Social Brilliant, Video Two Transcript:

Share-Worthy Strategic Blogging

Welcome back to Social Brilliant. I'm Sarah with Team Edgar. Now,
we're going to discuss share-worthy strategic blogging, or podcasting or
vlogging, whatever type of content you like to create for your blog.
Remember, we're using that generic term of the blog to encompass all of
those types of content that you create for your website just for the sake
of simplicity. So let's discuss how you can blog in a way that encourages
shares.
If you're going to take the time to create content, you should create
something that will get shared. That's what this video is all about. We've
talked about planning out your editorial calendar, why you should blog
what to blog about and how often to blog. Now, we're going to zoom in
on your individual blog posts looking at what makes a great blog post
that's going to get shared over and over again on social media.
First of all, why are shares so important? Shares are like having a street
team across the globe promoting your business for free. Sharing is how
social media works without you having to become this crazy,
unsustainable marketing machine. If you're here because you want to
spend less time on social media for your business, which I'm sure all of
us do, you need to get people to share your stuff for you because that's
how you market your business without spending a single second of your
own time.
When other people share your posts, they're doing marketing for you for
free. That's why it's so important to create posts that are going to get
shared. If you're going to create the post anyway, why not make this big
free marketing team work for you. You'll never get big on social media if
you're the only one sharing your stuff. This is something that we see
pretty often with people. It's really common.

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When you start blogging, and you get your social media accounts going,
you're putting your links out there, but no one else is linking to your
content. That's when you see really slow [00:02:00] growth in your
accounts. You don't get your numbers up when other people aren't
sharing your stuff. Shares seem so mundane because that's what we see
all the time when we're on social media ourselves, but we want to point
out how huge shares are for social media marketing for your business.
Here are some example of tweets from three different people that are all
pointing to blog posts from Edgar's blog. You might be thinking, no big
deal. This is what social media is. Social media is people sharing
content, and that's exactly right. All three of these people are linking to
Edgar's website where we sell our product, and all of these posts are
promoting our business to some degree. These posts aren't saying we're
having a big sale or anything like that. What these posts are doing, like
we talked about before is increasing that know, like, and trust factor so
that people can move along the path to buy from us.
They’re establishing Edgar and our team as experts. They’re sending
traffic back to our website. And, they're telling people that our website is
a valuable source of information for them. The fact that people are doing
this for free, we haven't asked them to do this, is incredible. It's really
powerful for your business. That's what we want you to achieve as well,
that you regularly see other people sharing your stuff. Let's talk about
how to do that. That's the point of this video so you can learn how to
make that happen for you.
There are three elements to a share-worthy blog post, there's the
headline, there's the content, and there's the social integrations, and we're
going to go in-depth on all three of these topics.
Something that's always really interesting for us to see is that people will
share headlines, even when they haven't read the article or listened to the
podcast or whatever. Again, as part of this process, we want you to pay
attention to your own behavior on social media, too.

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Do you ever find yourself sharing a post because the headline was really
compelling [00:04:00] or the visual was really compelling. Even though
you haven't actually looked at the post? A follower once sent Laura, our
founder, a message on Twitter that said, "You know, I always share your
stuff because it looks really good, but I actually read this one and it
actually really was good." He was regularly sharing Laura's content, but
he admitted that he definitely didn't read them all before sharing. So that
just shows you the power of headlines. A great headline can bring lots of
shares, even if your content is actually just average.
Let's dive more into headlines now. Becoming a master headline writer
is one of the smartest ways to spend your time in your business. Of
course, we're talking about them in the context of blog posts, but they
really apply to everything that you create. Writing a great headline is just
a microcosm of being a great copywriter and being a great copywriter is
being a great communicator, a great marketing person, a great
salesperson. If you can write amazing headlines, or just write better
headlines than you're writing right now, it will make your business more
money.
One of the best ways to get better at headline writing is to write a lot of
them for every piece of blog content that you create. At Edgar, we create
10 headlines for every piece of blog content that we make. Some of
those options, of course, are better than others, and we choose the one
that we like best as the actual title for our blog content, but the point is to
come up with all of these different ways of talking about your content
and grabbing attention for that content so that people want to know
more, so that they want to click on it and share it.
We kind of refer to this process as our headline factory. We would really
suggest that you run through the headline factory for every blog post
because you're going to come up with a great headline, and you're going
to find yourself really stretching and really getting creative with them
and the more headlines you write the [00:06:00] easier it becomes to
write great ones.

