* * *
Everyone visiting my site will be there for custom music. Should I delay them with content?
* * *
Your question itself reveals your problem. You want to delay people with content? That’s messed up. It means your strategy is to find value that suits you, not content that brings your customers any value. The last thing people want is to be delayed. They do, however, want to be intrigued. So give them something that will make them glad they stopped for an extra ten seconds or four minutes. Maybe post behind-the-scenes videos of you composing your music, or a short blurb of you greeting people and sharing your thoughts for the day. Make it personal, and make it one of the reasons people come to your site. Few people come to the bar just because there’s a dartboard, but it sure makes the place a lot more fun.
If you are trying to sell ads and trying to encourage viewers to spend more time on your site so that you can leverage that to advertisers, you have to do it organically, not by making it hard for consumers to get what they came for. Think like a supermarket. Supermarkets know you came for essentials so they put the milk and eggs far away from the entrance so that you have to travel the whole store to get what you came for. Along the way they try to show you endcaps and displays of items to raise your bill, but they don’t block the milk from you or make you go downstairs.
* * *
What’s the best way to grow a following or community from nothing?
* * *
Put out quality content every day and engage around it.
It really is that simple and that difficult. No one becomes a sensation by accident. The talent to put out content is only one piece of the equation. One percent of the magic. One percent of people who make it big in social media might do it on content creation talent alone, but the rest of us have to work our butts off to bring our community in to see what we’re creating. You can have a terrific idea for a YouTube show, but if you don’t get that content out you’ll have nothing around which to build your community. And if you don’t put in the work to engage, rarely will anyone see your content. The two almost always work together, especially in the beginning.
It’s hard to put out content every day, and even harder when you’ve got high standards. But you’ve got to try. Eventually scale can take over and pure momentum kicks in and you can ride the wave of all that work, but that work really never ends if you want the amazing upside of fame, money, or accolades. Whether you’re putting out pictures on Pinterest, drawings on Snapchat, photos on Instagram, a video, or a written blog, you need to focus on getting as close to that daily goal as possible. BuzzFeed puts out a ton of content all day, every day, ranging on a variety of topics. Seth Godin, on the other hand, puts out his best effort once a day. Either scenario will work so long as the content is high quality. If you can’t keep that up, six days is better than five, five is better than four, and four is better than three. And if you can only come up with enough ideas or energy to put out content once or twice a week, well then, that’s what it is, though it limits your chances for the exposure you’ll need to play this game.
Give people something to look forward to. Keep yourself on your audience’s radar. Create context by responding to comments and otherwise engaging people so they know who you are, that you’re paying attention, and that you care. Give them every possible opportunity to share your name with someone who doesn’t know you yet and to become part of the conversation. Work hard and smart. There’s no reason you can’t do both.
* * *
The company I’m working for has a great story but we’re not getting the engagement we hoped we would. Is it worthwhile to promote our Facebook posts, tweets, and LinkedIn posts in order to gain more engagement from our social posts?
* * *
Easy: yes. Promoting posts is almost always a good investment if you can afford to target properly. I could go into detail about how to use Twitter and Facebook ads here, but you can find that information in Chapters 9 and 10. Instead, let me ask you a question:
Are you sure your content is as good as you think it is?
Remember, you need to put out content your audience likes, not what you like. There’s an easy way to know if your content is valuable: Look at the raw engagement numbers. How many people are sharing? How many people are leaving comments? How many views are your videos getting? If you are provoking a reaction in the people consuming your content, and they’re taking time out of their day to share it, that’s great news. Pay attention.
Then, look at the big picture. How many people are actually buying? How many books did you sell because you provided free content? On what days do sales spike? Always keep track of what is going out when, and how that affects traffic to your retail site or app.
Let’s say your engagement numbers aren’t what you’d like them to be, but you’re utterly confident your content’s quality and subject are hitting the right notes. Is it possible the problem is with your actual storytelling? Is it contextually appropriate for the platform? Are you using the right hashtags? Are you linking properly? Is your content the right length? Are your logos all in the right spots? There are certain storytelling details unique to every platform whose presence or lack thereof can make or break a piece of content. Are you hitting every one of them every time? (If you need a refresher, I discuss each one in detail in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.)
This is why content and engagement can rarely stand alone. The quality of one almost always affects the reach and effectiveness of the other.
* * *
What’s better for content, blogging or vlogging?
