but they won’t forget how you made them feel. #custserv

— Alf Dunbar (@AlfYATD) October 20, 2013

Customer service is one of those things that always seems really easy to provide until people actually need it.

When push comes to shove and people need support, though, it’s tricky stuff! And just like with doing all your own writing, it’s an undertaking that can easily become a full-time job if you allow it.

Maybe you’d like someone to check your support inbox a few times a day, or to build a database that your leads and customers can use to find answers to their own questions. An experienced CS pro has the tools to make people happy at the times when they need it most – and whether your business needs one full-time or just part-time, it needs one.

Just like designers and writers have their own styles, CS pros can have drastically different philosophies – but unlike creatives, they don’t typically have online portfolios you can browse through to get a feel for their work.

When we’ve hired for our CS team in the past, then, we’ve given candidates test questions similar to how we give test assignments to people applying for other positions. How would they handle certain situations? How would they phrase their responses to certain questions? Are they formal or informal? (Or, semi-formal, like your best little black dress?)

Finding a CS person who’s a good match is a matter of fit as much as anything else – and once you find one who clicks, you’ll know!

A Project Manager

Don’t skip this section!

We know. You kind of want to scroll down. Who needs a project manager, right? Isn’t that basically just paying someone to do the “running the company” type stuff YOU do? What’s the point?

There are two sides of running a company – and you should only be in charge of one of them.

First, there’s the big picture stuff. Strategizing, creating new things, perfecting what you have, deciding what comes next.

Then, there’s the nuts-and-bolts stuff. Stuff like dealing with logistics, managing assignments, payroll, insurance, and so on.

Which one of those sounds like more fun?

Would you rather spend your days mired in paperwork and chasing people down, or working on actually growing your business?

Handling your company’s logistics (and similarly, its financials) on your own is tempting, especially because not doing it yourself can make you feel a little like your head’s buried in the sand. You’ve been in charge of this stuff from the beginning – why give it up now?

Trouble is, as your business grows, so do its logistical needs. Even just adding new people to your team – you know, like the ones we’ve been talking about this entire time – introduces all kinds of new organizational busywork. It’s not a question of whether or not it’s going to start getting in your way. It’s a matter of when it will get in your way – and whether you’re willing to hand over those responsibilities when the time comes.

That’s kind of the thing, though.

As time goes on, you’ll eventually hand over more and more of the tasks like these that you take care of on a regular basis. You’ll fire yourself over and over – and despite what you were always told, you’ll find that being fired feels amazing!

The less time you spend on those jobs, the more time you can spend on growing your business, and the things that make you feel like you’re moving forward instead of just treading water.

Kind of makes you think about going ahead and firing yourself right now, doesn’t it?

The post Have You Fired This Person Yet? You Should appeared first on Edgar.

There’s SO much amazing, insightful, thoughtfully-crafted free content available right now.

Terrible, right?

As a consumer, it means there’s just too much good stuff to choose from. It’s like you’re at the biggest free buffet in the world – no matter how much you’d like to gobble up everything in sight, there’s only so much you can have before you need to switch to stretchy pants.

Mmmm…free content.

That makes things just as tricky from the business perspective, too – especially when it comes to creating opt-in offers.

Your email list can be a huge traffic driver for both new blog posts and older ones – and an invaluable way to promote new products and sales – but only if you can get people to actually sign up for it! And while you can do things like use Twitter in creative ways to drive signups, growing your list is also a matter of what you’re offering – not just how you’re offering it.

Sure, sometimes offering something like a newsletter is enough. (Who doesn’t want regular updates from one of their online faves?)

However.

If you really want to grease the wheels, go the extra mile, and do whatever other cliche idioms you can think of, you might take a little inspiration from some of the really heavy-hitting opt-ins that are out there.

Some opt-ins promise something so unique, so compelling, and so irresistibly good that you can’t NOT give ‘em your email address. And we’re gonna take a closer look at a few of them right now.

So, who’s really crushing it with their opt-ins – and what can you learn from them? What can you actually offer people up front – including people who have maybe never even heard of you before – that’ll make them want to join your list right then and there?

Video and Webinars

Whether you’re more comfortable with the energy of a live webinar or you prefer perfecting an instructional video over the course of a thousand takes, putting yourself in front of the camera can be a compelling way to drive opt-ins.

We mentioned Ramit Sethi the last time we wrote about webcasting – now let’s take a closer look at how exactly he makes it work for him.

