How to Get Website Traffic With Evergreen Content and Social Media Marketing

Key Takeaways

okay and I think we're live hey everyone can you hear us Brian hello hey there yes I can I can hear you clearly okay guys please type something in the chat we still have like three to four minutes before we start but we want to test if everything is working okay there's there's a group chat they're on YouTube you should be able to see it and I see Brian just posted a message there tell us if you hear us well if the video quality is also like bearable I just checked out the YouTube laughs okay looks like it looks like it's working right mm-hmm okay so uh their their messages don't appear in our chat or something in the internal Google Hangouts yet all right that's interesting yes and everyone's saying Heidi right now if you open up the excellent YouTube stream the live stream you can see all the comments coming through yes okay cool yeah we have hey everyone nice okay so you're checking out the the messages in the YouTube YouTube livestream right not not in the in the window that you are communicating through yes exactly so it's not really I mean our hangouts actually on YouTube okay let me open it or probably I should not open it while I present I will open it while you'll be presenting so so that not to take bandwidth out of my my part okay guys we still have one minute to go maybe tell us where you from like classic move of webinar presenters I can tell you that I'm from Singapore it's 5:00 a.m. here so if I look like someone has beaten me please pardon myself good up like an hour ago but I'm sure I'll be able to make it I think you a great team I would ruin all of that dated by the morning so you're great Brian Peters I'm chased out of Denver Colorado but currently in San Francisco for a few conferences that are going on as we drift in Salesforce or both having their conferences this week so big week in that so Canali yeah awesome but I'm pretty excited that each dress and buffer are teaming up to do something together I think this is this is the second thing that we do together first thing that we wrote a blog post for you guys I think it was received pretty well and now we're doing webinar and who knows what next I like genuinely enjoy what you guys did before i doing or buffer like what's the correct spelling same with a tres actually so like i'm looking forward to doing more cool stuff with you agreed yeah thanks thanks to me is the great partnerships I feel like you're so knowledgeable and SEO we have the social media content stuff sort of figured out so I feel like this webinar should be a good partnership and these hopefully will be able to teach you folks next up yeah I'm hoping so okay so it's 501 am and we can start let me share my screen it would be this okay guys please tell me if you can see these slides I'm now in present mode and Bryan please confirm that people are seeing slides yes you are okay awesome so today a tress and buffer are presenting a webinar on how to build your website traffic with evergreen content and social media so basically if you have a blog or if you're publishing content on your website in some form you're going to learn a few awesome tips from us today so the two presenters are Brian Peters brand Peter's tell a little bit about yourself what you're doing at buffer yeah absolutely yes I work around a digital marketing manager in strategic partnerships director here basically that means I do a little bit of everything social media content marketing I host and producer podcast the science of social media do some advertising so yeah a little bit of everything is best many small businesses no that's okay I wear both hats throughout their awesome same with me I'm kind of marketing at a stress but I do a little bit of everything from hiring to working on our product writing articles and even doing webinars as you can probably tell so this is it for the Shawn short intro I guess let's talk about the good stuff we're actually doing a giveaway so you can win one of these three HDFS accounts like six months long and all you have to do is tweet is composed to it tagging HS taking buffer and pasting the link to the live stream to the YouTube live stream that you're watching right now and you like optionally you can also include some comments you can include some feedback of moisture because you can tweet like during the webinar with some of your insights maybe take screenshots of some slides that you enjoyed and post them to Twitter and you yeah can get kind of quote-unquote extra points for mentioning my Twitter handle and brands Twitter handle so here we want some some engagement we want you guys to help us bring a little bit more people to the webinar and in exchange three lucky people will get free a chef's account for six month I think it is a good deal and actually I have right now I have a tradition to give away something during each time each time I'm talking live because it really boosts engagement and it really brings more people to the webinar so it's a win-win for everybody okay now let's start our webinar from a little bit of credibility just in case you don't know about it chefs or you don't know about both buffer or you haven't heard of any of our companies so here's organic search traffic which means the free traffic that is coming from Google to blog.bufferapp.com which is a blog buffer brian's blog and you can see that till 2017 just in search traffic alone we are not counting like social media traffic direct traffic and all others traffic sources they were doing half a million visits from search per month that's half of visits from Google per month it's a lot and especially considering that it shreds underestimates traffic it tends to underestimate traffic I'm sure they were doing more like in in just a few seconds I will give Brian an opportunity to come in but I see that in in January 2019 and further they almost doubled this traffic and right now they doing almost 700 K from search alone Brian do you want to add anything about your real traffic numbers they know you guys at buffer are like super open about everything about every numbers so I wonder like how far off the HSS to mission is yeah thanks and yeah actually it's not too far off we're closer to about 1.3 at the moment on pace for just over 20 million for the year so very very close but yeah it's it's an honor to be able to say that number out loud yes so guys as you can see Brian is not some random blogger he's a guy who is responsible for one of the biggest blogs in industry so you're going to absolutely learn some awesome tips from him as for myself this is they are getting search traffic to a trellis block as you can tell what we did is we took our block from almost nothing back in 2015 and in the last two years we we were able to kind of generate the critical mass and kickstart our growth as you can see it looks almost like a holistic and again this is search traffic it is it not it doesn't account the social traffic the direct traffic and all other traffic sources so you can see we're doing pretty well with search traffic alone ok so how did we achieve that we achieved that with a combination of smart SEO targeting search engines what people are searching for and strategic content promotion and SEO is clearly what I am going to talk about because they trust is an SEO tool and I'm in charge of marketing for SEO tool and strategic promotion is what brand is going to talk about because strategic promotion always involves a lot of social media sites a lot of community sites and and all the other stuff that brain is going Brian is going to tell you about ok so let's talk about SEO I'm sure that some people might not be impressed with what I'm going to talk about because ISO is like such a popular topic there are tons of articles about it there are tons of videos about it and like it feels like everyone knows already what is they say oh like just put your keyword and title content just build a few links and like what's what's interesting about