Andrew Warner:	Welcome to Mixergy's Blogging for Business. This session is led by Laura Roeder, a social media marketing expert who teaches small businesses how to become known as the number one person in their field and claim their brands online. She is the creator of Creating Fame and Your Backstage Pass to Twitter. 

I will be helping to guide this session. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com where proven founders teach.

Laura, do you have an example of what our audience will be able to do at the end of this session?

Laura Roeder:	Yeah, I want to start off by diving right into my analytics. Here I am in my analytics account on a recent blog post called, "How to Create an E-Course on a Budget." This is a great example of a blog post about something that my customers are always asking about, and I want to go to my navigation summary to show you where people went after they looked at this post. 

After they looked at this post, 70% of people left the site, seems pretty normal. I hope that's pretty normal, but of the 28% that stuck around, you can see the third most common page "Laura Roeder-Thanks for the Joining the Dash." That's my thank you page for my newsletter. 

Out of the people that stuck around, 10% of the people that stuck around, so 10% of that third signed up for my newsletter immediately after reading the blog post. That was their next action. For me, the newsletter is the main metric I track. That means they gave their email address; they're staying in my system; I can continue to market to them. I thought this was a great example of something you can achieve from your blog. To me, that's a pretty impressive result to have 10% of people sign up for the newsletter. 

Andrew:	That really is impressive. In fact, can we see that blog post and understand the process as it happens on your site?

Laura:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	And so for you, everyone who gives you their email address is essentially a lead and a potential customer, so you know that out of every 1,000 people who sign up, you're going to get X number of people who actually pay for a product.

Laura:	Absolutely, absolutely. 

Andrew:	This is the blog post that we were looking at?

Laura:	Mm-hmm. By the way, I want to point out, I actually didn't write this post. The vast majority of the posts on my blog are guest posts, so you can have other people write your blog for you. So here's a little step-by-step guide. Then I would guess this is where most of the opt-ins came through. We have this box at the bottom of the article, "If you enjoy this article, join more than 10,000 others and get your free weekly marketing to-do list," and they enter that email right there.

Andrew:	I see. I'm glad, by the way, that you brought up the fact that you didn't write that blog post yourself, and we'll talk about that later in this session. But the reason that I'm glad that you did it is because a lot of people who signed up for this session, when I asked them, 'Why do you want to take it?' They said the biggest problem they have is they can't keep up with all the blogging that they're required to do in order to get business. They understand that it helps, but they want to make sure that it doesn't suck up all their time, and then they can't do the rest of their business.

That's where people are coming in. They're signing up, and they're becoming members. That's an example of a success and we see how blogging leads to leads and then eventually results in customers. What's the first step towards doing that, for the person who's listening to us right now?

Laura:	The first step is to identify why you're blogging, and this is where most businesses make the biggest mistakes. I'm blogging not for traffic. That's the biggest difference between a blog to promote your business and kind of normal blogging for blogging's sake. If you have a blog, well, I'd say now you're exploring some different models in Mixergy. But let's say that Mixergy was just an interview show and you never sold anything else. For something like that, your goal is to get as much traffic as possible because it's not promoting a product or service that you sell. 

A blog like the New York Times or a really common one, a blogger newspaper, they need to get as much traffic as possible because that's their model, they sell advertising based on the traffic. It's nice if it's repeat visitors who are really interested in the Times, but they can still get paid, even if it's just like they made the front page of Reddit. They get a big surge, maybe they get paid more from their ads that day.

If I get a big surge from Reddit, it probably wouldn't help my business very much. Don't get me wrong. That would be nice because some people are going to come through, they're going to be subscribers, but I don't make more money when I get more traffic, that's not how my model works. Instead, I make money when I get targeted people who are interested in what I have to sell, and because I don't need huge traffic, and my traffic is not that enormous for my site, I'll go back to my analytics in a minute. One, I don't need to blog every day, the way that Gary Vaynerchuk says or used to say. I don't know if he still tells people that, but I think it's terrible advice for a small business because a small business has a lot of other stuff to do besides blogging. 

If you're blogging every day, there are probably some critical tasks to your business that are getting thrown by the wayside. So, the first thing you need to examine is, why are you blogging, and who do you want to talk to? That means, what are your business goals? Are you in a stage when you need a lot of new leads coming in? Are you in a stage where you have a lot of free subscribers that you need to convert them to paid? Or maybe you have paid subscribers that are leaving too soon? Whatever your goals are in your business, that's who you should be focusing your blog content on.

Andrew:	I'll get to identifying people in a moment, but you're saying it's not about hits. That, I think, is one of the reasons why, when I first proposed the session, some people weren't sure if they wanted to sign up. They said, I don't have time to get more traffic, and I don't see the benefit of getting more traffic. The idea is to get more customers. Can we see what you're selling?

Laura:	Yes. If you look on my site and you look at the shop page, I have training programs about Facebook. I have one called Creating Fame, which is like online marketing; How to Become Known as Number One in Your Field; WordPress website, How to Make Your Own Site; Zero to SEO; SEO Basics Class; and Your Backstage Pass to Twitter, a Twitter Training Class. I'm selling to small businesses that are probably pretty new to technology and on-line marketing. They're wanted to learn how to use these tools to promote their business.

Andrew:	I know you used to talk publicly about the revenue that you were generating from this. Do you still feel comfortable sharing that?

Laura:	Well, I said it on Mixergy last year. Oh, look. The little chat thing came up. Good job, Stacy.

I said on Mixergy that my revenues last year were about $300K. I think they ended up being about $325K. Actually, this year with another project that I do called B School, with Marie
Forleo, we are officially now a $1M business.

Andrew:	Wow.

Laura:	Doing well.

Andrew:	Yeah. I keep hearing from other people about how they're watching how well you're doing, and they're trying to learn from all the ideas that they're picking up on the sidelines. I'm glad that we get to give them an inside view of what you're doing. This is really serious. It's serious business for you. One of the steps that you say, to get people from just reading a blog post to actually buying, is you want the audience to know you. If they know you, they're much more likely to buy. How do you do that? Teach us how we can do it.

Laura:	For me, a lot of that is actually done through email, which is kind of interesting. A lot of it's done through email, and a lot of it's done through social media. You can see that my site clearly has a personal brand. There's my picture. There's my name at the top of the site. But you don't have to put your picture and your name at the top of the site to have a personal brand. 

For me, Twitter is one of the main tools and Facebook as well. I have a very active Facebook community. I'm on Twitter all the time because you can see I don't write a lot of my blog. I view that as playing to my strengths. I don't especially like to write. It's really difficult for me to get through. I love to be on social media and chat with people there. I'm always talking to people on my Facebook page. This is Facebook.com/getthedash. 

You can see, I do have a lot of comments. These are all users posting. It's very active, and I'm chatting with people on Twitter a lot. And my emails are very casual, very conversational. I can't think of any business where you want to write corporate emails or straight-up selling emails. People like to have conversations in email. I don't want to get too off track there, but there's other elements besides my site where people get to know me better.

Andrew:	What about on the blog itself? How personal should a company that's trying to close sales and do business get with their blog posts? Let's see how you do it.

Laura:	Well, I guess it's a mix. I do have some video blogs that are more of a personal story. One of my most popular posts is the True Story of How My Worst Fear Came True. That's where I tell a kind of embarrassing post is a true story about how my worst fear came true. That's where I kind of tell an embarrassing story, but embarrassing in a way that's appropriate for business. I tell the story of how a coach told me that I was doing my business wrong, and I felt terrible about it. 