Here’s a glance at one of his opt-in landing pages:

Ramit’s opt-in doesn’t just subscribe you to the list he uses for sharing his expertise – it hooks you up with an exclusive video guide, too. That immediate payoff can be the tipping point for someone not sure if they want to commit to yet another email list, because c’mon, aren’t you at least a little bit curious what he has to say?

Part of that curiosity comes from his level of authority – even if you’d never heard of him before, that fancy, professional-looking screenshot says that this is a guy you may as well take seriously. (But hey, everyone starts somewhere.)

Even still, looks aren’t everything. Ramit also sells the heck out of this video’s actual content, too:

These make you curious because they’re concrete – they ask very specific questions to which the video promises answers.

Compare it to the bolded section from that first image, which promotes his email list. “Tactics” and “insights” are great, but they’re also things that literally anyone can promise you – and you can’t know ahead of time if his are any better than the next guy’s.

The bullet points selling the video promise things nobody else can – success stories, cautionary tales, and specific lessons that this person learned firsthand, and wants to pass on to you.

Make your leads a promise that only you can make. Offer something unique and concrete – ask a question, and tease the answer.

This is something we do with our own webinars, which promise information like:

See? Specificity is your friend!

Video is just one of those things that fancy online marketer-types like to call “premium content,”  and it belongs in that category because you can actually pitch it as its own free product – even though the thing you really want is for someone to fill out your opt-in form.

Think of it this way: that form subscribes someone to your list, and in cases like these, it also gives them an instant reward. From the user’s perspective, which is the primary incentive, and which is the bonus?

It’s kind of like McDonald’s Happy Meals. McDonald’s is selling food, but they know it’s really the toy that your kids want. (So much so that in 2010 – when McDonald’s spent more than $115 million advertising Happy Meals – a San Francisco law barred them from incentivizing unhealthy kids meals by including free toys.)

Fortunately, the emails you’re sending are undoubtedly healthier than anything you’ll find in a Happy Meal, but the point remains – the extra incentive you offer with your opt-in may technically be a bonus, but to your leads, that may be the primary reason they sign up at all.

With that in mind, what other things are people offering as an incentive to filling out an opt-in?

Ebooks and Mini-Courses

Ebooks and mini-courses are a perfect example of the types of premium content that can drive opt-ins. Anyone can make them, because unlike video, you don’t need to deal with any potentially unfamiliar technology – if you can type, you can whip one up.

Here’s an example of a mini-course:

No, no – mini course! Like this:

That’s a popover you’ll see when you venture over to Copy Hackers – one of our absolute favorite resources for studying copywriting. (We’ve mentioned them before in this post.)

You can (and should) read up on the philosophy of that two-button opt-in on their blog, but for right now, we’re focusing not on how they’re making the offer, but on what they’re offering.

For one thing, they’re not blowing smoke when they say that free book is a $21.99 value – you can buy it right here, if you really want to.

For another, a book isn’t the only thing they’re offering. Opt out from that popover, and you’ll still see this right there on the blog:

It’s there on the left – a simple opt-in form and a couple of oh-so-specific bullet points teasing a boatload of free instructional material. (A seven-part course, for crying out loud!)

Clicking on that CTA in the bottom-left corner calls up another popover that really drives home that point about what’s “bonus” and what isn’t:

Opting in is just the price you pay for the thing you really want: the book. (Wouldn’t you rather give them your email address than shell out 22 bucks?)

On a related note, this is another reason that you should invest time in blogging on a regular basis.

The Copy Hackers blog is an intensely valuable resource for anyone who wants to step up their writing game – it offers in-depth case studies and instructional guides that range from beginner-level material to the crazily advanced.

Putting that expertise on open display kind of makes you wonder:

“If this is what they give away to just anyone, just imagine how valuable the BOOK must be!”

Think back to Ramit. His blog reaches half a million readers every month – that’s a lot of potential leads who know, like, and trust the guy. If you’re trying to do all this “premium content and opt-ins” stuff without blogging first, it’s like you’re trying to build a house by starting on the second floor.

Invest in your blog, show off your expertise, and people will want more of it.

Here’s another example:

This is an ebook from the team over at Intercom (and yes, they also have an exceptional blog).

Just like Copy Hackers, Intercom offers this book for free in exchange for an opt-in – but this offer also comes with an ingenious twist:

Don’t want to surrender your email? Your money’s going to a good cause. Otherwise, you can go ahead and just opt in – and when you do, you’re giving Intercom another lead.