it and people usually when they come to webinar they're looking for growth hacks silver bullets magic pills and all that stuff but actually the statistics say something different about the knowledge of people in SEO because here the chef's we did a study of almost 1 billion web pages with content just think about it for a moment about the size of this number 1 billion pages with content and what we discovered is that over 90% of these pages get zero visits from they are not seen in Google search results for for even a single keyword so they get zero traffic it's like 90 percent of content that that exists online doesn't get any traffic from search and then if you look at the colors of the pie chart and compare it to the legend you'll see that another 4.5% get from anywhere from one to ten visits per month which is also nothing so the vast majority of content that is published online doesn't get any search traffic which which makes me think that SEO is actually a good topic to talk about and one more note at the bottom of this slide you can see a link to the blog article on a shells blog where this slide where this pie chart is coming from so if you want to read more you can just later check out I think we'll post the slides in the description of this video once the webinar ends so you'll be able to check out the slides again and click all the links and read all the content that was referenced okay so since 90% of content that is being published online doesn't get any traffic from Google how to be in the other 10% well if we look at the big picture it all comes down to two fundamental things first is you have to find evergreen topics that have huge traffic potential huge search traffic potential I'd I'd say and second build quality backlinks to your content so let's cover those two things real quick and see if I'll be able to tell you any good tips so how to find evergreen topics with huge traffic potential when I say evergreen I say that is something that people are constantly searching for you know that there's surge demand like every single month people are searching for a specific question for a specific issue and you get a chance to pop their pop in the top 10 search results with your page and get some of these people to your website and it will be consistent so every single month you will be receiving visitors who are looking for this specific thing in the search engines so one of the best things that I know to find awesome topics or awesome content ideas that get systems search traffic is to research your competitors research their websites and see where they get their own traffic so on the example on my slide you can see our own blog it says dot-com slash blog and I am using our own tool I'm using a traps to see which pages bring the most traffic to our blog so as you can see all I need to do is enter the blog address in in the tool called site explorer go to the report called top pages and I will see a breakdown of pages with estimations how much traffic these pages are bringing from from search and also the value of this traffic the estimated value of this traffic which is estimated based on cost per click of each keyword that page is ranking for and the actual number of different keywords that each page ranks for so as you can see the page on each chefs blog that brings us the most traffic is about website traffic as you can tell from the URL because the URL is slash website traffic the second the the second best page the second best article that we have is about free keyword research tools the third is about submit website to search engines and now you should have if you're not familiar with these chefs you should have now an idea of how it all works and how easy it is to pretty much browse the web site of your competitor and see what are their best performing articles now how much traffic they're bringing them exactly from search and how many keywords they rank for and they reminding you that we are doing a giveaway you just have to tweet insights from this webinar mentioning HDFS and buffer Twitter handles and you have a chance to win it shares account so other than just looking at the top pages of your competitors you can actually click on this little expand button and see all the keywords that each individual page is ranking for which helps you a lot in creating your own piece of content on the same topic because you can see all the relevant search queries that people enter into Google to find this kind of page to find the page that would answer these kinds of questions and you can pretty much create an outline for your own article and you can pretty much know what kind of things you should you should cover in your own article to be able to answer all these relevant search queries so this is awesome and we're doing it ourselves quite a lot we always research other blogs in the SEO industry and find awesome topics that we could cover in a chef's blog and as you've seen just like a few minutes ago from the search traffic of our own home of our own blog it works pretty well for us so the next thing the next best way to find awesome topics with stable search search traffic potential is to use a keyword research tool we have one in each stress is called keyword Explorer but there are like a ton of different keyword research tools I think if you just google for cure research tools you'll be able to find some free ones some premium ones but clearly free ones will only get you so far if you're serious about your business if you have a little bit money to invest you should probably go for a premium tool especially because keyword research is not something you should do like every week you can just do keyword research now I get enough topics to target like in the next six like to 12 months and then just cancel the tool problem I shouldn't be saying things like that but this is true you can do like extensive keyword research and then capitalize on on what you've done so how this works is these keyword research tools and specifically keywords explore NHS we have a huge database of the actual searches that people put into Google and we have the so called search volume or otherwise called volume as you can see on my slide this is how many times a specific keyword a specific search query is being entered is being searched into Google per month so you can see what I can do is I can search this database so if I use any general word in this case weight loss or I can just put cats or I can put parenting or I can put I don't know guns or whatever we will return the tool will return to you all the search queries that contain your words or your phrase in them so you will get all the relevant search queries with your target keyword in them this is called keyword research and then you can see how many searches per month each of these keywords yet and what is the keyword difficulty I will talk about it a bit further so then when you get a huge list of keywords a huge list of keyword suggestions you can easily refine it so I suggest to refine your keywords and look for great opportunities by using filters so for example keyword difficulty is a proxy to how many backlinks the top 10 ranking pages have if you're not familiar with the concept the more backlinks the top ranking pages have the harder it would be for you to rank there unless you get as many so if you want to rank in top 10 Google search results you should see how many backlinks the top ranking results have and build the kind of the same amount of backlinks or even more to your page to be able to rank in top 10 so what I did here on the screenshot I limited keyword difficulty up to 10 which means that top ranking results don't have a lot of backlinks so I won't need to do a lot of link building correct the top results and then a also on the right hand I used the so called modifier I used the word 2018 to see which searches like people enter with 2010 teen in them which would be something fresh something recent and which will be able which will show me some interesting results I could also use