I think it's a mix. What you don't want is treat your blog as a diary. This is another mistake that people make, is they see blogs out there because blog means so many things. Some people are introduced to the world of bloggings through personal blogs and more diary style blogs, where people put updates on their life. I think it's good to mix in some of your life, but your customers are not interested in reading your diary. 

They're interested in reading news that is relevant to them, getting their questions answered. In a way, that throws in some of your personality and how you talk. If you mention taking your dog on a walk, if you mention a great restaurant you went to because it's relevant to the story, great. It's great to throw in little details. People do not want to read just a diary blog of your life story as someone who works at the company. 

Andrew:	Now, let's take a look at how you do it. I want to keep in mind that at some point my audience is going want to have other people do it for them. So, let's see if we can pick up some tips from the way you do it, and then you've got some concrete examples of how others do it. And later on, we'll talk about how to get it all done.  

Laura:	Let's look at this page because this really has both, like here are two posts that are just kind of little more personal things for me. And you'll notice when I say post, that these are both videos. Because again, I don't like to write, it's much easier for me to record a video. So both of these and you can see the videos, just like I'm sitting here, there is no production value. I just pop open on my camera and make a video. These are the ones that I make myself.  

If we go back to that search results page, you'll see the rest of it is all guest posts. So from typical CPA to super cool online biz, that's a client of my, Rebecca Turbow talking about her journey as a CPA. You don't own your online content, what to do about it, guest posts by Joel Markowitz, "500 Network Marketing Techniques", all small business.
 
Andrew:	All those, you're not showing a personality specifically. You're just teaching, teaching, teaching.    

Laura:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	Let's see how others do it. I've got here in my notes that you recommend we take a look at blog.zynga.com. Would you be able to show us your emails, to show us how personal you get in there? 

Laura:	Yes. 

Andrew:	Or does that mean we have to...you know what, if it means that we have to take a look at some of your private emails in this session, then let's hold off and you can send us links to them afterwards.       

Laura:	Yeah, that makes more sense anyway. 

Andrew:	And people can actually look at it in their own time. So this is Zynga. What do you think of their blog?

Laura:	I'm going to be honest with you, this was an example chosen for Matt. So I'm giving you my live feedback right now. 

Andrew:	OK. 

Laura:	This is more of a feedback thing than an example thing. 

Andrew:	Got you.  

Laura:	Here's just an update from them. Actually, I'm going to say that they are making a mistake on...Well, it depends on their goals. So if Zynga's goal here is to recruit, which it might be, they are doing a great job because they are talking about tech firms try to out perk one another, saying we have the best perks. But if they are trying USA today Farmville at 7/11, that would be interesting to me, if I wanted to work there, that it's spreading. This is not interesting at all to people who play Farmville because this is very insider industry tech news. 

Depending on what their goals are, they might be doing a great job or a terrible job. If they are trying to draw people in to play Farmville, I think this is a terrible example because they are being too focused on their own industry. You basically have to work in the tech industry to come close to understanding what they are talking about in this blog.      

Andrew:	I see. This is not a great example of a company that's pulling in new customers using their blog. 

I've got an example, I think, that we should take a look at, how about blog.kissmetrics.com. And I'm suggesting them because I know that Hiten Shah, the co-founder of the company, has told me that that's one of the best places for him to get new customers, his blog and I know he is a superb marketer. Let's see, what is he doing right here, that the rest of us need to copy? 

Laura:	This is actually a blog that I read. I think this is a good example, Kissmetrics online marketing and customer acquisition blog. That tells you what sort of business this is, if anyone doesn't know. They are looking for business owners, unlike Zynga who's looking for like 45 year old women, I think, is their market. 

They're posting very useful content that's related to their business. That sort of reminds me of my site in that you saw that everything doesn't have to be exactly related. You want to talk about content that interests your audience. It doesn't all have to be about your product because that also will get sort of boring. I had that thing about how to create a cheap e-course. Well, I don't teach how to create e-courses, but that's something my audience is interested in, similarly, a beginner's guide to Google analytics 5. They do metrics and analytics. It's related, but this is better than just having a beginner's guide to KISSmetrics, because it's not just pitching their product. They know that if people like KISSmetrics they're interested in Adwords, they're interested in Google Analytics. This is just great content that's very useful for their audience.

Andrew:	I know in a little bit I'm going to ask you and I know you have the answer, to how we can identify what our audience wants to know and create great content like this. Right away, I'm seeing this and Hiten has told me this in a past session, he gets rid of everything that doesn't fall in line with the path that he wants the audience to take. 

At the very top he's got the request for an email address, kind of like you do, and if you click on one of these, in fact let's go up to the top and show that. There it is, the request for an email address, and if you click you'll see he does the same thing you do. Right underneath the blog post, he has a second box where people can enter their email addresses. There it is. The idea is to constantly think what's the path, how do you get people into the funnel and it looks like he's doing that too here.

Laura:	I would be curious how often they blog. Oh, you know what's sort of interesting that they do, they don't make the dates permanent, which I think is really smart. And I would guess they do that because I'm guessing they're not blogging super, super frequently because as I'm looking at this I don't care how frequent it is, I just want some useful information. This is a great example of, you don't have to blog every single day.

Andrew:	I see. That really goes against everything that I learned when I started blogging myself. Everyone kept saying blog every single day, blog every single day, but you know what, as I'm doing these sessions I'm hearing, no you don't. You want to as Rameetsi told me, you want to stretch your other muscles. It's great to be able to blog every single day, but that's kind of like being a muscle man with a big right bicep, but the left isn't strong, and the legs are weak, and your abs are fat.

Laura:	I agree. It's like, if you were, again you have other stuff to do in your business, if you were a huge company that had a team devoted to blogging, great, have at it, but the reality is you're a small business blogging is taking time away from some other marketing activity.

Andrew:	I think I'm in a little bit of a different situation because my message is more important to me than the rest of the business, but if you're really building a business with the site, I see blogging can take up all your time, of course. 

Laura:	Oh yeah.

Andrew:	We see what they're doing well. We saw it on your site. Do you want to take a look at one other blog?

Laura:	I think 37 Signals, which we have here in our notes, is another great example. It's a blog that I love personally -- signals.com, signals versus noise. 37 Signals is a great example of a blog that does mix in the personal very well. I feel like you really get to know Jason when you read this blog, but you'll notice that they do have different people, I believe it's all people in their company writing, which if you are a little, 37 Signals is a bigger business than mine, this is a great way to spread it out a little bit, is just have different people in your company blog.

I see Jason, I see Ryan and they post all sorts of stuff. Again, they just post anything that may be interesting to their audience. They post videos that they like with a little commentary. This one is just a quote from Warren Buffett, great blog fodder. This is a great example of, you don't have to write a long blog post. That's another huge mistake people make, they think you have to do a whole article with a thesis and a beginning, middle, end.

This entire blog post is just a quote, and it's an interesting quote so it's great fodder for the blog. This is another one, just a little comment from Jason and then they have these longer articles. They have some things about the thought process behind their products, all sorts of bull shit, how Forbes turned 6.5 million into 20 billion, that's a great headline. Again all over the board but just all things that are interesting to the small businesses they serve.

Andrew:	I love the way they do it. It's useful and it's got their personality all over the place. All right, I said earlier that we need to talk about how to identify what the audience wants to know. How do we do that?

Laura:	It's so easy. Most people make it too complicated.