* * *
What are you good at? You can crush anything if you’re good at it. I’m not a great writer, but boy can I make a terrific video. So I focus on making videos, and then I delegate the transcription of those videos to someone else to make sure people who like to read their content get what they need.
Since I’ve started The #AskGaryVee Show I’ve spent a lot of time looking at other videos and have been asked by many to take a look at their version of my show. Many are below average at best. Making compelling videos is clearly not these people’s strength. Many of them would do better communicating their ideas through illustrations or cartoons, articles, or podcasts. They need to focus on their strengths, find some other outlet for their content, and put everything they have into it. I bet they’d see an incredible increase in their engagement and reach.
* * *
I have 39K Instagram followers and I average about 250 likes per photo. I also run the Instagram account for the company I work for, and we have 6K followers and also get 250 likes per photo. What am I doing wrong on my personal account?
* * *
Logically, two accounts with such vastly different totals of followers should not be getting the same number of likes per photo. When this happens, it’s because your company brand is more beloved to its community than you are to yours. We can’t know why people like or follow someone else on Instagram, or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe they think you’re someone else. Maybe they liked one picture you posted, got bored by the rest, and forgot about you. Very few people actively go back into their accounts and delete the people or brands in whom they’ve lost interest, because it’s not really worth the trouble, and Facebook’s algorithms make it so that they can’t see what they don’t engage with regularly. I think this is a practice that other platforms might replicate in the future.
So how do we restore these followers’ interest in you? Look at what you post for yourself and what you post for your company. What’s the difference? This particular question came from someone storytelling on Instagram. Instagram is a place where human emotion reigns. The photos on the company site were filled with people; the individual account was filled with pictures of buildings and tunnels. They were good pictures, but they weren’t what people on Instagram generally respond to. There was no mix, and there needed to be.
The same analysis needs to be done on any platform where you run
more than one account where one is performing well and the other isn’t. Try to incorporate what’s working in one into the other and see if that helps.
* * *
Should I post articles on my blog and just mention them on social, or post natively on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Medium? Or both?
* * *
Most people try to tell new marketers that they need to own their content and keep it on their own site so they can monetize it, usually with low-paying ads. The problem is that when you’re only posting on your own site you’re at the mercy of the traffic that goes there. For most people that’s not a huge number, or at least it’s not as many visitors as they’d like. But if you post content on sites where the potential for virality isn’t dependent on your popularity but on the quality of your content, you can gain a lot of followers. I have a lot of reach and fans but I still love Medium, because when I post something and I can see that 1,950 people have read it, I’m relatively confident that often as many as 700 have never heard of me before. That’s 700 people who now know my name, who might go to my site, or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook, or might share my content on their own sites. And when something like that happens to someone with only 400 followers, it can have an even bigger impact on his or her brand or business. In short, don’t worry so much about owning and monetizing your content, especially early on. Get it out whatever way you can, and worry about monetizing the results later.
* * *
What do you think of the recent Omnicom advice to move 25 percent of ad budgets to online video and the space in general?
* * *
Online video is at the top of the dog pile when it comes to content, so I’m all for moving traditional media dollars toward it. But I see a lot of people misplacing the money and misplaying that move. If you tell people to spend only 25 percent of their ad budget on online video, they tend to think they only need to spend 15–20 percent of that on the video production. The quality. The very stuff itself. That means 80–85 percent allocated for distribution. So the dollars aren’t being spent on improving the quality of the video, just on getting more video reach. And the same thing goes for content and distribution as goes for content and engagement—to get the results you want, they have to work together. Allocating more money to online video isn’t going to do you any good if the bulk of your money is spent on pounding out hard-core right hooks that nobody likes. To most marketers, online video means pre-rolls on YouTube—the ones that consumers immediately tab out of or ignore while checking their cell phone for the fifteen seconds it plays, and don’t actually consume. Or a pop-up video—the kind that takes up thirty seconds of people’s time before it allows them to read the article they came for. You know, horribly intrusive and annoying crap, the stuff that steals time, one of our precious assets. So when I hear marketers being told to allocate their budgets to online video, I hear them being advised to spend more on stuff that no one wants, which is pointless, and therefore very bad advice.
What would be good advice?
Move 25 percent of your ad budget to creating really great online videos that bring value to your customer.
If you’re not making a good video, who cares if you distribute it to a million people? Make interesting and engaging content that speaks to the people you are trying to sell to. Figure out the most native ways to distribute it on multiple platforms (including and especially Facebook ads and Snapchat and more and more).
