While personal bloggers are free to create whatever goals for their blog that they want, business bloggers do not have that luxury. A business blog must accomplish the following:
- Increase Website Traffic
- Generate Leads
- Convert Leads into Sales
If your blog isn’t doing those things, then it’s time to step up your game and improve your blog and blogging habits.
Generating and converting leads (read as: making money) is a function of the content that you write. Are you creating content that addresses concerns and questions from prospects as various stages of your sales funnel? Are you incorporating clear calls to action that take those prospects to their next logical step? If you’re not, and you’d like help with blogging and understanding this aspect of inbound marketing, let me know.
But to address the first task, Increase Website Traffic, we must utilize a number of techniques to promote new blog posts and spark an interest in potential prospects. These techniques include sharing to social media, sending emails and newsletters, and more. I’ve gone into detail about all the steps I take after each blog post, and I have provided detailed instructions on how to use one of the more powerful tools in my marketing toolbox: Triberr.
Triberr (http://www.triberr.com) is a web service that you can use to greatly expand the number of people who see your new blog posts on social networks, primarily Twitter. But like any great tool, it takes practice and expertise to wield correctly. If you want to be a Power Triberr User and see some phenomal results, you need to hone your Tribe Management skills, always be Looking for New Tribes, and have a Daily Routine.
Triberr F5
As a quick refresh on how Triberr operates (see this post for full details), once you create your account, you must connect a Twitter account and a blog (Facebook and LinkedIn are optional). Your blog is connected via your RSS feed, so each time you create a new post, Triberr will automatically see it within an hour or so.
Triberr is made of up of Members and Tribes. Members can join as many Tribes as they want. Tribes are typically organized according to Categories so that member blog posts are all on similar topics. Members will join Tribes that they’re interested in and begin to share new posts from tribemates.
When you’re a member of a Tribe, and you publish a new blog post, all of the other members of that Tribe will see your post and have an opportunity to share it.
When sharing, you can see everything about a post, and decide whether or not your own followers would be interested. Approving is easy, and you will have a schedule set up so that shares are spaced out.
As a result, Triberr is an outstanding vehicle for curating great content, as well as having your own content shared to many, many people.
Don’t believe me yet? Ok, how about some numbers from yours truly: on Triberr currently I am a member of 61 tribes, which accounts for over 2000 tribemates, and a reach of over 37,000,000. That means that every time I create a new blog post, over 2000 people have an opportunity to see it and share it with their 37,000,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn. That’s the potential reach for each of my posts.
So, let’s dig into this idea of joining Tribes and talk about what that means, and some best practices.
Tribe Management
Follower vs. Blogger
If you’re using Triberr and joining specific Tribes to find great blogs and articles for content curation, then simply following a Tribe so that you’ll see new posts in your Tribal Stream is a fine strategy. However, if part of your purpose is to expand your reach and see your blog posts shared by other Tribe members, than you must achieve Blogger status within a Tribe. Other Tribemates won’t see your own blog posts if you’re just a follower.
Within Triberr, requesting an upgrade is easy. When you follow a Tribe, the site will automatically prompt you to request an upgrade. Accept, and the Tribe Chief will receive a notification. Hopefully they’ll have room in the Tribe for another member and will upgrade you. Make sure that you give them a few days to respond as not everyone logs into Triberr daily.
If you’re already a follower of a Tribe, go to that Tribe and post a comment in the Tribal discussion, asking to be upgraded to Blogger.
Once a week, go to your Profile and note the list of Tribes that you’re a member of in the right sidebar. Click on the Following tab to see Tribes where you have not yet been upgraded to Blogger. If you do not want to just be a follower of a Tribe, click it or right-mouseclick to open in a new tab (if you have several to go through). Enter the tribe then click on the Members list. Find your name and click on the red Leave button to leave that Tribe.
If your join request and discussion comment were posted a long time ago, you may want to try rejoining the Tribe and requesting an upgrade once more. Your initial requests may have been missed, and the new automated upgrade request can be quite efficient.
Blog Assignment
Any time you join one or more new tribes, take a moment to head over to your settings and check that your blog is assigned to every new tribe, and that your social network accounts are appropriately set. Because Triberr allows granular control over blogs and networks, these may not be set the way you want them for a new Tribe.