Andrew:	Is it? I feel like it's very complicated. I'm glad you've got an easy system for me.

Laura:	You blog about the questions that your customers ask you. That's it and most people don't do that because they think that's too simple.

Andrew:	Can you say that again?

Laura:	Yes. You blog about the questions that your customers ask you.

Andrew:	OK.

Laura:	Actually, let's look at my most popular content for a great example of that. My most popular blog post is how to re-tweet. Literally, the video is called How to Re-tweet. I'm guessing, if you're watching this video you already know how to re-tweet, but a lot of people on the Internet don't know how to re-tweet, and those people are great customers for me because I have a whole course about how to use Twitter. You can see, this is just my whole content for my entire website. The number one page is my home page, lauraroeder.com. The number two page is how to re-tweet this blog post from January, 2010. It gets a lot of search traffic. 

I'm not winning any social media industry awards by teaching people how to re-tweet. Nobody is going to give me a marketer of the year award for this post, and that's why most people overlook stuff like this because they think it's too simple, it's too basic. But the fact is this is what your customers want to know about, and a lot of people aren't talking about it because it's not winning them industry awards. They're trying to come up with some new philosophy on how to do things. That's probably way over their customer's head or their customer doesn't care about it.

Andrew:	If I were in your business, and I would be looking for something to blog about regarding Twitter, the last thing I would think people want to know is how to re-tweet. I would think that it would be so basic that people wouldn't even want to check it out. How do you know what your audience knows and get past your own assumption that what's in your head must be in everyone else's heads because it's so obvious to you. 

Laura:	Right. People are telling you all the time, you're just not listening. Whenever you talk to a client on the phone, whenever you see the emails that come in on your contact form. Like I bet you I can guess one that you get so much it probably drives you insane. I bet people ask you over and over again, well, one would be like, what microphone do you use? Is that something you get a lot?

Andrew:	I do. I get what microphone do you use, and how do you do the side by side video for your interviews, right.

Laura:	What microphone do you use is a really basic question. I'm sure you're like, it doesn't matter what microphone you use. Why do you keep asking me that?

Andrew:	I do think that, exactly. I say, just get any one from the store as long as it's not the crappy five dollar one. You're going to do OK.

Laura:	Right, but here's the deal. People are asking you that because they want to know. Otherwise, they wouldn't be asking you. If you did a blog post called why I use the blah, blah, blah, whatever model for podcasting because it's the best microphone out there, I guarantee you or if you did a blog post even better called what microphone should I use for a podcast, what microphone should I use for a video podcast, that would get you tons of search traffic because those are the words that people are typing into Google. What microphone do I use? How do I re-tweet? What they're asking you when they type it into Google, and they want to know clearly. 

Andrew:	What about this? I feel like, with me, I'm getting a lot of emails because I'm a little further ahead than many people who are watching us might be. I'm blogging every day. I've been doing this for a couple of years. I've got a staff of people here and a big audience, and so the questions are coming in. What do you do if you're just starting out and you have, maybe a hundred people coming to your site a day, maybe a few hundred, but you're not getting so many people that you can start looking for questions or get them unsolicitedly. How do you spur on the questions that your audience is looking for that will result in great blog posts?

Laura:	One, you ask people and I think often the best source is not on the Internet. It's talking to your customers on the phone. People will just go more in depth on the phone than they will like, filling out a survey. So many tech people especially love to do surveys because they're really easy. You don't actually have to talk to anyone. You just pop it up and put their answers in, but what people will tell you on the phone will go much more in depth because that's just the nature of a phone call. They don't mind. 

They're going to think, oh I don't want to type out this long answer. Nobody thinks, oh I don't want to talk that long on the phone. Ask them what really confused you when you first started out in this area, or when you were thinking about looking me up, what hesitations did you have, what did you want to ask? You could say, what were you too embarrassed to ask me?

That's another thing that I get a lot. People will say like, this is a really stupid question, or they'll say; I know I shouldn't be asking you this. I'm like, no, that's what I'm here for, ask me. So, questions like that, what are you embarrassed to ask about, what do you think is a dumb question? People will be happy to tell you.

Andrew:	First of all, I know that we need to do that even today, that we need to call up our customers and talk to them and ask them questions and really go beyond what's coming into us right now. So, you're saying, that's a great question. Ask what were you too embarrassed to ask me in the beginning, or what do you think is a stupid question that's important to you, or give them an opportunity to ask you the basic stuff because the basic stuff drives people nuts.

Laura:	It does. It does.

Andrew:	Like what kind of microphone to get, for some reason, is a basic question that people seem to just go nuts over.

Laura:	It holds people up.

Andrew:	How do you get them on the phone? Do you put up a blog post saying hey, I'm going to take any phone call from people who want help, or what do you do to get those conversations going early on?

Laura:	Well, I'll give you a recent example. We were just looking for case studies for people that have been through my Zero to Facebook program, so we sent an email out to everyone that had taken the program saying we're looking for stories that we can feature on the site. This is going to be good for your business because it's going to get featured. We made a big point to say you don't have to be successful because the problem is when you ask for stories like this, most people immediately take themselves out of the running. Again, since I'm dealing with small business...

Andrew:	Can we take a look at that blog post, I want to make sure that we...

Laura:	This is an email. 

Andrew:	Was it sent by e-mail?

Laura:	Yes. How would I find that? It should be in my Google.docs somewhere. Let's see, I'm just going to pause my screen sharing.

Andrew:	Well, then we're still going to be recording it from you. Tell you what; let's give that in the notes also. 

Laura:	Because this doc is going to take forever to look for anyway. 

Andrew:	 Sorry?

Laura:	It's going to take forever to look for anyway. 

Andrew:	That's a good point. I'm going to put notes here of what we want to give people afterwards. We want to show them email and give them examples of how you connect with your audience. And we also want to show how you solicit phone calls. 

Laura:	 Yeah.

Andrew:	 Solicit phone calls. What else? What other ways are there for us to get questions from our audience that we can then use as blog posts?

Laura:	Obviously, social media. You know, Facebook, Twitter. Facebook, I think it's rare to have your audience post on your Facebook as much as mine does, but Twitter is a more natural place to ask questions. Also, you can just get ideas from what they are talking about, like this girl, Kara, posted 50 % off biz cards with QR codes. Clearly, Kara is fired up about QR codes. That's something that I could write a blog post about. 

This one's a straight up question; could someone share an explanation or resource? You know what, this is a great example. Could someone share an explanation or resource for how to test market an offer to a target audience through social media? 

This is a good example because the reason that I actually haven't answered this on Facebook yet, because I do answer questions, is that I'm not sure exactly what she means. When I think of how to test market an offer through social media, I think, well you just have your offer, and then you just send it out. To me, I'm like, well that's how you test it. So the question almost doesn't make sense to me but clearly to Alicia, this question is bugging her so much that she posted on Facebook about it.

This is actually a really good example of something that you would often overlook because to you it seems like, well how do you test it, well you just send it out and then that's the test. But to her, it's really bugging her, and she's given us a great headline, too, how to test market an offer to a target audience through social media. There is your headline right there.

Andrew:	I see.

Laura:	  I guarantee people are typing it into Google, and then even though to me it seems obvious, I would explain, well, testing an offer through social media, can just mean, sending people an offer. Here's how you could send it on Twitter. Here's how you can send it on Facebook. Maybe, you want to do a split test. Then you would send your Facebook traffic to the split test. That's how you can do a split test on Facebook. But people think that there's something that it needs, that there's something more involved when you bring in social media. 