Here’s the important thing: clicking the “share with a friend” option does NOT subscribe that person to Intercom’s list. (That’s up to your friend, as it should be.) But it does put Intercom and this book on their radar, just as if you’d sent them a link to a blog post you thought they’d like.

What matters most is that Intercom is offering you something that provides serious utility for the small price of an email address, and for spreading the word on their behalf. Not a bad deal, from the lead’s perspective – and that makes it a seriously compelling opt-in offer. (Just look at that testimonial quote in the image above. The book is free, but they’re committed to promoting it as its own product.)

Speaking of promoting your freebie as its own product, check out what this last uber-famous Internet entrepreneur gives away to connect with new leads:

Something Personal

Neil Patel is pretty much online startup royalty. Blogging superstar, architect of four multi-million startups, and the guy just plain knows his stuff.

Which is why the opt-ins for some of his businesses are so interesting.

Here, take a look at two of them. First, Quick Sprout:

Next, Crazy Egg:

Easy to see what they have in common, right?

Each of these sites offers you a custom report right off the bat – and that personalized touch can be pretty curiosity-inducing! (Just ask anyone who offers free tarot card readings.)

Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as those landing pages make it seem – enter your URL, and you’ll be greeted with this:

You’re not just giving them your email address – you’re giving them access to the data in your Google Analytics! That’s some pretty intimate stuff, and it undoubtedly allows them to keep ridiculously detailed records on their leads.

Not that it isn’t worth it. (After all, think of how much personal data you willingly surrender to sites like Facebook. It’s just the cost of doing business.)

What really matters here is that Crazy Egg and Quick Sprout offer something personalized, and that’s hard to resist. It’s like how we talked about making a promise that only you can make – where else can you get a free heatmap for your website? (Granted, you have to sign up for a free trial with Crazy Egg to actually access it, but once you make it that far in the process, your mind is probably made up.)

When you’re offering something personalized like a free consultation or analysis, just remember that there will come a time when it HAS to be scalable.

Starting out, it may not be too difficult to give your time away for free if it means gaining leads. Once you start picking up momentum, though, it becomes all too easy for freebies to take up way more time than they’re worth.

The solution in these examples is to automate the process. Neil Patel isn’t personally creating heatmaps for everyone who opts in – those people are just getting free access to a program. Plenty of programs and apps offer free trials for the price of an email address, and these are no different.

Don’t have software to offer? You don’t need it. A free tool doesn’t have to be personalized by you – it can be personalized by the person using it. Spreadsheets, planning guides, custom calendars, and other templates you design can provide real utility to the people who need them – and you only have to create things like that once.

Whether you’re thinking of creating resources like those or any of the other types of premium freebies we’ve been looking at, the thing to remember is this:

It’s worth the effort

Creating the sorts of premium content we’ve been looking at is a question of short-term effort, long-term gain – and that means it’s easily worth it.

It may feel at first like too serious a time investment for something that might not pay off. After all, it’s not unlikely that a lot of your leads won’t become customers.

But considering how valuable your email list can actually be, investing time and energy into enticing people to sign up is more than worthwhile.

Will you see the payoff right away? Probably not! But you can certainly see a slow and steady return on your investment – and sometimes, that’s the best kind anyway.

The post The Biggest Trend in Online Marketing: Just Give It Away for Free appeared first on Edgar.

(Pssst – before this post starts, quick announcement! If you want to score six months of Edgar for free, I’ve got a Cyber Monday special running through 12/4! Click right here to check it out! Ok now back to your regular scheduled programming! – Laura Roeder)

Sometimes, the hardest part of breaking a bad habit isn’t actually the part where you break it at all – it might be in just recognizing that it’s a bad habit in the first place!

Professional habits are relatively easy to pick up, because they sort of sneakily become part of your regular routine. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to add one or two new things here and there, right?

Over time, though, your To-Do List gets bigger and bigger, and the tasks that are on it become more complex. And you might not realize it while it’s happening, but eventually, the amount of stuff on your plate can get out of hand.

And that means some things have got to go.

Not just in the “I’ll get someone else to do this,” sense, either. More like the “We’re not going to do this particular thing at all anymore” sense.

But how do you figure out what’s a bad habit, and what isn’t?

This is a challenge you already face all the time, and often without consciously thinking about it! In your everyday life, it’s pretty easy to tell whether a part of your routine is really worth the effort. (Setting the coffee maker before bed? Definitely. Shaving elaborate geometric patterns into your cat’s fur? Your mileage may vary.)