This also allows you to have multiple blogs, and to assign different blogs to different Tribes. This is partcularly useful for people who have a personal blog and a business blog, or perhaps have a number of niche sites where they create new posts occasionally.
Own Your Own Tribe
You can also have one or more Tribes of your own, and invite others to join your Tribe. Just visit someone’s profile (here’s mine, for instance), and to the right of their cover photo you will see a big blue button for Send Tribe Invite, with a drop down where you can select one of the Tribes that you control.
To create a new Tribe, just click on the Tribes button and you will see a grid display of Tribes, and the first grid contains a + New Tribe button. Make sure when you’re creating your Tribe that you choose a meaningful name and a complete description, so that other members browsing Tribes will understand what your Tribe is about.
Use the Bonfires area to look for people who want to join new Tribes, or to post an announcement about your Tribe.
Looking for New Tribes
Regularly browse new Tribes and look for great groups of people that you’re not already connected with. Click on Tribes and then click on Explore New Tribes. In the right sidebar, you can select a category to view Tribes for specific kinds of sites and blogs. Definitely do this to make sure that you’re looking at like-minded bloggers.
Why bother? Because the people who follow you social networks do so because they’re interested in what you have to say. If you’re going to share posts from other people, those posts should be on similar topics. Likewise, if you join a Tribe of bloggers who write on similar topics as you, it’s far more likely that their followers will be just as interested in what you have to say.
Take a look at the Tribes that come up. While the number of members and reach are important, that’s not the only factor for determining a good Tribe. Right-mouse click and open a prospective Tribe in a new tab (so your search isn’t disrupted) and take a closer look. Read the description and see if your content is a good fit. Check out the recent posts. Would you share any of them with your own followers? Check out the member list as well and make sure that the Chief is actively promoting followers to bloggers. If the Tribe consists of one Chief and all followers, move on!
Daily Routine
Triberr Power User log into Triberr at least once a day. That’s because there are two main things that you need to do each and every day, and if you do these things daily, your whole experience is improved.
Approve Posts
Throughout the day, Triberr will continue to import posts from the members of your Tribes. In order to keep your Twitter queue filled with great content, and in order not to get too far behind, you need to go through your Tribal Stream at least once a day.
As you can see in this screenshot, there’s a large green button to Approve that all you have to do is mouseover. If you’re not interested in sharing a particular post, click the delete button. You can hover over the author to read about them if you haven’t before, and you can click on the title of the post to open it in a lightbox window to review it before sharing.
I have found that, over time, I have come to recognize certain authors and am frankly happy to share whatever they write. Shelly Kramer, for instance, pictured above, does great work and I know her posts are worth sharing, so then it’s just a matter of reading the title and deciding if the topic is relevant or not (or if I want to read it myself).
Make sure your own posts have imported
Equally as important is to make sure your own posts have been imported. This task isn’t so much “daily” as it is “as often as you post.” That might be twice a day or once a week. Regardless of the frequency, within an hour or two of publishing your new article, if it hasn’t yet automatically been imported, go to Settings, click on My Blogs, and then click on Check Feed. This will usually grab your latest post(s) without a problem.
It’s important that you do this in order to quickly identify whether or not there’s an issue with your RSS feed. If your RSS feed stops working for whatever reason, Triberr won’t be able to import and share your new posts. And if you’re not regularly checking, you wouldn’t know there was an issue until it occurred to you that your posts weren’t being shared as much recently.
Check Tribe Invites
Finally, make sure that you glance at the Tribes page once a day to see if you have any Tribe invites. If you do, you’ll see them in the right sidebar, and can choose to accept the invitation or not. This should be part of your daily routine because Tribemates can only share new blog posts once you’re a member. If you hold off on joining a Tribe, they won’t see past posts that have been published, only posts published after the moment you join.
Are you ready to be a Triberr Power User? What questions do you have? Or, if you’re already comfortable with Triberr and achieving success, what other tips can you share?
Reach Image courtesy of stuartpilbrow, Flickr.
Want more help, right now? Take a look at The Blog Planner to help you succeed in your content marketing. Start planning today for a successful tomorrow!