some other word modifiers like let's say best or by or for or probably put some questions like how why actually we have a dedicated report with questions but still you can use all these kind of modifiers to look for search queries that also mention some specific word and it will help you to kind of filter and search through the keyword ideas that you have and come up with interesting topics to target on your own blog okay now listen to me very carefully something super important is about to follow something that I don't see are there is so specialist as the professionals or should I say so gurus talk about when they talk about keyword research and picking topics to target on your block on your website so oh this slide got corrupted a little bit for some reason but still you should never rely on the search volume alone and the have a nice illustration for that so it's like holding an elephant's trunk with your eyes closed that you might think that's it a snake but it's actually an animal because there's there's a layer that you don't see when you look at the search volume and I'm reminding you just in case you're new to SEO search volume is how many times people people enter a given keyword a given search query into Google so if you just look at the search volume of individual keyword you might make the wrong decision so here I have a great example it's like super vivid we have two search queries so SEO tips this is something that people enter into Google twenty seven hundred times per month as you can see from the volume column and we have another search query a submit website to search engines which according to our data people enter every month into Google 1,400 times so as you can tell SEO tips is almost twice more popular than submit website to search engines so most people will make an assumption that if they write an article about SEO tips and try to rank for SEO tips they will get twice as more try as much traffic as they would get if they would target topic of submitting website to search engines which get twice less the search problem but this is not true so what I have here is a report from a través we can show you traffic that is coming from search to any URL that you put into each rest and as you can see at the top you have the article that ranks number one for SEO tips or at least it was ranking number one at the time of I was doing this that screenshot and it was like a few months ago to be honest because I used it in my article but still so the article about SEO tips as you can tell it's getting almost 2000 visits from search and right below it there's article about submitting website to search engines and this is getting 16,000 visitors from from search and the arrows show why that happens because when people search for SEO tips there are only so many keywords how to search for it like SEO tips SEO advice maybe best SEO tips easy SEO tips so there are only 148 keywords that this article might rank for because there's not so many ways how people what kind of phrase their search requests there there aren't so many unique ways to ask for it but if you if you're talking about the topic of submitting website to search engines there are just so many ways how people search for it like how to submit my website to search engines how to submit someone's website to search engines how to get my websites to search engine there are like tons of different search queries how to search for the same topic and because Google will will realize that all these searches mean the same it will rank pretty much the same pages for all these searches and that is why the total traffic coming from all search queries related to the topic will be quite huge so as you can see based on the search volume alone SEO tips look looked like a twice better topic to target but if you look at the traffic that is coming to the actual top ranking pages for each keyword you'll see that the second key word submit website to search engines will get you ten times more traffic if you were to rank for it in top ten and here's another research that they want to reference what we did here at HS is we studied how many different keywords how many different search queries a page an average top ranking page the page that will rank in Google top ten will also rank four because a page cannot rank for just a single keyword there are there are I'm pretty sure there are dozens hundreds sometimes thousands relevant keywords keywords or search queries that mean the same thing and Google can realize that Google can see that and it ranks the same pages there so an average page will rank for over an average top ranking page that page the ranks number one in Google will also rank for almost a thousand relevant search queries so this is why you should always study how much traffic the top search results get and not rely solely on the search volume of a keyword of course the search volume of a keyword and total search traffic potential are well correlated so in general the more the more people search for a certain keyword the more you can get traffic in total if you rank for it but there are many many exceptions and you might overlook them if you don't look at the traffic of the top ranking pages and here actually is the easy way to look at the traffic of the top ranked pages in the chef's keywords explore a tool that I mentioned before if you enter any keyword if you enter any search query what we're going to do is we're going to do the top ranking search results and for every search results we will show for every search results for every top ranking page we'll show you the traffic the total search traffic that is coming to this page so as you can see these are the search results for the keyword submit website to search engines and right now the number three results right under featured snippet and related questions it's an article from HS and you can see that our article gets over five thousand visits from search every month so by by studying the search results for every keyword that I'm considering I can see what kind of total search traffic I can get from ranking in top ten so this is very insightful and I want you to remember it because the search volume alone could be a little bit deceiving okay so this was the first part the part about keyword research I hope I didn't go too deep and my tips were actionable and easy to understand and let's talk about building backlinks a little bit so actually the topic of link building is super like large and complicated there are tons of things I should cover but we don't have a lot of time on this webinar because they have Brian coming up to talk about content promotion so I'm just going to briefly talk about three things I'm going to briefly talk about guest blogging outreach and content promotion this will go to Brian actually so in terms of just blogging this again this is a pretty big topic there are tons of things that I would love to tell you and this is why I recently wrote a article on the chef's blog about guest blogging for SEO about guest blogging specifically with a goal to build quality links to your articles to your website to help it rank higher in Google and essentially it all comes down to two challenges the first challenge is to write to find blogs to guest post for and the second challenge is to create a lot of content because if you're guest posting you want to do this at kind of scale you don't want to write just three guest articles and call it a day you want to write a few dozen because only a few doesn't link we'll make some visible impact like just two or three links won't get you too far so if you want to learn more about just blogging for a soul about guest blogging to get links just Google like yes blogging hrs or HDFS get blogging I'm sure you will find my article it's pretty detailed and if you will have any questions then you can just email me or tweet me I'll be happy to help you understand the parts that weren't so clear for you okay in terms of outreach this is pretty again I have another article on HS blog which you