When people say "Create great content", it can be frustrating.
Here's an actual "create great content" process:
I would do the following:
Check out http://makersrow.com also mfg.com and be sure to connect with other such entrepreneurs on http://reddit.com/r/cosplay to ask about how they make costumes.
I can introduce you to my friend Colin over at 52businesses.com He founded begreenman.com
My email is my reddit username (at) gmail.com
I would spend some time learning how to embroider. In a startup, audodidacting things that are simple skills to understand how they work is a great way to start. Adora Cheung of Homejoy did just that, and now it's a massive company.
You should definitely find people on twitter who are hat junkies, embroidery junkies, and more using http://buzzsumo.com
Search old subreddit threads to see if you can track down potential hat junkies.
You should avoid thinking too hard. Go talk to people who want hats, and give them hats to look at in image or real form. You can have people on fiverr or other such grabcad.com make mockups of your sketches.
I wish you the best of luck. Email me if you want an intro.
I wouldn't suggest you focusing on different topics (e.g. automotive, healthy lifestyle, home improvement and yoga). Such idea will likely produce content of too different topics. It will quite hard to get the right SEO, keywords, etc, because you don't really have a niche. I'd say to focus on something specific.
You can try some tool SEO tool to find the most shared topic b/w those that you've shared. For example, this one for the start: http://buzzsumo.com/
One way to increase your twitter profile engagement is by engaging with other influencers in your niche yourself.
However, easier said than done right?
What I would recommend is to use this tool: http://buzzsumo.com/
What will you get by using this tool?
You will get a huge list of influencers from your niche and their reply ratio.
Extract the list and start engaging with those influencers one by one.
But engaging is not enough, you need to do it properly.
How do you do it properly?
Did they share an article? Yes. Go trough the article and ask a question.
Retweet their article and leave a compliment, for an example. "Great article, check it out!"
Another way to increase your engagement is by being very active and posting more engaging content.
By engaging content I mean, asking a question, provoking an answer or for an example post, "Like if you think X is better than Y, retweet if you think that Y is better than X".
A study of over 1 billion Facebook posts shows that posts WITHOUT hashtags generate more engagement than those with them.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-improve-facebook-engagement-insights-from-1bn-posts/
I've used BuzzSumo a few times to get article ideas. Just input what you're targeting and it shows you which articles (on that keyword) have been shared the most. Use this to figure out what you should write to complement/support/contradict. There's also a bunch of alternatives
As /u/jpking10 said, the first think you want to do is get a good understanding of your current customers.
Who are they? What industry are they in? What are their pain points (why are they using or interested in your saas)? How can you provide a solution to their problem?
Then, begin to think about how social media (I'm going with social as the example here because OP says only social) could play a role in the above questions:
Are you producing content that resonates with your followers? Are you targeting people that fit within the demographic that was established above? Are you making shareable content?
Again going back to /u/jpking10's comment, you need to make sure you're driving results. Impressions, likes, retweets, comments, etc., look good, but they have to lead to tangible, real results.
Do you have good internal links on your site? Are you collecting email addresses? Are you retargeting people who have visited but not converted?
So, to go back to your original post, and do a quick mockup:
Goals:
How to get there:
In terms of content ideas, have a look at what other businesses similar to yours are doing online. You must have a list of competitors in mind? Possibly 2-3 that you really admire when it comes to their presence online? Have a look at their sites and blogs and see what they're publishing. You can use BuzzSumo (http://buzzsumo.com/) both to check content from your competitors as well as to search around specific topics and keywords to get some ideas.
In terms of frequency, if we're talking about social media posts, you should definitely aim for 3-4 tweets and 1-2 Facebook posts a day. If we're talking about blog posts, then even 1 fresh article a week or biweekly would be good. Finally, try to schedule Instagram posts for late afternoons and evenings as well as weekends. And since you're talking about local products, maybe Pinterest would be a good addition to your social strategy.
You might find these articles helpful:
http://coschedule.com/blog/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/ (although I don't agree with what they say for Instagram)
Alright. I would use http://buzzsumo.com/ to find relevant content. It's useful because it tells you what people are sharing, and also the top influencers sharing that content. Find those guys, see who's following them and find the conversations they're contributing to.
If it's home/child stuff, twitter might not be the best site for generating leads. I find Facebook and Google+ are surprisingly better in that demographic.
If you drop me a PM I'd be happy to give you a full breakdown.
1) BuzzSumo started as a side project late 2012. I got in touch with my co-founder Henley about another project early 2013 and we got talking over email about startups and marketing tools. We we're both keen to start something and he was already playing around with the idea of a adding social data to shared content, then making it searchable. So we teamed up and built a working first version of BuzzSumo. A few months later, around Sep 2013, we launched our MVP on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437712).
2) As you'll see from the initial HN submission, we got a decent bit of feedback and some beta signups (about 50 I recall). It was enough encouragement for us to quickly get back to work and iterate making improvements users requested. Many first users were recruited manually, we asked people on Twitter, over email and through any contacts we had for feedback. We also did several blog posts interviewing industry experts. This is a great way to get a blog started, as the experts who are typically more influential than you will share the content, helping it get off the ground. We've continued to keep the blog going which does drive traffic, but honestly most of our new users come from referrals. So I suppose the lesson is focus on the product and marketing is a lot easier.
We've had a few requests for Moz/Majestic link data. We'd definitely consider it as I know a lot of SEOs would value this.