Don’t even think about it.

When it comes to your business, though, this is a little trickier.

It’s easy to think that doing more is always better. You’re checking more stats, writing more emails, making more calls, going to more meetings, whatever – it makes you feel proactive, like you’re doing something.

But all those somethings you get in the habit of doing can prevent you from taking on much more valuable projects down the line. You end up filling your day with tasks that you keep on doing without ever stopping to think of why.

Here’s an example.

We were tracking WAY too much data for this very blog.

Tracking data for your website – and specifically, your blog – is extremely important.

But you can still get a little carried away.

See, our own habit of tracking data went a little like this:

1. Think of something we can track
2. Add it to the list of data we regularly check
3. Repeat (and repeat, and repeat, until that list is completely out of control)

At its worst, our blog data spreadsheet was a whopping 44 rows long.

It kept track of EVERYTHING. Which posts were most and least viewed. Most and least shared. High bounce rate, low bounce rate. Percentage of new versus returning users. Sessions. Pageviews. Whatever.

(And we tracked all of this on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, too.)

We spent so much time checking all the things that we didn’t stop to figure out what exactly we ever gained from it – until we did.

Turns out, not much.

So we quit the habit – we stopped tracking about 75% of that data, going from 44 rows to a trim 11.

We dumped a lot of the things we’d been checking, and actually swapped in some new ones, too – things we decided would ultimately be a lot more valuable for us.

This is how we did it – and how you can, too.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of asking yourself the right questions about your habit.

Questions like:

1. What am I learning from this?

Some of the habits you’ve adopted may have seemed like good ideas at the time.

That doesn’t mean they’re still good ideas now, though – no matter how useful they once were.

For example, we used to hold a daily call for everyone on the team. This made a lot of sense in early 2014, when we were a team of seven, and every department had one person in it. By the time we doubled the size of our company, though, the call was taking too much time – and everyone spent most of that time listening to news that wasn’t particularly relevant to them.

So we axed it in favor of smaller, department-specific check-ins – and nobody’s missed it since.

Take a hard look at your habits, and ask yourself what you learn from them. Are they giving you information that you need, and is useful to you? Or just information that never really goes anywhere?

Don’t waste time keeping track of information that doesn’t add value to your job.

And speaking of adding value, you should also ask yourself this:

2. What does this enable me to do?

Want to know if a habit is actually useful? Look at what it enables you to do – if anything.

The routines you spend time on should provide utility. (It’s a great test for whether or not the information something gives you is actually valuable, or if it’s just sort of…there.)

For example, we used to keep track of which blog posts gave us the best results from search engines. It was sort of interesting seeing how they stacked up, but when we thought about it, we realized something: we weren’t actually using the information at ALL.

The traffic our blog gets from search engines generally isn’t as high-volume or as valuable as that which comes from other places – so why pay so much attention to it? It wasn’t really influencing our strategy, so whatever information it provided wasn’t going to much use. So just like the daily call, we nixed it.

Figure out what your habits enable you to do. Are they giving you information that actually influences your business decisions? Are they equipping you with unique tools? Or are they just taking up space, like that hot dog toaster on the counter you keep swearing you’ll use?

Yes, this is a real thing.
Source: Amazon

If the things you spend time on aren’t allowing you to grow, change, or do something differently, they might not be worth the time you give them.

And finally, one of the most valuable questions you can ask about any habit:

3. What does this prevent me from doing?

You can only fit so much into your routine – and everything you do prevents something else, just by virtue of occupying space.

It isn’t always just a matter of time, either! Even if tracking all of that extraneous blog data didn’t take up our time – even if it just magically appeared in that spreadsheet when we snapped our fingers – we still wouldn’t want it.

Why? Because having that data there prevented us from focusing on the information that was really important. The data that we actually learn from and that enables us to do things was like a needle in a haystack – all the rest just made it harder to find.

Be honest with yourself about how you’d rather spend your time. Is there something else you’d like to do – or even to try – that your current habits are preventing you from doing? How much space do your habits take up, and are they earning that space? You may realize that it’s worth giving your time and your focus to something new – even if you aren’t sure that you’ll stick with it in the long run.

Bad habits don’t always feel bad – but getting rid of them always feels good.

