Last time, in Lesson 1 I told you that this course will be all about getting 300 readers to each blog article you write. I also made a promise that all of this will be highly actionable. The first lesson was the only one that was all talk.
This new lesson is ALL Action.
Let’s begin.
You most probably already have a twitter account set up, a facebook account, a linkedIn account and a google+ account. These are all must-haves if you want to start getting traffic from social media (for free).
I am not going to show you how to get those, because you probably already have them. Also, there already exists a LOT of documentation on how to get those up and running.
Let’s assume for now that you have accounts on all those channels.
The Journey to 300 readers starts with your followers
How many followers do you have?
Are they engaged with what you write? Do they favorite your tweets, do they RT, do they +1 your posts, etc.?
This is not a theoretical course. I’ll give you exactly what you need to do in order to start getting those 300 readers. It’s what we’ve already tested on multiple sites, including our own squirrly.co website.
Rules of social media publishing for the tactics I’m presenting here:
Twitter:
– 10 or 15 posts / day on each twitter account you have
– if anyone favs or RTs your messages => you immediately reply and thank them for it, or use that to start conversations.
– RT messages showing up on hashtags that are relevant for your activity. (eg. your blog is about spirituality -> RT important posts from the #spirit hashtag)
– Use followerwonk to see the exact times at which you should post for your audience
What hours should you use?
As I said:
– no talk. all action.
– followerwonk shows you the best hours at which you should schedule your tweets to go out
– tweetdeck or bufferapp will help you schedule them.
Got it. Let’s go!
You need to start doing this. This is an actionable lesson, so please also do this for your own site.
Login to your twitter. That’s what I did.
Next: Login to your BufferApp account.
If you don’t have one already, create one. It’s free 🙂 (bufferapp.com)
Here’s a screenshot of our buffer account.
I’m going to show you how we do things for the @SquirrlyHQ account. So, I’m clicking on that account in my bufferapp.
Wait. What do you see there? That’s our schedule for the posts that go out on our Twitter account.
Awesome! You can see that we use the 15 posts / day scheme. You should think about this really serious as well.
In your own bufferapp, I want you to pick the 15 posts / day plan. You’ll need to add 15 times during the day (or night) in which you want the posts to go out.
Look at the next 2 screenshots to see what I just wrote.
There’s the button called “add posting time”. Use that one until you get to 15 times / day. Very important for this strategy. Most people really don’t get this right.
You need volume. You need people to see you, they need to see you’re alive. Otherwise, you’ll never make it to 300 readers per blog article.
Okay.
How do you know at which times during the day (or night) you should post?
Followerwonk is your answer. It’s a tool made by the great peeps @ MOZ. It’s what you’ll start using. It’s also free.
Remember: all action. I really want these lessons to help you out, so I’m taking great care to showing you all there is in this step-by-step process.
Starting out is hard. But after you get this flywheel going, you’ll see that it becomes a lot easier.
Do the following. I’m showing you all there is in these screenshots.
Now click on FollowerWonk. Oh, you may just use this link.
You’ll see now why I made you login with your twitter. Click sign-in with twitter there at the top of the page.
You can now see the SquirrlyHQ twitter account appearing there. Hopefully you’re doing this as you read, so you should be seeing your own twitter profile image up there in your own window for followerwonk.
Now, click on Analyze Followers.
Yup, click that analyze thingy.
Here’s what you’ll get to:
There you have it. The box you see there is what you need to start using.
In the following screenshot, you’ll see where to place YOUR own twitter account handle (the username) and also select to analyze NOT the people you follow, BUT the people who follow you.
See the exact settings in the screenshot below
Click : DO IT! you have that orange button there. Make sure you click it.
For me it personally sais that it started generating my report, as you can see in the following screenshot.
I clicked on “your reports” (the little underlined text you see above. pay attention)
Click on that link inside. It should take you to your report.
Okay. This report is huge. I’m telling you. Maybe you’re already on your own report for your OWN followers.
Remeber, the road to 300 readers starts with your own followers.
Scroll down the report until you reach this part:
There you have the exact hours at which your twitter followers are most engaged with their accounts.
You’ll need to place the TOP hours into your bufferapp. If you move your mouse cursor over any of those blue lines, you’ll see that it shows you exact details about them.
Lucky for you, I made you use bufferapp and you can see that followerwonk allows you to schedule these hours directly into your bufferapp account.
Follow the step.
Yes. Make sure 15 times a day is selected. Click the orange button that reads “Schedule at Buffer”.
Awesome! Now you’ll start having great stuff in your buffer account for when you’ll start publishing the tweets that are going to promote your articles to your followers.
There may be a few extra steps after you click that orange button, but they’re amazingly simple, so we’ll not focus on them
What have you done so far?
You’ve made sure that from now on your twitter account stands a solid chance of driving you some real traffic.
Without these settings and without starting to schedule tweets that promote your articles, you’d have very low chances of success.
As I said: it’s hard to get the flywheel started. But once you do, it starts becoming awesome.
Getting 300 Readers: Method Specifications:
What you’ve learned today and what you’ll learn in the next lessons will get you there.
We calculate 300 readers / blog article, in a 2 weeks (from publishing date) interval. Very good to keep this in mind for all the next posts that we will have.
Getting awesome at this twitter followers method:
– you’ll need to prepare at least 3 tweets that promote each blog article you have.
– schedule a lot of messages that promote different blog articles to your followers.
– try to replicate this twitter method for your Facebook page, Google+ Page and LinkedIN as well.
– you’ll see that bufferapp allows you to schedule on those as well. If you don’t know the specific hours for those accounts, just use the hours you’ve extracted today from the lesson I taught you.
Remember: It all starts with your followers. Take care of your followers first, even though this will not bring you amazing results very fast. nurture this. In the long-run it will help a lot.
Rules for Facebook: 1 or 2 posts / day
Rules for Google+: 3 to 5 posts / day
LinkedIN : 2 posts / day.
The road to 300 readers per blog article will follow in the next lesson, where we’ll start working on hashtags. You’ll get to see why they are amazingly valuable for your new strategy.
Use our benchmarks for helping you get to 300 readers
How to read this?
After having implemented this lesson you should start seeing an increase in the number of readers for your articles. On a 2 weeks interval, you should get 30 readers for your article, by using the methods of this lesson.
Check your inbox for the next one in the following days! That will help you advance on this road.