can easily find by simply typing into Google outreach HFS or a tracks outreach and you file find this article it's called how we use blogger outreach to promote content and build links and the outreach has two of its own challenges the first challenge is actually similar to the challenge of guest blogging so you need to find outreach targets you need to find people who you're going to reach out to and your message your email what you have to say would be relevant to them so you have to find relevant people who would be interested to take a look at your content and maybe then tweet it or link to it or promote it to their audience in some way so this is the first challenge and in this article I'm covering where to find these people and the second challenge is to craft an outreach email something that they're going to open read respond and if you're likely they might even act on it and as for crafting emails I have another article like guys I'm sorry that I'm keeping you two articles but I I just don't want to give you any like quick short tips and call it a day because each of these topics requires some like interesting strategies some interesting tactics there are some interesting tips so there's an article called I just deleted your outreach email without reading and no I don't feel sorry and it basically talks about this psychology of reaching out to people what you should say what you shouldn't say and like what expectations you should have about them reacting and replying to your outreach emails so actually like I finish saying that there is nothing like super scientific about guest blogging about outreach it's pretty easy but you need to understand fundamentals and you need to understand the common issues that people are making when trying to guest blog we want trying to get post for others and when trying to write outreach emails and get on the radar of fellow bloggers of fellow people in your industry ok and content promotion this is something that I want Brian to cover because there clearly better at content promotion than we are at HS because their blog is like 10 times larger so I'm actually I'm going to be making notes myself I have my notebook here and just before Brian starts I will remind you that there's a giveaway going on I've used a lot of 4 HS in my slides a lot of each has tools in my slides and you have an opportunity to win one of three it chefs accounts for six months that's like half a year and all you need to do is compose a tweet you need to mention HS Twitter handle you need to mention Twitter buffer Twitter handle you need to put the link to the webinar that is going right now just copy paste the link from YouTube and probably write your short comment or anything like that because we need a little bit more people to watch this webinar and to get a little bit more exposure so yeah let me mute myself now and give Brian the microphone Tim now is amazing for bad thank you I think I think my favorite takeaway from all that was you know I mean there's a lot of takeaways but particularly not to base all of your I guess SEO efforts on just keywords alone because I think that's what I do a lot of times I'll target the most heavily heavily use keyword must write content around that we got some really good questions which I think will stay from the end but I'm excited to ask you guys we've got about three really good ones but I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here let's see and Tim can I make sure that you can see see you slides yeah it's ok it's ok ok excellent all right one of my favorite sites back to thee so you know Tim thanks for all the awesome SEO tips there and strategies and resetting their recent closed posts on the strategic promotion side that's sort of where I have a lot of fun and I get to share about today so thanks for your attention and thanks for being here everyone I'm really appreciated so basically once you have all of this awesome content by doing all the steps that Tim just outlined there's still no guarantee that people were going to visit your website it takes a little while to get ranked in Google it's not gonna happen overnight you have to build this library of great content but in the meantime there are things you can do that will essentially help to boost your additional results and eventually drive people to your website and it's sort of like a fly will effect right you get people to come in through non-organic means like social media and referrals and backlinks and it's sort of all fulfilled in this big content ecosystem but basically besides saying even if you have the best SEO strategy in the world there's no guarantee no comps you have to have sort of this back-up plan going simultaneously as you work on your SEO strategy to make sure that you're driving consistent traffic your website you guys important of the businesses we all need to survive so there are tons of ways obviously to effectively promote your content I took a lot of these tips brian dean is a really great SEO resource but essentially i use podcasts or blogger outreach or share videos on linkedin or you know promote your blog posts and videos on the school called cue or create a youtube channel 8 hrs has really great YouTube channel definitely check that out but out of the Tim we're gonna we're gonna cover two main things Dave easily the thing two things that have really worked well for us at buffer the first one is amplifying our content video and the second one is advertising with top performing content on Facebook and Instagram and these team you know as the best do these seem like easy things to do but I think there's some really proven formulas you can use to create videos and to creat ads that drive consistent traffic to your website right being a guessing game and that's the thing that I'm trying to help you with today is removing the guesswork from your blog promotion techniques and doing things that I promise will work so let's dive into a code first this course amplifying your video your content with video so out of all the techniques and tactics that why video right why is video one of the best ways to do it there's a ton of stats out there about why video is one of the most important mediums currently for consumers but I wouldn't point your attention to a couple like Facebook for one generates 8 billion video views a day on average social sort of a video generates twelve hundred percent more shares in text and images combined companies using video enjoy 41 percent web traffic from service and non-users of video and all in all video is the primary way that people are consuming content in 2018 and Beyond of outside of reading content course right so video is super important for your brand to build a reputation as a thought leader in the industry product showcases it's just a super robust and versatile way to educate your customers and your potential customers right and at the end of the day what else we're here for and to help our customers solve a challenge and video is a great way to do that so this would be this is pretty much the formula we use it's going to seem straightforward but I hope these are some tactics that you walk away today so when you're thinking about promoting blog content on your website don't guess don't guess out of Wichita intent you think people are gonna like the most but the first way that I find content that we should be creating essentially videos for to promote I go into Google Analytics of the stores our blog content by the most page views and then I will you know go back for the last three months and then I'll show you know show 100 in the come on in and you'll move all the sudden have one to a hundred any how much blog content you have ideas for videos that you can then create for social media for your website or your blog to embed in your blog post themselves so this is what I do first first I'm going to do plan building sort by most pageviews and and start I da ting and creating lists of topics that would make for a good video and you can see here this is what we