Still not sure if something belongs in your regular routine? Try ditching it on a trial basis! You may find that you don’t miss it at all – and that you’re able to spend your time and energy on much better things. (And if you realize that you do miss your old habit, you can always pick it right back up again. It won’t hold a grudge.)

The post The Three Quick Questions That Reveal Our Worst Business Habits appeared first on Edgar.

It’s a pretty good idea to have a plan. Whether you want to prepare a 10-course dinner or to blow up the Death Star, you ought to have some idea of what you’re getting into.

Sometimes, though, all that planning you do is actually a bad thing.

Sometimes, planning is the enemy.

Here’s what we’re talking about.

Since long before Edgar existed, we’ve been helping entrepreneurs answer questions about their businesses. And a lot of those questions tend to be the same – questions like:

• What should my profile picture look like?
• How often should I post on social media?
• What should my newsletter be called?
• What are some of the best things to post?

Now, these are questions worth asking. (Some of them might even have answers.)

But they’re also the kinds of questions that can paralyze you, trapping you in the planning stage forever.

When you get sucked into a black hole of planning, you can obsess, agonize, and second-guess yourself over and over in the pursuit of perfection – and that’s when planning gets dangerous.

When planning becomes procrastinating

Over-planning doesn’t feel like a bad thing when you’re doing it – in fact, it feels pretty good! You’re creating a believable illusion of productivity, while assuming none of the risk that actually acting on your plans would entail.

If you get so caught up in your plans that you’re constantly putting off action, though, you’re really just procrastinating. Unless you actually launch that blog, self-publish that book, or order those business cards, you may as well be cruising celebrity gossip sites or binging your way through Netflix – your business won’t know the difference either way.

Here’s a famous example of the perils of over-planning.

A ceramics instructor divides his class in two, and gives each half different criteria for their grades.

Half the class will be graded on the quantity of pots they turn in – the more, the better.

The other half will be graded on quality – and they only have to turn in a single pot, but it has to be perfect.

Turns out, the group that creates the best work is the group that’s creating more work. Instead of sitting around trying to plan how to create that one ideal pot, they’re actively practicing, creating, and perfecting, so that their work continually improves. The group that obsesses over creating the ideal right off the bat? It has nothing to show for itself.

Obsessing over what you want to do won’t take you far. (And it might not take you anywhere.) The trick is to just get started – even if what you’re doing isn’t perfect or “ready” right at the beginning.

Nothing you do exists in a vacuum

Another reason it’s easy to get addicted to planning is that it creates an illusion of control – subconsciously, we figure that if we plan enough for the future, it won’t be as scary.

No matter how much you plan for the future, though, you can’t predict it. (And the only way to find out what’s actually going to happen is to stop planning and start doing.)

If you’ve ever played chess, you already know all about this.

Because chess is all about strategic planning – thinking several steps ahead, and making a move based both on what you think will happen afterward and what you can then do in response.

The only reason this works? The clock!

Competitive chess players have to race against the clock – they have only a certain amount of time to make their moves. It puts the pressure on them, so they aren’t allowed to just sit around endlessly fretting over which decision is the best!

No matter how thorough your plan or how good you may be at making educated guesses, you can’t know what’s going to happen. Should you have an idea of what you’re going to do? Of course. But once you have that idea, put the pressure on yourself to actually start – because you won’t find out what other moves you need to make until you do.

That’s why this next thing is so important:

Adaptability > Planning

While there’s nothing wrong with wanting something to be as well-prepared as possible before you release it into the wild – like your sales page, or your juvenile peregrine falcon – it’s even more valuable to make adjustments after.

Which might sound ridiculous at first. Once something is out in the world, it’s done, right? Final draft, signed, sealed, and delivered?

Not really.

Look at it this way: when the first iPhone came out back in 2007, it was pretty revolutionary. That hasn’t stopped Apple from releasing at least one new model per year ever since.

Nothing is ever done – even after you think it should be.

Even if you don’t revisit something until long after it’s out there – even if that something is just your business plan – there’s no expiration date on when you can improve it.

Managing your business is a matter of making improvements as you go, not having everything planned out perfectly from the start. It’s like furnishing a new house – you figure it out piece by piece as you go, rather than placing every last knick-knack before you ever move in.

Think of your business – and every project you take on – as a work in progress instead of something with a concrete end date. (Because really, most things in life are!)

A trick to remember

Plans aren’t a bad thing at all – it’s just easy to accidentally obsess over perfecting those plans, and to never actually act on them.