Andrew:	I see, and you know what actually, if I were targeting your audience, I might just come into your Facebook page and look to see what questions people are asking you.

Laura:	Yeah.

Andrew:	If I were targeting KISSmetrics' audience, I might go over to KISSmetrics Facebook page and see what questions people are asking them and then write posts about that. So, I'd look for whose audience I was targeting and feed questions, or grab questions off their site. What about this other question, if I take that and put it up on my website in a blog post, people might think it's too basic, or it's not the right fit. What about this issue, the issue of potentially putting up posts that aren't right for your audience, or might be embarrassing because they're too amateur or any of those other things that would keep people from blogging.

Laura:	It's really such a non-issue, it really is. One, because if we see a blog post that doesn't interest us, we just don't read it. The only thing that people really get pissed off about, is sometimes people will get pissed off if they feel like you're doing too much selling on your blog. Or, they'll say, "This is just a sales pitch, it wasn't really content." I've never seen anyone get pissed off on a blog because something was too basic because that's just not the nature of how we read blogs. If we see something that doesn't appeal to us, we just skip it. 

I think KISSmetrics is kind of a great example of that, because that analytics thing, it looks like a pretty basic look. When I think of KISSmetrics, I don't even know if this is right, but I think, they do more of an advanced type of analytics. That's the brand impression that I have of their company. 

Andrew:	Right.

Laura:	I know they have a lot of founders, like tech start up people, people that seem like pretty tech-y people, but they've been chosen for a reason, and look at how many frickin' re-tweets they have. A beginners guide to Google analytics, this is on a KISSmetrics blog. It's not an advanced thing, a beginner's guide to Google analytics. They got 404 re-tweets. That's more than these other posts around them. And you know what? Actually, this is funny. 

This looks more advanced, remarketing with Google AdWords. How do you use Google AdWords to reach the people that didn't click on your ad? That looks like a more advanced topic. Look how much fewer social media it got. It got like half the tweets, and it only got 25 Facebook shares. This one got 90 Facebook shares.

Andrew:	I see, yeah. 

Laura:	And the content, like 99.9% of the time it works better  because there's so few people that have the time and inclination to implement that, or that even understand what's going on here. I'm pointing at it like you can see. I'm pointing at the Google AdWords. It's like we all think we want to know this advanced stuff, but the one that's actually useful to people is the beginner's guide because there's just so much basic information.

I spent so long the other day trying to figure out how to find that content thing that I show in the beginning of Analytics. I spent so long trying to figure out how to do that. I've used Analytics a ton, but I didn't know that one little thing of how to see the page before and after, like there's plenty of complicated beginner stuff in any of these technology platforms. I love that they made their point for me here. A beginner just almost always does better, and people aren't like... I don't know. You would just never look at this and go KISSMetrics doing a beginner's guide? Who are there? It's just not how people respond.

Andrew:	Yeah, right. I guess people will not look at that and say, "Oh, if they're doing a beginners guide to Google Analytics 5, then they're probably too amateur for me. I'll go look for a higher end product." It still maintains their space in the market.

Laura:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	I've got here a note to also take a look at your Facebook-Twitter combined, or did we just take a look at the Twitter already?

Laura:	You mean, just like in my Twitter account?

Andrew:	Yeah, is that what we're going to show people?

Laura:	I don't know. I'm trying to look it up.

Andrew:	Let me ask you this. The way that I look for Twitter to see what questions I need to answer, what's going on with my site is I don't go to Twitter and look at the mentions. I do a search that I save as a bookmark. I do a search on my name or my company name or a couple of other things that people might be using, and that's when I know where the issues are because people don't often tweet directly at me when there's a problem, but they mention me when there is. Is that how you do it?

Laura:	I think you made a great point earlier that I want to really re-emphasize. If you are starting out, look at other people's questions. Look at other people's Twitter feeds. A lot of people don't even realize that you can see all the mentions for someone else just by searching for their name. If you have a social media business and you want to compete with me, I'll tell you how right now. You just search on Twitter for @LKR and you can see they're all going to be Mixergy things today, most of them. 

Andrew:	Cool.

Laura:	But you can see... Oh no, we're late. What did happen? You can see what people are saying to me. You can see what questions they're asking me. You can see which blog posts they're re-tweeting here. You don't have to have a huge following of your own, just look and see what people are asking Andrew, what people are asking me. And yeah, look, search for your competitors, search for other people in your industries, search for terms.

Again, there's just no shortage of fodder out there. The reason people think it's hard to blog is because they think they have to come up with something new. People just want their questions answered. They don't want your amazing new philosophy. 

Andrew:	Next topic is how to create an editorial calendar. Do you have one that you can show us?

Laura:	Yes. Let's see here. 

Andrew:	Then, I'll ask about the significance of it. I've got to say, I've heard about this from a few other people, but we still don't have one for Mixergy. 

Laura:	An editorial calendar, I can't believe you don't have one for Mixergy although I know you plan, you plan ahead some.

Andrew:	We do schedule guests far into the future, but not based on any editorial calendar. 

Laura:	An editorial calendar is just a fancy way of saying, plan out your topics or plan out your guests if you're doing an interview show, plan out your guest posts.

Andrew:	Oh, I see. That, we do have right. We have a calendar that says for the next month these are the different people who will be coming to do interviews with me every single day, and we know then what's going on the website every single day, at least, the next month, no headaches.

Laura:	That's all I mean. That's all I mean by an editorial calendar, and the reason that's so important having a successful blog is this is another reason it's so hard to blog. When you think of any sort of media show, clearly Good Morning America isn't like, another episode again? But it's Thursday. We just did this thing yesterday, but that's how almost everyone treats their blog. They decide that they're going to blog, let's say, once a week, and then every week they're like, another blog post. 

What am I going to do? I already wrote it last week. It's this nightmare, and it's like they're starting from scratch. An editorial calendar takes away a lot of the drama about blogging because you already know what you're going to blog about and, again, for most people what to blog about is the hardest part.

Here's a really easy way to create your editorial calendar. Let's say that you're going to blog every week which is what I would recommend for small businesses. Every week is great. Even if you blog once a month, in most industries you're probably way ahead of your competitors who probably aren't blogging at all or aren't blogging with any regularity. 

Let's say you're going for once a week. That's 52 blog posts in a year. To make your editorial calendar, I want you to start with writing down, let's say, 25 questions that your customers ask you and, again, go basic. So, this is like when you're on the phone and they're asking you about your service and they're asking you about your business. When you meet people and they explain what they do and they ask follow-up questions or there are questions that you get in your contact form, like go basic, go easy. 

I think most people off of the top of their head or maybe with a digging through their inbox can make a list of 25 questions. Let's just start there. You just take the questions, and you just plot them out on your calendar. You can do it in a list. I like to do a Google calendar like I have here. This is my dash editorial calendar, which is actually my newsletter, not my blog. We just plot the questions/the topics every Wednesday, and you can see, I think we actually have it for the whole year.

Andrew:	Wow. 

Laura:	We have it for the rest of 2011 and then no more.

Andrew:	Oh wow, wow. Actually, can we take a look at one of those just to see what you put on there?

Laura:	Let's look at November. On November 2nd we're doing Google Yourself, which means...

Andrew:	So, you know that far into the future what to do.

Laura:	Yep.

Andrew:	All you'll do is put a phrase up there like Google Yourself. You won't give yourself any more direction than that.