Stumbled upon http://buzzsumo.com/ and their chrome extension which maybe will be of interest to you since it sort of tries to do something similar though I haven't tested its Twitter integration but its Reddit Engagement count seems hit and miss (it does show a url being on Reddit at multiple subs but sometimes it doesn't).
It is the sort of company that might buy your extension even because your algorithm/system seems much more refined it seems.
Do you have a budget for this? you're just looking for traffic for the KS or for your site and sales? A marketing strategy will need to follow what your goals are and budget allows. social sharing isn't a marketing strategy, fact is it is off more than 50% just last year.
Read this: http://buzzsumo.com/blog/content-trends-2018
Do you have your own site?
I'm happy to help but need more clarity on the objectives and what you have to work with.
hi. not sure about the money-making part - you can literally try and sell anything in articles on any topic, as long as it's relevant. in your trump article, you could be selling trump mugs or t-shirts or something. so in my book, the topic has to be interesting to your audience (have solid search volume etc). a good place to start is buzzsumo: http://buzzsumo.com/ (it's free)
type in a generic keyword that describes your topic/area of expertise. say, if you're about to write something seo-related, you could type in "seo". the tool will show you the posts that contain the word/phrase you entered in their title, sorted by the number of social media shares they received. a great place to find content ideas.
The last section of this blog post has some good info.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-find-influencers-to-amplify-your-content-marketing/
Look around at influencers within your niche and see what made them want to share someone else's product/content/etc.
Have a read of The Lean Start Up and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising if you haven't already. In terms of tools it depends on what you are trying to achieve with these tools, lean marketing covers a pretty wide topic. Here are some tools we have used to get us organic (&Lean) growth. [Slack](www.slack.com) - get linked up with slack discussion groups. Buzzsumo - learn what content is working well with your competition, get you NewCo on facebook and twitter and start getting yourself out there - it's amazing how much you learn just trying stuff out, you'll see what works, what doesn't, what your competitors are doing. Used properly Quora is a good platform too. We don't use it but i hear good things about hubspot. If you are looking for tools to manage product roadmaps like aha.io you mentioned, look at asana. Good luck - Rick
To get a media coverage you gonna need to pitch your product to a journalists, that can write about you and get you out to the public.
Well the main thing here is how you get a journalist to cover you product. You should start by doing some research on the journalists who could potentially be interested in the product you have.
Google some keywords (and i would recommend this tool too http://buzzsumo.com/) that identify your product, and see what are the top posts made and find the one that resembles your product. Then in the post you can find who is the editor, so by going through some articles you should have a list of journalists who have already written an article about similar product, and you can assume that they are interested in that topic and possibly will be willing to write about it again. You should start doing research on all the people in your list, see what kind of products and services they usually cover, and if your product is one of them, they are more likely to write about you.
When you have your final list of journalists you think would like your product and would be willing to write about you, contact them via email, as most of the journalist prefer to be contacted via email. Write a short, and straight to the point email that describes exactly what your product is doing and it's benefits. And if they find your product interesting then possibly they will write and article about it.
Awesome, thanks for the link. The http://followedapp.com/free_tool_search tool is fairly similar to BuzzSumo http://buzzsumo.com/ Ruzzit http://www.ruzzit.com/ etc unless i am missing something? How does it help predict viral content exactly? All I can see is a list of results that have been shared many times?
There is a lot of research that suggests longer content is better for your rankings... it has changed over the past year or so.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/4-ways-content-quality-improves-seo-rankings/
I take it that you mean promoting your content organically, without paying for it to be seen? To begin with, it depends with the type of content and the industry we are talking about, but normally I would start with sharing it on Twitter using the right hashtags (http://hashtagify.me/), I would then look for relevant Google+ communities to join, start conversations and share it on there too making sure it adds value to the community, then there is also LinkedIn Groups that might be relevant and finally niche communities and forums related to your product/service. In addition to that, you could search for twitter users, bloggers and vloggers (check http://buzzsumo.com/ and http://twtrland.com/) with a high social authority/influence that you could reach out to, share your content with them and suggest that they share it with their audience or link to it through an article (of course, provided that this content is relevant to their interests and what they talk about online).
People are going to knock this, but if you do it correctly, it can turn out profitable. You have to be very strategic about it, however. Strategic in the sense you carve out a niche because this industry is very competitive and saturated. Teespring.com offers a t-shirt buying process where you don't have the initial, upfront costs. Instead, you fire up a t-shirt campaign with a set number of orders, and you sell them and the order does not go into production until you reach your number.
This means you can test what sells, and if crap isn't selling, no orders go out. So you could take this concept and research trends in the market. The easiest way to do this is through social media websites that track trends, such as BuzzSumo. You can hop on trends, create shirts related to trends, fire up a t-shirt campaign, hit the social wires marketing your shirt (the pump), and sell the shirts (the dump) before whatever fad/trend dies down. This can become a game of sort, trying to predict what will hit and where you can put your t-shirt idea into streams of consumers who would be interested in the impulse buy.
Now this isn't the best idea known to man (and it's not the easiest to do), but it's an idea that's IS easy to get into and you can save your money to possibly hire some freelance designers to do some of the design work for whatever trend you want to capture for the moment. Perhaps you can find ways to rope your gaming and hanging with friends into t-shirt concepts you can persuade people to buy.
Obviously, don't be stupid about other people's intellectual property. So be careful about right of publicity, i.e. the right to use someone's identity, trademarks, service marks, copyrights, etc.