One of our favorite tricks? Have a goal in mind, but instead of asking yourself what you’re going to do to achieve it, ask what you can try to achieve it.

Just like the chess game, there are plenty of ways you can get from Point A to Point B – and you won’t know what works until you start making moves. Know what you want to try, but be prepared to tweak, reprioritize, or even abandon your strategy as you go – that kind of open-minded adaptability will take you a lot further than looking for the perfect solution while sitting still.

The post Planning vs. Doing appeared first on Edgar.

Keeping your mouth shut can be a pretty good idea.

Sometimes, it’s out there in the real world – like when you’re at dinner with that one uncle who can’t help sharing his many colorful political opinions. (We’ve all got one.)

Other times, it’s here in Internet Land, where blibbity-blabbing about the wrong subject or at the wrong time can have harsh repercussions that you really, really don’t want to have to deal with.

There will be times when you should think about piping down on social media.

Emergency situations and national tragedies might be a few. A major holiday might be another. No matter what’s going on in the world that might make tweeting about your upcoming two-for-one sale seem a bit misguided, it’s important that you have a plan for quieting down, so when the time comes, you know what has to happen.

Here’s what you need to do now, so you can be ready later:

Schedule your outages

Being able to predict the future is pretty amazing. It’s why our team keeps a tarot card reader on permanent retainer, and it’s why marketers overwhelmingly prefer planning their social media out in advance.

Sharing the same old types of links and promos that you usually do on a major national holiday can come off as a little out-of-touch. Do you have to silence your social just because it’s one of those days marked by feasting, family, and the local post office closing? No – but you probably don’t have much to lose by showing some restraint, either.

One thing it pays to know: where does your audience live? (If 99% are outside the United States, for example, then slowing down your self-promotion on Thanksgiving probably isn’t a major concern.) Consider which days might be a little more on the sacred side for them – and consider doing what you can to keep self-promotion out of their feeds on those days.

Make sure you know in advance the extent of your plan, too. For example, you may decide that pausing your posting routine is a sign of respect – what about your ads? You’ll find differing opinions on whether or not it’s appropriate – just know which side you’re on before it’s time to make a choice.

Plan for the unexpected

Hard though it may be to talk about, when tragedy strikes, it often becomes an instant topic of national conversation.

(And it’s usually not a conversation that needs to be interrupted by a link to one of your blog posts. Oftentimes, these are those moments when the best thing you can provide is reverent silence.)

If you decide that the respectful thing to do is to stop posting, and you use a scheduling tool to automatically post at certain times, have a plan in place for shutting it off.

This may mean figuring out factors like:

• How do you stop your posts from going out?
• Who is in charge of making this happen?
• Is this something you can do from a mobile device, or only from a computer?

For example, we built a pause button into Edgar, so that you can turn your posting off and on with a single click. Whether your tool of choice has a feature like this or requires more complex finagling to pause your posting, know in advance what you need to do, how to do it, and who’s going to do it, should the need arise.

Don’t wait until you NEED to know to figure this out. If and when that time comes, you want to be able to act quickly – not get caught fumbling for a solution at the worst possible moment. It might be an unpleasant thing to think about, but it won’t be any less unpleasant when the time comes to actually do it, so you may as well be prepared.

Stick to your plan

When your plan is to be quiet on social media, it’s a plan worth sticking to.

Granted, it all depends on context – if you want to tweet holiday wishes to your followers on an otherwise promo-free day, that’s one thing. If you want to try to make your brand relevant by latching on to less savory news with an impromptu update, you’re probably better off not saying anything at all:

Epicurious had to eat its words after posting these tweets in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. http://www.businessinsider.com/epicurious-boston-bombings-twitter-2013-4

Not everything that happens in the world demands your commentary. This can be an easy thing to forget, especially when you know for a fact that others care about and respect your opinions on other issues! The truth is, though, when disaster strikes, you’re not obligated to weigh in. At all. Stick to your plan of not saying anything until such a time as seems appropriate – there’s nothing insensitive about keeping your thoughts to yourself.

This is an easy thing to prepare for – so don’t put it off!

Getting a game plan in place doesn’t take long, and that means you have no reason not to have one.

Decide in advance when you want your social accounts to take a breather – both the calendar days you can target ahead of time, and the different types of circumstances that will set off your Spidey Sense – and you’ll be all the better equipped to do your part if and when the unpredictable happens.

The post The Time to Keep Quiet On Social appeared first on Edgar.