Laura:	This is how I do it because this is just a little note for me/my team, like how to not stick other people's bids in your YouTube embed. Clearly, that's just a little note for me. That's not how I would phrase it. So, you don't have to write even the headline. Some people like to write headlines. That's sort of how they think. They like to write out the headline and plot that. For me, I just do a little note about the content. This is something that now that I know what I'm talking about, all I have to do is explain how not to stick other people's bids in your YouTube embed. I can explain that really easily. 

Andrew:	You know what? By the way, let me just pause here for a second. As someone who does videos, that drives me nuts. When I go over to a web apps website, and I know they spend a lot of money and a lot of time building out their web app, then they even spend a lot of money creating that video that shows the how-to, and the video is only a minute, so they thought that through, too. 

Then, at the end of it, instead of thinking where should I click on their site to go sign up, I see on the YouTube embed, I see four other videos that people who watched the video I saw are probably going to want to watch, and so I go and I click that or it just feels a little amateur.

One little thing that you do and it makes that whole problem go away, but I never even thought that I would need to teach anyone that. I just kind of assumed that they should go figure it out for themselves. How did you know that that's a topic that needs to go on the calendar, and, of course, once you know it, researching and organizing a great blog post about it is not that tough.

Laura:	Right. By the way, this is one that I've already written, so this is actually a repeat in my newsletter.

Andrew:	I see. 

Laura:	Another thing you can do is you can repeat content. A lot of people are afraid to do that. Don't be afraid to do that. You can see this is sort of interesting. You saw the note for how I set it myself, but how I wrote it in the headline was how not to show other videos at the end of your YouTube video because embed is jargon. That's how I wrote it for myself, but this how people search for it. 

And then, this is just a video, so if you want to know how to do this, just Google on my blog, how not to show other videos and you'll find this post. You can see, again, I just made a little how-to video, and the reason I thought to do this is because well, one, you can see just from what you said, like oh, why are people doing this? If you notice a problem, then clearly people need a solution and blog about it. This one, in particular, people are asking me how I did it. People are saying, on your video, why doesn't it show other videos on the end?

Andrew:	I see. So, they saw it on your site and they said, "I want to be able to do it, too." I would sometimes just be bothered by that and say, "Why aren't you paying attention to the video itself? Why are you asking me those questions?" I see. 

Let me just make this point to the audience because I think at this point it might seem too frickin' easy. It might seem like we're just breezing through the hard stuff and making it all sound easy, or maybe that your business is too basic. But Laura's business is generating a million dollars a year in revenue at this point, just answering questions that many of us would overlook and think are too simple. She's doing it really clearly, and she's making it very useful.

I could see if I were listening in the audience, I might say, nah, this is too basic for me. I've got a much more complicated business than that or I've got visions of creating something much bigger." No, you're doing it on a regular basis. I talk to your audience all the time. I keep trying to pick up the vibe from people. I had a drink with someone who's a customer of yours. I think she's spending $1500 on one of your products. Do you have a product that goes for $1500, the NBA product, right? 

Laura:	Creating Fame or she might have done B School.

Andrew:	B School, right. She did that. I said, "Look, it's just you and me now having drinks. I'm paying for the drinks here, so you can be completely open with me. What do you feel about this? Do you feel you're being snowed? Do you feel like it's costing too much? What's the deal?" She said, "Andrew, I love it!" She breaks down these concepts in such easy to use ways, and she has an interesting way of explaining things.

I can't even begin to tell you all the reasons why she loved it. And I thought, Well, this really does work. And I'm paying attention with that in mind, with the idea that this works, that it's bringing revenue and that your customers love you. I hope I'm doing a good job here of communicating that to the audience. This stuff really does work. We spent a lot of time making sure that Laura's the perfect person to do this. And I don't want anyone thinking just because it's easy, it's not as complicated as they thought, that they don't pick up on how great this is. 

Laura:	Well, I want to give an example that I give a lot which is that this all seems sort of silly because you know your industry so well. But to other people your industry is an absolute black box. So for me, something that I know nothing about is cars. And when I bought my first car, I knew that I was supposed to do something to it after a year, like that is literally all I knew. I knew that people who have cars take them in after a year and get something done to them. But I didn't know what was supposed to be done. I didn't know what to ask for. I had no language around it. And I wanted to give someone my business, but I felt so stupid picking up the phone and saying, "Do the year thing to my car." That's all I knew to say. 

And finally, somebody sent me a coupon in the mail that said like, "Do you need a one-year service checkup?" And I was like, Yes! That's what I need! Thank you for advertising to me and giving me the ability to pick up the phone and say, "I'd like your one-year service checkup," or whatever they called it. I had no language around cars and maintaining cars and fixing cars. It's something I know nothing about. 

If you own a car business, that seems really stupid to you. You think everybody knows they need to get their oil changed and how often. But I didn't know that. The same thing, a lot of people don't know anything about how to embed YouTube videos or how to re-tweet on Twitter. And of course, they don't because we all started from zero on every single topic in our lives. So there's plenty of topics that plenty of people know nothing about, and this does seem really easy. And I always think, Great. Like let it be easy. Don't try to make it so hard and complicated. 

Andrew:	That's a great example. I feel the same way about cars. I still don't know what I need to do a year into it or afterwards. And, thankfully, the company that I bought my last car from, they would just let me know exactly what to do and when. "Just drop it off. We'll take care of it." I want that. I want someone to just teach me and walk me through it. 

That editorial calendar, you're right. I didn't even think to ever tell anyone. I've been telling people for years how to do interviews because that's what I do. I never thought to say, "Do an editorial calendar." And the editorial calendar is so basic, and it's gold because there's going to be a time when something just comes up in business and you can't think of what to write about. And because you can't think of what to write about because you're stressed about work, you're not going to sit down and write. But if you have that calendar, it holds you accountable. It makes it easy. It gets you started. 

That calendar is huge for me especially since we do interviews. You know, if you have a bad interview, you don't want to think about the next one. But if the next one's already in the calendar, you've got to do it, and you do. Shame on me for not thinking that that was important enough and telling other people about it. I know I could have saved them a lot of trouble. 

Laura:	And also it's great for promotion. If you can get more organized, if you know what you're talking about, then you have the ability to say, "Don't miss next week where this and this is covered." You can schedule social media updates.

Andrew:	Frequency. I do still do daily interviews. I do still publish every single weekday. Tell me more about frequency. What should the person who's listening, who says I don't want to do as much as Andrew does.

Laura:	One, again, you have other stuff to do in your business. I just don't think you have the time to blog every day, too. Andrew, I would tell you not to run the videos so often because I can tell you, as a viewer, I do not have time to watch hardly any of them, and I always like the ones that I watch. But I run a business. I don't have an hour a day.

Andrew:	I know. I hear that a lot. You do too much, Andrew. I listened to Gary Vaynerchuk. It's helped me become a better interviewer, and it's helped me get an audience, but it's also helps me want to lie down on the floor sometimes in exhaustion every so often. What's a good frequency for us to take on? What's more manageable?

Laura:	Think about your audience. Once a week or once every two weeks is what I would suggest to most business owners, but really make it realistic for yourself is what I would say. I would actually say that every day is a bad idea for almost everyone because it'll take too much time away from more important tasks in your business. If you have tried to blog and you've never been able to do more than once a month, just make it once a month and embrace it and let people know that that's the schedule. 