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Notice what makes you click when you're on social media for yourself,
and you'll probably notice that curiosity is the killer in the headline
writing. What really makes us click the most are those things where
we're like, "What are they talking about? What are they referring to, I
need to know what they mean." Then you click on it to see. So curiosity
works so, so well.
Look at the sites that get shared over and over again on Facebook and
model their headlines. Look at the celebrity gossip sites and the silly
video sites and the stuff that pops up on your feed over and over again.
Those sites have made an art and science out of writing great headlines,
so pay attention to what they do. Often when we at Edgar are coming up
with our 10 headline variations for a new blog post we’ll actually model
the headlines from those sites.
You might read a headline that says “The six stupidest ways of all time
to tie your shoes.” Well, then you can think, okay, how can I apply that
framework to the article that I just wrote? Can I say something like this
number something adjective to achieve this outcome that I talked about
in the blog post? So you model it the same way as their headline and
look at all the different things that they do, and then you can make that
your headline workshop to play with.
Now, let's talk about the actual content of your blog. How do you create
a really great share-worthy blog post?
You want it to be long enough to sufficiently cover your topic and in-
depth is generally better. There have been studies that have shown that
longer posts tend to get shared more, but it does depend on the context
or the situation. There are posts out there with three sentences that
people are like, this is so brilliant, it had such a big impact on me, and
they've shared them over and over again.
In general though, we do encourage you to pick a topic and just ask
yourself, "Have I covered all of the frequently asked questions?"

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That's where we usually start when we're creating blog [00:08:00]
content. Start with what are all the questions that someone asks about
this topic? And by the way, if you don't know what those questions
might be, you can Google them. Google is your friend in all things. Then
you just answer the questions. That's a really easy framework to make
sure that your post is in-depth enough.
If your post evokes a strong emotion, like awe or outrage, those are
much more likely to get shared. Now, please put this particular advice
into the context of your business and the context of your reputation. At
Edgar, we don't really like to write posts that make people outraged. The
personality that we've built around Edgar is fun and cheeky, outraging
people just doesn't serve our purpose. But maybe you're a nonprofit with
a really touchy subject matter, and that will work for you. It just depends
on your industry. If you can have really strong emotions, those posts are
more likely to get shared.
Obviously, stuff that's useful stuff that's interesting, those things get
shared. Things that help your reader solve a problem that they have or
things that they can use and implement in their lives get shared. Also,
think about how your posts might make the reader look better by sharing
it. This is something that we don't consider a lot, but look again, at your
own behavior when you share something. It's because you have some
sort of affinity or association with what you're sharing. We're doing all of
this in public, it's not like we're just keeping our own notes on the
articles that we like, you're choosing to share this where people will see
it.
We don't really like to admit these kinds of things about ourselves, but
we share things because we want to be the type of person who would
share something like that. We want to be the type of person who is
useful or who's clever or who's interesting, and we think that the posts
that we share, make us look that way.