essentially did for the last year and I'll show you some stats about how much video use is actually produced but I would you know I would take some top blog posts from the buffer blog top marketers guide to 30 desk books 17 ways to get more views of engagement simple Facebook posting strategy that helped us 3x our reach and engagement and then I would simply turn those into videos embed them on the blog post send them to our customers and in an email put them on YouTube promote them on social media advertisement with them on social media and what that did was drive hundreds and thousands of views to the content itself and then thousands of visits to the blog post itself where people can read more right so these these videos aren't an entire summary of the blog post or a teaser is the content you're going to get from reading the content so it is essentially just find the most popular content create videos essentially summarize so I promised I'd show you the videos so between July June 1st 2017 and July 31st 2018 this is Facebook alone we we drove more than 17 or 1.7 billion minutes viewed of our videos that were strictly based off blog posts alone so when I said before if you generated it doesn't necessarily mean it will come well a lot of times people don't necessarily know what their brand yet or they're not you know they're not in a place where they can click on a link and read it tie an entire article what videos do is help to supplement your your written content your website content and the easily digestible piece of content that people can view in 30 seconds to a minute and then if they want to see more that's what maybe that's when they you give them a link to go check out your website for more so one over of 1.7 million minutes which I thought was pretty awesome so with video obviously it's it's a win-win-win so studies show that videos and graphics performs three to five times better on average than generic link post social media blog post what videos are more likely to be shared and it gives people a variety of ways to consume your content sorry typo there to consume your content so a win/win/win videos or graphics are going to get more more engagement blog posts are going to get more engagement and shares if they're actually videos embedded on there then of course it gives people a way to a variety of ways to consume your content so not everybody wants to read a blog post some prefer to watch a video or this to a podcast it just makes your content more evergreen and more robust so all of that was to say if you have a current blog content that's how you can create videos to promote your blog content now if you don't have a ton of content on your website or on your blog that's okay and a lot of times you can use this strategy that I'm about to give you to supplement what Tim talked about on the SEO side thing so you can there are other ways you can develop really great ideas for your blog outside of keyword research even though obviously keyword research is one the best ways to do so those are things like YouTube search bar hrs keyword Explorer Google Keyword planner fa Q's on your website so what questions are your customers asking you Cora reddit's are all really good resources so let me take an example here so what do I mean by YouTube search bar for developing content that will get shared and popular topics for your blog so the youtube search bar one of my favorite tools LeBron's free all you have to do similar to hrs keywords or is you go in and you type you start typing a keyword that's relevant to your niche so for us at buffer might be social medium work right so I start typing in social media marketing and YouTube just like Google starts to return the most popular keywords around the term that you're typing into the bars so right here as soon as as soon as I type in social media marketing I'm presented with five to eight I would say really great ideas for topics that would make popular video content then you can take that video content and make it even more evergreen by producing a piece of blog content a website page whatever it may be so you can actually tonton or starting instead starting a blog content you can actually start with the video side of things and make your way back towards law content so for this one let me give you an example so as you can see here actually this is a real life example I type in social media marketing and if you look down about six or seven ounces social media marketing for small businesses well I went ahead and turned that keyword into thirteen proven social media marketing tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs currently this videos more than 46,000 views it has generated more than five thousand visits to our website and has generated over a hundred plus offer from business leads for us which have eventually turned into customers and what's great about this technique is that if you if you're out of the blog content to promote and you're you're doing all the things that Tim said with SEO research there's still four ways to generate a really great content to promote using video and YouTube's are very careful to do that we also put this video on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere and so it's really a full since each promotional technique does not live in a silo it does not exist by itself at all feeds into each other and that's something you should be thinking about your your promotional strategies especially when it comes to your website and blog content is that everything feeds in doing it each other and everything should be thought of holistically rather than like a single strategy for each platform you got to think okay if we create this piece of blog content we're also going to want a video we're also going to want to maybe a podcast episode we're also going to watch social media campaigning around it the more you treats each individual blog post that you write as a mini campaign in itself the more successful your contents going to be in that's something that I hope you walk away is that each blog post really is a mini campaign or a mini or an opportunity to create a campaign in and of its own so don't just create the blog post elem go read the blog post and create a promotional strategy around and then of course you know again if you're still fresh out of ideas after you've created up videos for your boss you're wondering what to do next well there you can start to think about your promotional content in two buckets and this is what we do a buffering you actually have two teams that are sort of focused on each of these against as you will buckets right so on the left side view of create awareness what some people call top of the funnel tofu content thought leadership pieces blog teasers like I talked about announcements how to use etc etc and then you can start to move people down the the funneling what I'll talk about the advertising settings and you can start to convert them natural customers with webinars demos on an onboarding personal messaging FAQ so like I said before think of your entire strategy promotional strategy holistically and think about how you're going to create videos and create other types of content that fits into the part of the journey that your customers are actually in because sometimes people are ready to buy from you right sometimes people are thinking about other products or they just want a specific problem solved now but they might be open to buying from you down the line so think about your you're not only brief put your strategy into you know a holistic thoughts but then you can start to break it down depending on where your customers are in fun which is a perfect segue I hope into the second part of what I'll be talking about and that's advertising with top performing content and there will be some time for Q&A at the end - I know we got some great questions for you so in 2018 if you're on social media and you're looking for a really great way to drive more traffic to your website advertising as scary as it may sound is