[MUSIC] Stan Smith is the head of Pushing Social, an organization dedicated to helping companies build their social persona. I have been a fan of Stan's blog for years now. In fact, I may have been one of his earliest subscribers. I like his down-to-earth, but extremely effective advice. And his willingness to help new bloggers develop their skills. Stan, welcome to our social marketing specialization. >> Well, it's great to be here. >> Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about pushing social? >> I always say that one my favorite jobs, the best job I have, is being the father of my three boys. They keep me going. I guess, for them, they eat a lot. So Pushing Social has to do very well. So my company, Pushing Social, is responsible for creating content and helping companies build their presence online and use content to solve some of their tough marketing problems. >> Fantastic, one of the things we're doing in this blog is the last assignment will be for the participants to write what might be their very first blog. Can you give them some tips to help them become successful right away? >> I have several to get a person off to the right start here. I would say the first thing that you wanna do is pick the right topic for your blog. And if you pick the right topic, you save yourself a lot of pain down the road. So the first thing you want to do is think about your reader first. What is their most annoying problem, and how can you help them solve that? So how can your information help them solve that? So always keep your reader foremost in your mind. And one good way of doing that is to go on Google and use something called Google Keyword planner. Or even just search for your topic and see what results come up to see how other people are talking about your particular topic. And I think that's a good way to kind of hone in on the right thing to talk about in your blog. And then you want to do a gut check and decide if your blog itself can support content or support a blog post for 52 weeks, so that's a year. Can you write about your topic every week, and if you can do that, then you have enough content to kind of keep your blog going. And then the next thing you want to do is remember that every blog post that you write has to create demand for your expertise or for your service. So that'll be the first thing that you want to do is pick the right topic. The second thing that you want to do is, you want to start strong, all right? You want to get out of the gate and really have a lot of great content for your readers to engage in. So one of the things I tell people to do is to sit down and write out that 52 week editorial calendar. Okay, and this sounds daunting but if you work through it you can get it done and you'll feel a lot more comfortable about actually starting writing your blog. And I also tell people to have your first ten blog posts in the can, scheduled and ready to go, all right? Cuz if you start strong, some people are going to see your blog and say, I really like what's here, and you'll give them other things that they can take a look at and learn more about what you're doing there. >> So you're sort of planning for success, which is a great way to do it. >> That's exactly it, that's exactly it. And then the next thing is that you want to spend as much time on blog promotion as you do on writing the blog post. So you gotta think that as soon as you write your blog, its gonna go out there and you want to make sure that everybody knows about it and they know how to share it. So you're gonna have to think through that process as well. I think those are the key components of starting strong. >> One of the things that I'm concerned about is when I send out my first blog, how do I know it's a success? What sort of numbers should I be looking at? >> Well, you can get lost in the numbers. And sometimes people get a little intimidated by numbers. But what I would say that you wanna do is first of all, start off with installing Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that is fairly easy to install on your blog and it will tell you some key numbers. Such as how many visitors are you getting to your blog, where are they coming from? Because if they're coming from a specific source you probably can get more from that source, from a Twitter, from a LinkedIn, or a Facebook, so it will give you that number. It'll also tell you how much time people are spending on each individual blog. So if it's only a few seconds you know that people are not reading, but if they're spending a minute, two minutes in there then you know that you have a blog posts that's getting read. And then the last thing is that you want to make sure that you are keeping track of how your blog is moving your main number which is sales or conversions or leads. So, you wanna have that in mind and you wanna understand how your blog is contributing to that. So I think that's an important piece of knowing your numbers. Do you have any other tips that you'd like to give our participants as they get started with what might be their first blog? >> Well, one thing I tell people is that blogging is competitive now so you need to get good quick. How you get good quick is that you start with a mindset of an experimenter, a scientist. And you approach your blog and you say, what we're going to do is we're gonna test a new blog improvement every week. And we're gonna watch our numbers and see how it moves the needle for us. Are we successful? And I think that's important to do. The second thing is that you wanna have the mindset of, or you wanna respect your data. As marketers we love our intuition, our gut feeling. But really we wanna take a look at the data and that is gonns tell us actually what is happening. So respect that data, make good decisions based upon on that and then realize that you're going to fail. And if you're experimenting as much as I recommend you do, you're gonna fail a lot. But, that is moving you closer to actually having a successful blog, and a blog that consistently gets good over time. And I think that's the goal. >> Fantastic advice. Before we go, when I started the introduction, I talked about how you are really willing to help people become very successful bloggers professionally. And one of the things you're offering to the participants in their toolkit is a free ebook. Could you tell us a little bit about that? >> Right, the ebook I wrote is How to Start Your Business Blog The Right Way, all right? So it talks about a lot of the same tips we talk about here, I go into more depth in the book. We talk about how to create that 52 week calendar, I give you the spreadsheet that you should use for that. And we also talk about promotion and setting up the right systems to support your blog. So there's a lot of good information in there, for the person that's building the blog to support their business. So, that book, you definitely want to get it. It's free and it'll get you off on the right foot. >> It's a fantastic book. I've read it, and it really does give you a lot of very concrete advice on how to do it. But it also shows you companies that are doing it successfully, so I love that. Also, in our social marketing bookstore, we have another one of your books. Could you tell us a little bit about that? >> Sure, the other book I wrote, with my good friend Mark Schaefer, is called Born to Blog. And that was a really fun book to write because we start off the book with a thought, that everybody is born to blog. Everyone has one or more of five universal traits that makes them a great blogger. So, we talk about that, and how you can really understand those traits in you, and take that into making your first blog. And then we talk about personal blogging, business blogging, and some strategies and tactics around that as well. >> Fantastic, and Mark Schaeffer, in addition to you at Pushing Social, are two people that I really recommend people follow. Cuz you're at the cutting edge of how to use media to help build your business. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Well, Stan, this has been fantastic. I love the tips you've given us, and I really appreciate you sharing it with our audience. Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having me. Have fun. [MUSIC]