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We don't tend to sit down and do this consciously. You're not like, "How
can I look really smart today? I've got to [00:10:00] go find an article to
share." There are these little micro-decisions that we make throughout
the day and that we make when we're posting on social media. Think
about that. How would it make someone feel to share this post? How
would it make someone look to their audience to share your post?
Visuals are another really, really important part of making your content
share-worthy. Visuals keep people engaged, and they give your
followers more pieces of your content that they can share for you.
There are all different types of social networks growing all the time.
Pinterest, obviously, for example, is driven entirely by images. If you
don't have an image with your post, you can't share it on Pinterest.
Illustrate your points with visuals as much as possible, and do this no
matter what type of content you're creating.
This applies even if you're creating content for podcasts. You might be
thinking, "Well, podcasts are totally auditory. I don't need to worry about
visuals," but you do need to worry about them. When you share your
podcast on social media, and when you embed it on your blog, you
should use visuals to augment that content and draw more attention to it.
You can make graphics of key quotes—those pull quotes that we talked
about—make graphics of those, make graphics of the headline, find or
create images, you can use stock image libraries that go along with your
content. If you're talking about spaghetti, show a plate of spaghetti, if
you're talking about headlines, put in a screenshot of a sample headline.
You should have at least one visual, and usually more than that, to go
along with every piece of content you create for your blog. Visuals are
very powerful for helping your content get noticed and share it on social
media.
Another piece to consider for your content is pull quotes. Here's a little
example from one of our articles. It says, "Be willing to abandon

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[00:12:00] what doesn't work and move on." That's a quote from our
founder, Laura Roeder, from an article about how she built our business.
Pull quotes should be little nuggets of wisdom or inspiration like that
one that makes sense out of context. They basically need to be
something that people can pass along that makes sense without having to
read the whole article, or watch the entire video, or listen to the podcast.
Pull quotes give people easy nuggets to share on social media, and you
see this all the time with memes and other types of posts where it's just
that quote and then there's a link along with it. You can highlight them
using stylized text in your blog content. You might want to make a
graphic, like I said, with the pull quote on it. You might want to make
one of the little Click to Tweet buttons like we're showing here in this
example. Those are different ways that you can encourage people to
share those quotes.
If you make it really easy to share the little short nuggets of wisdom by
bolding it, making it bigger, making an image, giving them a button to
click, that encourages people to share because it's really quick to grab
that stuff.
The final piece of having really awesome share-worthy posts is social
integrations. Social sharing buttons on your blog are a must. This is
blogging 101. You need those little buttons at the top, or at the bottom,
or the side of every single post on your blog to let people easily click a
button and share it. This is basic, but it's really, really important.
There are so many tools out there that will help you do this
automatically, depending on where your website is hosted, whether it's
WordPress or somewhere else. Just do a quick search for social sharing
plugins on your platform, and it'll help you find and install these. It's a
must; you really need to do this.

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Don't just put the buttons up there, but customize them as much as you
can when you're sharing your [00:14:00] messages so that they link back
to your own accounts on that platform whenever possible.
Here's an example to show you what I mean from Edgar's blog. Now,
you can see on the left side, that's where we have our sharing buttons
where you can click really easily to share this post on any of these social
networks. We also have our cute little Edgar button there so you can add
a post to your Edgar account.
The other thing we want you to notice is that, for example on the Twitter
button, it doesn't just say the headline and the link, it also has, "Via
@MeetEdgar," on here too at the end. We're adding this extra little layer,
so not only is the share going to link back to our blog, but it's also
linking to our social media profile on Twitter, which can help us get
more followers on that network at the same time that it's driving traffic
to our website.
You can do this on some of the networks and not on others, but
whenever you can, you want to link back to your name and your profile
on that network within that shared post.
Emailing for shares. You've probably heard the phrase dialing for
dollars, which is when you're making sales calls, you're dialing for
dollars. Well, instead of dialing for dollars, we're going to email for
shares.
If you mention a person or a company in your blog content, email them,
let them know about it. They're very, very likely to share it for you. This
is actually a whole strategy in its own right that you might want to
employ for growing your blog and growing traffic to your blog with
your social media accounts.
A lot of people like to create list posts or roundup posts for their blogs so
that they have a bunch of people to link to. If you were to create a post
like The Five Most Influential Mitten Companies in Canada and you