Setting expectations is really important. If you don't blog for three months and your blog is just dead, people think your business has gone under. And especially think about someone like Googling... Let's say you have a car shop and you have a blog that wasn't updated since 2009. Well, your car shop is probably still doing great. You just stopped doing a blog. Well, when I'm Googling you, I'm like, oh this site... Did they go out of business? Their site used to be updated, but now it's not any more. It looks really bad when you just stop entirely. Just take the dates off your blog like KISSmetrics did. It's a great trick. Some people don't know, but do what's realistic for you. Once a week is great, once every two weeks but even if it's less than that, just set a realistic schedule and stick to it.

Andrew:	Let's take a look at your calendar. I want to keep the screen moving to make sure that people have a lot to see. I think it's the far right. You've got it once a week, and earlier I saw another calendar on it. You don't need to turn it on, but you were doing something sometimes on Thursday and another thing on Wednesday. Is there something else that you do beyond putting a blog post every week?

Laura:	Well, those are actually my newsletters, not my blog posts. 

Andrew:	So, you have another calendar for your newsletters.

Laura:	Yep. We use... Oh, let's see. This isn't the browser I usually use, but I have that one password thing now that I don't...where it is in Firefox? Let me just pull up my other browser and see that plug-in. We actually use a WordPress plug-in that I believe is called Editorial Calendar that's really nice. It has a manager in WordPress.

Andrew:	And thanks for putting that browser right on top of the other. That way, we make sure that everyone gets to see this.

Laura:	Oh yeah. Let me make it just right, actually. I edit screen flow as well, and I am familiar with that problem. 

Andrew:	Now, you've got your Chrome browser on top of your Firefox.

Laura:	Oh, you know what? It's in the post section. Oh wait, calendar. There it is. So, under post it says calendar because I have this plug-in. What this plug-in does... All it's doing is showing you your scheduled blog posts as a calendar. So, it's just a different view on WordPress when you have scheduled drafts. So, you can see that my blogging calendar is every Monday and every Thursday. We do guest posts on Monday, and then we do other posts on Thursday, which are sometimes webinar invitations or sometimes like a video for me or a training video. 
You can see we don't have this planned as far ahead of time, but we do have it planned out. Right now, I guess we're looking at July. It says July through August. I'm not sure which. I'm guessing July, and all this is doing is plotting out the different posts. If you look at it, this one is scheduled for the fourth.

Andrew:	I see. Right, because in WordPress if you create a blog post and you schedule it to go in the future, it's just in a list somewhere, and I think it might even be organized based on when it's supposed to post, but it's in a list with a bunch of other stuff. This way, you get to see it on a calendar and et the visual.

Laura:	Then, you click on it to edit it. Something you could do... This is a post we have coming up called, How to decide group coupon sites or write for your small business and my experience with HTML, like my experience doing a coupon in apps HTML. You can just click to edit, and you have the whole post. 

Something that you could do is just put in your headlines and schedule them as WordPress blog posts and then go in and edit and put the actual post, which by the way would be a great way to make sure that you actually write it because you schedule it to go live and then if you don't write it, it's just going to be a blank post.

Andrew:	What's the name of this plug-in?

Laura:	This is called... You know what? Let me make sure that I have the right name for it. 

Let me make one more point first. Another reason why this is so valuable is... So, that Groupon thing, I thought... I had the idea for that because I was reading... I love to read all those Groupon horror stories. Do you ever read those? It's like a small business, and that business went under because of Groupon. I find those really interesting. I thought, if I find it interesting, probably my customers do, too. 

Why don't I do an article about my experience with AppSumo which is kind of similar, but I had a good experience with by the way, a similar kind of service. And so, I had the idea, I wrote the blog post, which this is a written post for me, which is very, very rare, but I had the idea in my head and I wrote it.  

Now most people make the mistake of they write the post they publish. What happens is you have that one week where you have like half with ideas, and you're writing a ton and you're really excited to get them out. And then, you sort of burned up all your blogging juice and your blog is dead for the rest of the month.  


What you want to do instead, once you have an edit calendar, you know where your posts go. Let's say your posts go every Wednesday. Instead of just publishing it live, you write the post, you stick it into WordPress, but then you schedule it to go for whenever the next Wednesday is that you have a hole, instead of just making it go live right then. Now, you can still write whenever you are inspired, but you're scheduling it out for regular content.         

Andrew:	I see. Let's see if you can find the name of that plug-, and we'll recommend that to people, too.   

Laura:	Yeah, it's just called WordPress Editorial Calendar.

Andrew:	Perfect. Great. By Colin Vernon and others. I see now about the frequency, I understand how to publish. Let's talk about writing the post themselves.   

Laura:	My top way to write posts is to get other people to write them for you, is my favorite. And we actually have content through the rest of the year now, in guest posts. Obviously, I have a pretty good size following, but the word has sort of gotten around that I run a lot of guest posts on my blog, which I do. People know that I'll go and spot a guest post, because it likely get run, because I run so many of them.   

After a time, I just sort of established that reputation. We do have this thing on the side bar. I keep pointing at it, but it's showing on the screen. Want to contribute to lauraroeder.com? If you've got an idea for a rocking guest post about running a small business, entrepreneurship, personal branding or online marketing, all the things my customers are interested in, we want to hear from you. Just enter your details along with a short description of your proposed post, and we'll get back to you.       

Andrew:	Let's take a look at that. I want to see what you're asking your audience when they're submitting, when they're offering to guest post. 

Laura:	It's just a regular contact form. We don't even have a special form. We just send them to our normal contact form. And we tell them, enter your details and a short description of your post.

Andrew:	How do you make sure the post fits with the theme of the site, that it answers a question your audience has? I noticed that you break up your topics really well so that people can follow along easily, and they can scan it. How do you make sure that a guest writer does just as good of a job?     

Laura:	I'll be honest with you. For guest posts, we just want anything that our audience will be interested in. I'm not as picky as making sure that they answer specific questions because I rather get a post up every Monday that people are interested in than making it like super targeted for questions that people are asking us.

Our process is people send us a pitch of the idea, and we could ask for the whole post. I guess the only reason we don't is just because I always feel bad if somebody write the entire post and then we reject it, even though they can run it on their blog. 

Andrew:	Yeah, I would too.

Laura:	But that's why we ask for the idea. So they just give an overview, and honestly in the overview, you can tell if someone is a good writer or not. Again, it's just have to be useful. They don't have to be a great writer. They have to be a writer that people can follow and understand, honestly. And you can tell, like, are they coherent in their pitch, which not everyone is. So we just look at the pitch. Someone on my team named Sarah actually does that. 

She looks at the pitch. She says is this, I mean, our metric is, is this something that our audience would be interested in. Do they want to read about this topic? Are they likely to share it? Are they likely to talk about it? And then, if they are we have the whole thing written out.         

Andrew:	And then, they write it and what kind of editing do you do on it? 

Laura:	

We don't do super, like I wish we had a copy editor that worked at my company. We just don't have the resources for it, so Sarah edits them. I mean, not that she's not a good copy editor, she's just not a professional copy editor. It would be cool if we had somebody like running through all of our materials. But Sarah looks at them, I think sometimes she helps them write a better headline. Sometimes, people aren't great headline writers. 

The editing is really basic. We expect them to give us a finished post. So if like they don't have sub-heads, or paragraphs spelled out Sarah would say, "This looks great, adding some sub-heads, break the paragraph shorter." She'll give them feedback, and then we expect the finished post from them, and then she'll do like one final pass. We don't, like I've posted for Copyblogger before, and they rewrote a lot of my posts to make it better, which I was really unhappy about. We just don't. We don't do that; we don't have resources for that.     