one of the best ways to do so and you know back in 2016 15 I think a lot of businesses like welding you really have to advertise we're not there yet we're still driving organic traffic to our website I'm senator etc I think today in 2018 it's becoming less of should we be advertising you know more of how much money should we be putting behind advertising the great thing is that you could start small and once you see results you can move up that's what we did a buffer started with 10 bucks a day on Facebook and Instagram and now we're advertising with or than a couple hundred dollars a day to promote our blog content across social I want to show some stats as Tim mentioned we're very transparent you can always tweet at me at buffer or at Brian underscore GE underscore Peters I'm happy to share all the stats with you but let me just give you a quick example of how powerful advertising isn't impressive you look at the one I highlighted Facebook buffer blog traffic in the last six months alone we've driven more than 125,000 visits to our blog for less than 10 cents a click and that middle column there where it doesn't have anything that one point two one five that's Reach so for seven cents a click we driven more than 125,000 link clicks to our blog and reach more than 1.2 million people now unless we have a ridiculous amount of organic traffic coming in I think that as a business I would take this sort of stats and I would be more than happy to pay for this every single time now I want your organic strategy what your organic traffic starts to increase you can you can reevaluate your budget but if you're just starting out or if you're trying you're having trouble finding traction I don't think there's a much better opportunity for the cost per click at least then Facebook is right now Facebook and Instagram so let me give you a quick formula for how we boost decide what to post a boost and advertise with and then I'll and I'll kind of give you some more tips out for that but essentially we'll go in the buffer or into Facebook or into Twitter and we'll just go into our analytics section and we'll look at ok which closes have the most engagement and reach and which ones are like you know higher than average than normal so looking at just you know pulling a random sampling from buffer right now from our Facebook posts you know I'm gonna identify a couple close you see over there right so I'm looking at not only engagement but I'm looking at reaching that I'm looking at engagement per reach right so let me just go out I'll go back to the previous slide but looking at this if you have to identify top performers based on what you want your so what do I mean by that so a buffer were not necessarily focused on driving bottom of the fog conversions we're more forked focus on brand awareness and driving traffic shorter blog because we know if we can get people to our blog and we're going to convert at a much higher rate and if we would driving more expensive bottom of the funnel advertised so going back with this one okay I post on eight twenty nine has 714 flicks well that's traffic driver one below just now we got about two hundred seventy four clicks so that's another way to it of the second bullet point here that's another way to engage or to decide on which ones to do so you might find a post that Facebook for whatever reason or Instagram gave oh man bounce of organic reach to as we've all experiences businesses over the last year so organ but maybe the post has a lower Ganic reach but it has a regular your regularly high engagement rate so number of engagements divided over each times one hundred and then that can help you decide okay well if we want to you know increase engagement around our brand that might be a way to identify top performers you can also do whole number engagement or total amount of reach and if you have conversion setup with your Facebook pixel you might choose to boost or advertisement post based on conversions which is a default obviously for a lot of businesses but like I said a buffer we've realized that instead of optimizing our ads for conversions which are very hard to do and require a lot of a/b testing and experimenting we actually just optimize for clicks and engagement rates and we found that converts actually eventually more than optimizing ads for conversions the second thing you're going to want to do when you're advertising is create your ideal audience and believe it or not this is actually simpler than you might think the first one is based on the website traffic so the more traffic you drive if you have your Facebook pixels set up on your website the easier it is to obviously advertise to people who have been there so let me give you an example of that buffer we have a product called buffer free Instagram where you can essentially manage your entire Instagram presence automatic schedule so what we'll do is we'll actually retarget people who have been to instagram related blog posts with our for Instagram app and that's been highly effective us for us that's you know if you're retargeting based on website traffic that's much better for conversions now if you're just starting out or if you don't have a ton of traffic to your website that's okay general demographics are also a highly effective way to grow your brand awareness and also drive traffic to your website based on what people might find interesting so the three biggest things I would say you should target people based on with advertising page likes interests and locations and location so I buffer we might target people who are interested in social media examiner social media today a TechCrunch and that will retarget blog posts at those people right so quickly before I show you some images and graphics that will help illustrate all this but I have find the best practices for advertising so advertisement requires successful social media advertising and promotion requires testing your images testing captions and testing images capsules and petabytes are obviously three most important things and honestly I would actually put those order Civic images or capsules and then headlines until you find the right combination and then you can move it when you're advertising if you're familiar with this Facebook 50 view of relevancy or free chat your evening for a relevance aswer from 8 to 10 for that traffic driving type contents or your promotional stuff really should be in that 8 to 10 range if you're doing more bottle type advertisements you can be down indeed so 3 to 5 so be ok obviously you can start small and increase budget with success and immediately shut down the ads and on performing so I think that's the biggest misconception is that like you have to stick with that since they're not performing well I'd say you guys don't do that just double down on the ones that are performing well and don't be afraid to shut off unsuccessful posts of course try to keep an eye on frequency rates that's the amount of times that people will see your ad in the newsfeed generally 2.0 is what I recommend to businesses if your people are starting to see your ad more than twice they probably don't want on your activates Facebook's algorithm is pretty good with that and then of course evergreen content kind of run as long as you want we have a post that's actually been running an advertised we've been advertisement with more than a year as long as the content is relevant and it's working let it run I always say so just illustrating that point so this is actually one of our most successful ads and this is the ad I showed you earlier that has chairman actually more than one hundred and twenty five thousand clicks to our blog the caption make sure it's a teaser and actually a lot of people have differing opinions on what a good caption is all about I think the shorter and the sweeter the better and the more you can tease what people are going to learn the caption the more successful would be the I attention the image is the second most important thing we pulled this off unsplash so