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email those mitten companies, they're probably going to link to that post
on their social media accounts. Often, even if they're [00:16:00] big
companies, and especially if it's specific, they'll do this.
Who makes the best snowboarding pants for when it's sort of cold
outside, but not that cold? These guys make the best pants. Well email
that company and let them know, "Hey, I love your snowboard pants. I
just wrote this great review." That's exactly what companies are looking
for to share on their social media accounts. They want that kind of
content, so when they share your post, it can bring great exposure to
your blog.
You might also want to send shoutouts on the networks to people who
might enjoy the article, but you really need to be targeted when you do
this, on Twitter, Facebook. Again, Social Brilliant is really social
network agnostic because the whole idea of Social Brilliant is that you
have these big strategic level ideas that apply on any of the social
networks.
People get too caught up in, "What do I do on this platform?" and,
"What I do on that platform?" They have their differences in how they
execute things, but the strategy fundamentally is the same. This is an
idea that you can do on any platform, really.
If there's someone who you know really likes the type of content that
you've created, send them a message about it. Tell them, "Hey, I know
you are really into mittens. I see you've been blogging about mittens
lately. I wrote this mitten post, and I thought you'd enjoy it."
You do have to be careful with the strategy though. It really needs to be
genuine. You have to really love mittens, and you have to really think
they're going to love your mitten post. If you just blanket messages to
thousands of people who may or may not have any interest, well, that's
called spamming, and they're probably not going to appreciate it. It's not
going to help your business's reputation.

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This is a strategy that we've used from time to time when we genuinely
thought that someone would enjoy a post. They've clicked on it, often
they've shared it with their audience because they did like it. When
you're doing it genuinely, it can work well for you.
We want to touch on outsourcing some of this process. [00:18:00] This
is something really important to start thinking about in your social media
strategy as your business grows.
If you're going to employ social media marketing, you might not be
doing it all on your own. We're going to keep talking about this as we go
through the course, how can you outsource, what can you outsource,
what should you really be doing yourself, and what's easiest to pass off
to someone else. Of the whole blogging realm, here is the stuff that is
really easy and cheap to outsource.
Adding visuals to your posts. Remember we talked about showing
examples? It can be really time-consuming to dig through stock image
libraries or creative commons libraries to find graphics to add to your
articles, but pretty much anyone can read the word spaghetti and know
that it would make sense to put a picture of spaghetti there. They can go
into your blog content and add visuals to make them a lot more engaging
and compelling to share, and they can do this just by looking at what
your content is about.
This can also apply to doing pull quotes. Someone can go through your
content for you, see what would be a great pull quote, and then they can
make a nice little picture or one of those Click to Tweet buttons for you
in your posts.
Loading your posts into your actual blog can definitely be outsourced.
This is another really easy, cheap thing to hire out. There are a lot of
people out there who know how to take a Word document, or how to
take a Google document, or a video, or an audio file and make it into a

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blog post on your website. You don't have to spend your time doing that
yourself if you don't want to.
Finally, filling in pre-populated social messages. This goes back to what
we were talking about where you had the social sharing buttons on the
left-hand side and you want to customize them, you want to put your
Twitter handle at the end or maybe have a custom message for that
share. You can write out those messages or say what your customization
needs to be, and then they can go in and make sure it matches all the
different social networks. [00:20:00] There are a lot of WordPress
experts or different platform experts. Whatever your platform is, you can
find a freelancer to do this type of work for you. That's another really
easy thing to outsource.
Let's wrap up this session on share-worthy strategic blogging. If you're
going to create content, make it count. You're putting your effort into
creating that blog content so created in a way that people are going to
want to share and that's going to make a difference for your business.
If you do nothing else, please, please, this is so important, learn to write
great headlines. This is a profitable skill that will serve you in so many
areas of your business.
Finally encourage sharing with excellent posts that are just begging to be
shared. Remember, quality over quantity.
This wraps up the blogging portion of Social Brilliant. In the next video,
we're going to move on to the next big pillar of your social media
strategy, which is writing amazing share-worthy social media posts. I'll
see you there.
[00:21:04] [END OF AUDIO]

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