* * *
Short or long videos? What’s the value?
* * *
Quality trumps everything. Back in 2007, Yahoo and Google separately flew me out to California to figure out why my thirty-minute Wine Library TV was doing so well, even though all their research told them that people preferred short online videos. Eight years later many marketing gurus are still spewing that videos have to be short or else no one will watch them. But that’s just not true.
I like short and long, so long as it’s good. Avatar was a three-plus-hour movie. People loved it and sat through it. There are six-second Vines out there that people won’t watch to the end. Length has nothing to do with quality or value; it’s all about your message and what you do within the constraints of the platform you want to use.
* * *
How do new and small channels gain a following when people don’t engage?
* * *
During the early days of Wine Library TV the only people watching were my mom and a few friends. But the quality of the program was really good and I hustled, so the show broke out. That’s all you can do: put out great content, engage with your tiny audience, and go out and try to get exposure for your content by collaborating or getting press or guest posting on someone else’s platform. If you’re watching The #AskGaryVee Show today it may seem like perhaps I’m not engaging with my audience with quite the 24/7 mentality I tell others to, and it’s true the engagement is not where WLTV was. But still, every day and after every episode is posted I spend thirty to ninety minutes reading and engaging with my audience, and not a day goes by that I don’t see four to five comments of appreciation. At this point I’m capitalizing on ten years of a well-executed engagement around my content. Hopefully one day you will be able to do the same.
There’s one more thing you might do if you’re struggling to get fans: Ask yourself if you have enough business development chops. If you really think you have unique content that’s just not tapping into the right audience or gaining visibility (a romantic notion at worst, an audacious one at best), then maybe you need to partner up with someone who can do “biz dev” better than you. It’s worth a shot, because the alternative is that you’re delusional and your stuff is really just average.
TIMOTHY M. EVANS
FOUNDER/CEO—ATHLETE WEB DESIGN
@TIMOTHYMEVANS
www.timothymevans.com
* * *
Gary, what would you say to the current pro athlete, retired athlete, or even an up-and-coming athlete who is getting scholarship offers, who wants to brand themselves? Should an athlete have an official website? If businesses are now considered media companies, should athletes be thinking along these same lines?
* * *
Yes.
The day an athlete retires, he or she is dramatically less valuable than the day before. It’s been incredible to watch over the past few years how dramatic the depreciation is for an athlete upon retirement, even MVPs and Hall of Famers. So it’s imperative to stay in front of your audience at every stage in your athletic career, whether by creating content or just having a destination for your POV. For example, Derek Jeter just wrote his thoughts on Yogi Berra’s passing on his own site, The Player’s Tribune. I think content is important because it leads to other revenue streams available to retired players, like public appearances, speaking engagements, and other opportunities.
For a younger player, it could mean the difference between getting scouted by an NCAA Division 1 school and a Division 2 school because some recruiter might have discovered you based on a video shared out of you making an incredible catch. The days of sending VHS tapes to every school are over. Now you’re putting content out on the Internet in the hopes of being discovered in the same way everything else gets discovered.
Finally, it’s a tremendous hedge against mainstream media. Players are often misquoted, or their statements are taken out of context. With their own platforms, both on social and on a website, they have a chance to stay on the offense. These kinds of platforms are an extremely healthy way for athletes to keep the media at bay in a world where the media is only interested in selling itself and producing headlines that aren’t real stories.
A site and a personal brand are tremendously important in every stage of an athlete’s career—pre, during, and post—and bring massive value in allowing players to communicate on their own terms.
* * *
You say to put quality content out daily. Can I add curated content, and if so, what’s the mix?
* * *
> I can pat myself on the back for putting out a tremendous amount of original content, but at the same time one of my biggest weaknesses is my lack of curated content. I should do it more, like Guy Kawasaki. Have you seen how many pieces of curated content he puts out? Hundreds! I’d like to, because it’s a smart tactic, but I have the same problem with curating content as I do with offering quotes for books: If I’m going to do it, I have to read it first. And while I make time for many, many things that are important to me, reading isn’t one of them. But if I added curated content to my original material, it would bring me even more exposure and create more opportunity. Curating is like DJ’ing the world’s content and spinning it in your voice. In a world where context is everything, it’s an enormous skill.
#AskGaryVee Page 11