don't be afraid to use it splash is a good resource or you can obviously use one of your branded images and then of course the compelling headline is very very critical so how to get a massive following on Instagram now I will say that this we we got to this point because of everything Tim shared earlier all the keyword research all of these studying what our competitors were doing we knew that how to get it gained a following on Instagram what was a popular topic so this wasn't a guess that God was here this was very much a scientific process that got to this ad that is Austin performing well which you can do as well again if you don't have mom can to advertise with we could reverse engineer it and if you're maybe even if you're finding if you're advertising on social media and you're finding stuff is working we can physically to reverse engineer one of my favorite tools to do that and I'll wrap this up here just about a minute Facebook pages will watch this by far one of my favorites free tools online if you have a Facebook page or 100 followers you go into your insights tab and you can actually watch your competitor similar to a a dress keyword explorer where you can look at what competitors are generating in terms of search volume search terms same with social media you can actually see what your competitors are doing in terms of what's working on social content wise video wise topic wise so if you actually set this up and you were to click on let's say business insider right there it would actually pull a list of Business Insider's most successful posts over the last week ranked by engagement so the new things that caption ideas headline and topics ideas and then it'll give you honest ly bring them by engagement so you can start to pick and choose from your competitors oh I see that Business Insider was successful with an Excel Pro sheet cheat sheet well does that make sense Ryan this is maybe even for buffer that could make sense so you can start to pick and choose as little ideas around the internet and you can use it to give you a full picture outside of just keyword research of what's trending in your industry what's popular as a topic because I think one of the the tougher things to do in terms of content marketing is finding not only topics and keywords that are gonna rank well and Google and other search engines but finally topics that are going to be popular on our social media too because part of driving traffic to your website isn't just organic traffic right it's social virality and shares and word-of-mouth so that's another great way to do is basically pages and watches one of the end really quickly by saying that I think Instagram and Facebook stories are the biggest opportunities for brands and distances right now and I would say get on it as fast as you can because it's still an emerging platform advertising platform for businesses who haven't quite figured it out yet so 400 million day of the Africa users very low cost per click I think is next evolution advertising we're seeing cost per click rates as low as $2 I actually added this right this little screenshot and right before it jumps on so without marriage that wants to be fresh but we have a podcast called the science of social media if you want to learn more check that out on iTunes Google Play I'm actually to host a bit but we've been trying to grow the podcast rate over the last couple months and we started advertising with Instagram stories check out the results so far so we've actually driven more than two thousand clicks directly to our iTunes listing in the science of social media for about 11 cents a click using a super simple slide on Instagram stories and I think this is really relatable for businesses because it's easy we the advertiser that's a great way to drive traffic so keep an eye on Instagram and Facebook stories in the future they just opened up brand advertising on Facebook story so that's that's all I have to say for my section of the presentation I go ahead and exit out here and I'll let Tim take back over in case you had in the last minute thoughts on the social side hey thanks a lot Brian I made quite a few notes here I didn't know about the Facebook pages to watch by the way probably I'm turning them back my video yeah I didn't know about the Facebook pages to watch him definitely checking this out after our webinar and seeing like what our competitors and other kind of relevant companies do now one other thing I enjoyed the like personally is Instagram stories actually here at a chefs in Singapore Facebook office is right in our building right above us from the last floor and we recently visited them and they did a awesome presentation about their advertising and stuff like this and they also said that Instagram stories are pretty big so I'm now feeling guilty that we didn't get to Instagram stories just yet but like seeing your your your results like how cheap you were able to get clicks to your own podcast this is pretty inspiring and I I didn't actually know that buffer already works for Instagram so this is also something that we are your customers so I think we're going to use you for our Instagram account too because we recently started to like work on our Instagram Instagram account a bit you just can't ignore the platforms that are like so big Instagram is so popular you cannot just ignore it okay so let me ask you a few questions so that they've seen in the chat and then you asked the ones that you've seen so there was a question about instant articles like what about instant articles I I'm not familiar with what it is even so can you tell us about it yeah absolutely certain articles for those not familiar is essentially Facebook's version of Google amp which actually Google just got rid of Google amp so Facebook instant articles is their way of allowing people to quickly load stories on the mobile platform and if you have WordPress or a plugin you can actually just every time you write a blog are just click enable for Facebook instant articles and at all we make it available for Facebook against your article so I recommend just using if you have a wordpress some sort of plug in if not I think you can actually better the Google developer tools and add that to your website but it doesn't hurt ranking at all and it definitely helps now the only thing that's tricky about Facebook instant articles it's actually not going to show up under your traffic sources because it loads natively within the Facebook app which is a little tricky however my main point on that is what would you rather have somebody read your article or not read it at all because Facebook's for potentially privatizing and instant art so it's a is tricky stage for businesses I haven't seen as much instant articles today as I used to so maybe there's kind of phase in that a little bit but I would say just enable it again okay it sounds great the the second most popular question actually the most popular question was about recommending some tools for creating videos like what do you guys use yes absolutely oh sorry I shouldn't I use include that in the presentation we have sort of shorter time today two things I used Animoto and IM oto is one of my favorite tools for creating super good looking template in video so you can create an emoticon tonight to sort of give you these templates and drag and drop text and video clips into so Animoto for sure and if you're looking for more of the advanced sort of editor tools you can use adobe sparks mobile editing tool which is awesome and then my favorite tool were actually creating like relief professional-looking abs but it's a lot bigger and learning curve is of course Adobe After Effects and so Adobe After Effects allows us to create those really highly curated highly professional Instagram stories and Facebook stories ads which you can't do with the editors but it also takes a lot more so thank you we need we need to tap into those Instagram stories for sure okay and and the last question that I saw like which wish I have as well