Andrew:	Let's take a look at problogger.net because they have guidelines. I have seen that other sites have really clear guidelines on what they are looking for. Problogger.net does that and then there is another site that does it even more than them.   

Laura:	Let's see here if we can find... 

Andrew:	Where do they do guest...Actually, if you look at one of their guest posts, do they even say it any more? No, they don't even say it on the home page when it's a guest post.  

Laura:	It's on here. It's a guest post by Armand Assante.

Andrew:	This is a take-away from me that we should start asking for people to do it. And say, check out our write for pro blogger page, where they specifically say what they are looking for.    

Laura:	Yes, they have a lot of guidelines... 

Andrew:	It's impressive that you can get such on target blog post without having to create something like this.  

Laura:	Well, because honestly, I look at this and I wonder if people even read this. 

Andrew:	Is it too much for them? Now you've given them two homework assignments. One, to read, and then the other, to create for you.  

Laura:	I want to tell you another idea that we're planning on putting in place that we haven't done yet, but I think it's really clever. We got a list from our SEO guy of all the terms that we should have on our blog. Like one of them is like, Facebook marketing, PDF, you know, just different terms that we could be ranking for. What we're going to do is put that list in our guest post listing, like here's topics that we need writers about. Then we have people writing specific to the keywords.

Andrew:	I see. That's great. I was bringing up Rameetsi's site. He's another one. 

Laura:	He's really picky about his guest posts.

Andrew:	He really is, and he's very organized about everything. And he, I think, wrote pretty much a book about how you should write for him. I think it's under the About section.    

Laura:	I love this. He has that No button, called Maybe later. 

Andrew:	Yeah right. It's not no, maybe later for giving his email address. There you go, that's another one. If anyone just wants an outline for how to do it, this is another great one. And it just goes on and on, with details about what he's looking for, and then a format for how he wants it submitted and it works. I think for some guests bloggers, it really helps them to have a clear understanding of how to do it.     

Cool. And kissmetrics.com also accepts blog posts. I notice that's how they get a lot of blog posts up on their site. What about within the company, you do all your own blogging or inside your company you have someone else who does the blogging? 

Laura:	Well, the way we've done it up until now is that a lot of posts are just sort of modified by Sarah. Like if I have a video, there is one I posted recently, a video that I did, and then she, I think, wrote a headline for it, and she wrote bullets underneath of what you'll learn. That's the way that we....yeah, and that's fine....social media marketing what every business owner needs to know. 

Sometimes, I just kind of get on a roll doing videos, because it's really easy for me to talk into videos. This is why I know there's a few I have a sort of on a setting. I just start talking about things and I'm like, oh, I can talk about that, let's do another video. And I'll get all my videos recorded and then like I showed through the editorial calendar, we'll dole them out over posts.  

The way it works in my company is that I'll send Sarah the video, and I'll say stick this in the edit calendar. And that's all my instructions, that's as far as they go. So she'll take the video, stick it into the calendar, this one, I think, I had just already written a headline for YouTube and she just stuck the same one on. And then she wrote a little on this video what you'll learn underneath.

We actually load them on YouTube just because it's sort of a pain to not make them live on YouTube until the date arrives. So people can find them on YouTube sooner. This is another thing. There's all these details. It's like, who cares. People will really get into like...but I can't cue up a video post, because I have to load the video first. It's like, let people find it on YouTube before it's live. It really doesn't matter.         

Andrew:	That's actually, that would be me. I would be waiting the day before. I would look for some website that would teach me how to schedule it, the perfect time. It's really easy to get carried away and try to look for perfection instead of just results.     

Andrew:	Google's keyword search tool. You said that you have a SEO person who gave you a few keyword ideas for what to write about. How can we use Google's keyword search tool to figure out what blog post, either write ourselves or to have someone else do for us? 

Laura:	I think it's a good idea to use the tool for more of topic ideas. I think some people take the tool a little too literally where they'll see Facebook marketing is a good phrase. So, they'll try to write a post that just basically says Facebook marketing over and over again without any rhyme or reason. And also, the terms that are going to come up, unless I'm using the tool wrong, it seems like it's the most common ones that are coming up. 

In my experience when I've had a big hit in search traffic, it's always something that I don't predict which I think is a pretty common experience, like you have one post that for whatever reason Google decides they love that one and they rank you. It not only gets ranked really high, like the how to re-tweet. I wasn't trying to gain a keyword, I just did a post about what people wanted to learn about, and Google has decided, for whatever reason, for now that that's their favorite post on that topic. That seems to be a pretty common story. I think the keyword tool is very valuable but use it as an idea for a topic. 

Andrew:	Can you bring it up to show it to us, to see how you would find keywords based on that?

Laura:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	You just go into AdWords, or actually what you did was you Googled add tool, I think.

Laura:	I think I typed in keyword tool. 

Andrew:	Keyword tool. Thanks. 

Laura:	It has a crazy URL, so you should just type in keyword tool, like I did.

Andrew:	If you go to adwords.google.com, you'll find the keyword tool or you just Google for it. So, there, you're typing in word or phase, Facebook marketing, and you're doing Facebook marketing because that's one of the topics that you cover.

Laura:	It only shows that it's closely related. Wow, I'm really confused by that. Do I type in "the" or do I type in [inaudible].

Andrew:	They really twisted that thing. 

Laura:	I'll see if I can get past the high security here. Here's what Google keyword tool does, if you've never looked it up before. Facebook marketing strategy is Facebook marketing tips, Facebook viral marketing, Facebook marketing for dummies. What I want to point out to people because a lot of beginners will ask me about this, they'll be like Facebook marketing for dummies, great. I just write the headline, Facebook marketing for dummies, and then my post is going to get range for this term, and it's not quite that simple.

Instead, how I would use this is just say, Facebook marketing for dummies, OK, if I were writing the Facebook marketing for dummies guide, what would I include in that post? You do use the words "for dummies" but don't use the post as an opportunity to stuff that phrase in as much as possible, use that post as an opportunity to write about that topic. Does that make sense?

Andrew:	Yeah, it does. One of the advantages that we have over those automated systems out there is that we can spend a little bit of time thinking about how to customize this, both for humans in our audience and for computers over at Google. All right, and I see we can see the level of competition for that keyword, and we also get a sense of how much search action it gets. From there we can find those keywords that will help inspire blog posts. I'm really glad that I asked you to show this. I can see how that's useful. 

All right, next item here on my agenda. The reason I have this agenda is... Thank you, Laura, for spending so much time with David Saint, our course producer, who just put together a really good outline to make sure that we answered all the questions that people sent before the session and all the questions that they're likely to have as they're watching this. 

Next idea here is Laura's ads, and that's the one thing that I actually don't know what we're going to be covering, but we're going to cover it.

Laura:	I know what we're talking about. I think that you should not be advertising for other people on your blog if it promotes your business. This is another thing that when you... It's really confusing because when you're looking at blogging advice, like if you're looking at a site like Pro Blogger, which is a great site that I love, but Pro Blogger is about blogging where the blog is the business. In that case, you want to have ads. That's how you make money, but a lot of people will start a business blog, and they're reading Pro Blogger, and they're putting AdSense which is just... Is just no one making money off of AdSense any more? Why don't I see that any more? Has everyone just given up?

Andrew:	I imagine.