and which I'm interested in is what about creating memes for for promotion not just your content but some some kind of fun story so fun pictures or for the videos to have an experience yes absolutely so I think there's an actually it's funny because I think there's an entire industry around the meme style promotional stuff right like there's entire Instagram accounts that have 4050 million followers based on pure memes I think that I caution businesses from doing that unless you're particularly talented at it because I think a lot of times businesses try to take that route and they don't necessarily have the comedic intuition that feels on brands that might actually grow this fallen so I think if you're particularly skilled at it and you and you experiment and you see success with that I think absolutely it's a good strategy I just caution brands from committing to that and then not necessarily like look like deeply reflecting on it if it's on brand if it actually works them out so I always say if you want to try something new absolutely experiment with it try it a few times if it doesn't work then don't be afraid to sort of say okay we experiment it didn't work on philosophy yeah I guess if the KPI of the marketing team is to get some kind of traffic or to get views or to get engagement this might work like a charm and like boost the numbers in your reports but will it have any effect on the bottom line because you you just entertain people but you didn't really sell them like your product or your service so that's another question oh great you know these about the social part let's see if there were any questions about SEO and we're going to wrap it up awesome yeah absolutely there's a kind of really good one so the first one was and I was curious as well so what do you think about optimizing your content for search engines versus your audience right so is there a difference or a balance in writing for a search engine versus writing for humans actually I think that right now they're very much aligned because from my own experience I see that search engines and particularly Google like what I feel I don't have like any evidence to this but what I feel is happening is that they actually track the user behavior and what happens after a person will visit your page so if people will bounce if they won't read what you have there your rankings will go down but if people will stick if they will read like the whole thing if they will click other links and browse your website your rankings will go up this is called behavioral factors there's a lot of articles there's a lot of information but there's a lot of like myths about it like a so like SEO industry still cannot agree if this works so if this doesn't work but I think it does and this means that you should write for people so whenever someone puts some some kind of search query into Google and opens your article you should persuade them to stay and you should give them what they want this is how like Google will see that your page has value and this is how Google will make your page climb up in rankings and again if you will give people what they want they will probably reference your article somewhere they will send it to a friend which will send you more traffic which also Google presumably I might be able to see or these people will reference your article on Twitter or even on their website which means they will link to you so by actually catering to people to the actual readers and not to the kind of machine search engine you're doing a lot of things right that will help you to rank better from the kind of from the Machine standpoint and it makes sense yeah absolutely I feel like that's great answered thank you thanks Tim okay we're on time and I got one more for you this is really as well okay so if I bring so I'm going to give you an example and I'm attorney to do a question so if I rank for best cookie recipes a search term and a roundup host of lots of cookie recipes and within that same post I also rank for chocolate chocolate chip cookie sugar cookie and oatmeal cookie would it be okay to write another roundup post specifically for oatmeal cookies or would that potentially damage the ranking of the original best cookies search term does that make sense this is a very complicated question for a person who got up at 4 a.m. in the morning so I didn't quite understand let me rephrase I can rephrase so essentially you have a big post like a central hub post race yeah actually for multiple keywords yes is it okay to then write a separate post for one of the multiple keywords that its ranking for yeah it's a good question I I say I say again look at what people want if people are looking for a specific cookie recipe and what they get is a list of different recipes which includes the cookie they were looking for it might not be the best search result for them so if you create a page that will specifically answer the cookie received that they were looking for it would be better especially if you will provide a few of these recipes of the same cookie so the cookie is the same but you like give them a few options like a few other ingredients that they can use or like here's the video format here's the text format I don't know here's a podcast about it like give people choice but a give people choice within the actual topic that they were searching for and in terms of a bigger page that would list different types of cookies it serves different search intent so it serves kind of search intent if someone would be looking for what I'd like different cookies that I can cook at home I don't know DIY cook I'm not like an expert in in pastry and all that stuff so a I'm struggling to come up with the examples but you get the idea you need to you need to think about search intent like what do people think about when they enter a specific search in Google and what what is your page perfect for is it perfect for a list of different recipes or is it perfect for a specific recipe that people were searching for this is the general answer that I can give excellent excellent so it's not gonna hurt the original big round at first but you're only gonna help yourself by creating these other smaller pages particularly based on search intent well like I said eventually this big round the post I think the reason why it ranks for a specific cookie recipe is probably because as a roundup it got some nice backlinks so Google perceives this as an authority piece and when people when Google sees some page as an authority because it has a lot of backlinks Google starts ranking it starts ranking it for kind of loosely related terms but if you will write an article about like a specific focused article on like a specific cookie recipe and the tarda chol will also start generating backlinks so we will see that Google will see that it is a quality article it will eventually like push out the the big around of out of the search results if more people will write quality articles with that specific recipe there would be no point for Google to rank around the post there but around the post will rank for its own terms so yeah always think like what would be best for searchers what would what would be the best search result for people who are looking for a specific thing and be the best search result excellent okay I think that's it for the webinar I I'm hoping that we were able to teach people some good tips because I try to bring some SEO people to the webinar for them to learn about social media marketing and you brought some people from the social media marketing field to learn about this so so I hope you guys enjoyed the webinar and feel free to reach out to myself and Brian on Twitter or email ask a question as you can see Brian is like super open about what's happening in buffer we're at a chef's we're not like 100% open but we're also sharing like everything we can and we're trying to help people in every way we can so yeah guys I hope you enjoyed the webinar let us know your feedback and we'll see you somewhere next time bye