Laura:	OK.

Andrew:	It feels like that's basically the content forms are making a lot of money off of AdSense. 

Laura:	Because that's what I used to always see is everybody had those...because they're so ugly, those terrible, ugly AdSense links all over their site, which I don't see so much any more. But now I see a lot of affiliate ads. What I'll see a lot now is people, generally on that right side bar, you'll see people have a lot of little square affiliate ads that are filling their side bar or sometimes AdSense.

The money that you make from that is so miniscule. Unless you're running a business making money off of affiliate ads, awesome. I don't want to stop you, but if you're like me because I make some affiliate money. Like I said, I have a successful business, and my affiliate money is teeny, teeny tiny. I get those emails from AWeber that I made $.30. It's like, "Congratulations! A $.30 commission," because I'll just put links to things that I use sometimes. 

And so, I just have a feeling that if you have a small business with a small traffic blog, you are not making bank off these sidebar adds that you have. What you are doing is sending people away from your business. You're often sending people to competitive businesses. I see that a lot where they might not be a direct competitor, but it's somebody who has like other products that are competitive or they refer other things that are competitive. As you've seen, I don't especially care about competition. 

I'm using my own niche as an example over and over again, but I do care enough not to send someone to a competitor right from the side bar of my blog. Your ads should be for you for your business. You can still have the ads, but they're for you. I think I'm going to make this better. I don't think this is very good, but my most prominent ad is joining my newsletter. That's the big add on the sidebar. And then you can see below my posts I have...well, I guess it only shows if we're viewing just the one post. But you saw if you're on the stand alone post, that opt-in box. 

And then, I have these banner ads that are for different opt-ins or programs of mine. It picks one at random. So this one's "Twitter in 10 minutes a day." "No more website drama," that's for my "Zero to Website" program. "Twitter in 10 minutes a day," again, so you can see that I have ads on my blog. But they're for my own products, and that's what I think you should do.

Andrew:	I see what you mean. All right. I get that. I think, maybe at first it makes sense to run some ads. But if you've got a product yourself, I can see how that produces so much more revenue. It's targeted towards your audience. It doesn't feel like an ad because you're just linking to another product on your website, and it's something that you can learn from and keep improving. 

All right. Blog post work flow. What's your work flow? 

Laura:	The editorial calendar is the really key part of the work flow because that's where things get sticky, if you're just posting as soon as you have the idea. I'll give you an example, if there's not anything too top secret in here. I'll give you an example of my work flow. The other day I was talking to my project manager, Anne, and we were just chatting about business. And she's like, "Oh, you should do a video post about that." And I said, "Oh, you're right. That would be a really good video blog post. RYKE me to do that." 

RYKE is the project management system that we use, that you can see right here. It's like Basecamp. It's just a different version. And so I'll tell Anne, "Schedule me to do that. Make a task for me to record that video." Here's the one that she scheduled the other day. She wrote, "Do video about great ideas that aren't right for your biz." And so, then she even copied and pasted some notes from our chat. I think we were on Gchat and she just copied and pasted it here. So we make it a task. 

Like for me, I just tell everybody on my team to make tasks for everything for me because that's what I like to do. So I'll say, "Make it a task. Give me a deadline." What'll happen here is now I have the task. On Friday, I'm going to record this video and some others that she assigned me. The way that we do it now which we just started doing is I'll usually record the videos myself on my flip. Like just me or sometimes I'll have my assistant come over and she'll kind of help set up, but usually it's just me. 

And now, what we do is we send the videos to a video editing guy. I used to do the video editing myself which really wasted a lot of time. But we finally got a video editing guy, so I send the movie files to him. He sticks on our logo in the corner. He edits out the beginning and the end. If there's anything else that needs to be added in like maybe I'm going to mention a link and he wants to put in on the screen, he'll put that in. 

He'll upload that to YouTube, and then he would let Sarah know because Sarah's like the content master who manages the blog and the newsletter and everything. He would let Sarah know, "The video is up on YouTube." And then she would grab the video, make it into a blog post, then schedule it in WordPress, and stick it into our editorial calendar. 

Andrew:	I see. Let's go through those steps again to make sure that I've got them all down. You get an idea, what's the next step? 

Laura:	Schedule the idea in your task management system. 

Andrew:	Put it right in a task management. Not in the calendar yet, it's just an idea. Next step.

Laura:	The next step is to create it. So write the blog post or create the video. The next step is editing. For me that's video editing or it could be sending it to a copy editor. And then, the last step is to take the final edited version and schedule it in WordPress using your editorial calendar tool.    

Andrew:	Great. And then, you got it all down. And I like what I, as a person who does this on a regular basis, like about that process, is it breaks it all down. You don't sit down in one shot, feel like you have to come up with the idea on the spot, write it all out, publish it right away, because the deadline is coming up tomorrow. You get it done, but you also get it done in pieces that are much more manageable.         

Laura:	You can see I'm kind of psycho about scheduling, so I have trained myself. When I have an idea, I don't just leave it as an idea, I put it as a task. I also think it's a good idea to have a list of ideas for video posts or blog posts but take it a step further. Instead of just having it as a list, go ahead and schedule yourself to write that post, even if it's three months from now.              

Andrew:	Having it that far in the future is very reassuring. Final section here for us to talk about is what to do with all those eyeballs? You said in the beginning, the idea isn't to get more hits, and it's so easy to get carried away with hits. Because you publish something, you start to feel like...I remember I published and said, "Well, if no one likes it, then what's the point of publishing it?" 

I kept publishing thinking someday, someone will read the new stuff and go back and look at the old stuff, and sure enough that happened. And that I'd get better and sure enough that happened and so on, but I then started focusing just insanely on the numbers and thinking that, that's what really mattered. It's not what matters. You have other goals in mind. What do we do with all those eyeballs and all those hits that's more important than just counting them up in Google Analytics?

Laura:	I think the most important thing is converting them to email addresses. I'm definitely of the school of thought that the main purpose of your site should be to get email addresses.    

Andrew:	Why? Now, we're doing a session on blogging and, I don't disagree, I agree with you completely, but I want you to explain this in a way that would have stuck in my head two years ago when I got started and thought that everything is about blogging and just social media. Why is it that at the end of a session on blogging, we're about to tell people that their bigger goal should be to get email addresses. Why is it so powerful?

Laura:	Email is powerful because you can go to your customer instead of expecting them to come back to you. If you do not have an email address, all the onus is on your visitor, that they have to spend time out of their day to find your site again and to visit your site again. And I don't know about you, but I've been to probably, literally millions of websites, which is kind of sad. I've probably been to millions of websites that I enjoyed, that I have never seen again, like real interesting blog post, people I wanted to keep up with, because I didn't have a way to do it. 

I'm not going to subscribe to everything in my RSS reader. I don't even use RSS that much. I'm not going to go out of my way to be like, "Let's see, I think I'm going to bookmark this site, and then I'm going to check back tomorrow." And then, if they don't have a new post I'm going to check back the day after, and then I'm going to check back again a week later and see if they have a new post by then. It's just too much work for your audience. When I get your email, now you don't have to do anything. I'm emailing you saying, "Hey, here's some valuable new content for you." Gathering email is so important, because you taking the work off of your visitor and putting the work on to you, to share the content.                    

Andrew:	Yeah, you're right. Even if I produced the best stuff today, people might forget tomorrow, they probably going to forget tomorrow. And if I don't publish tomorrow, they're definitely going to forget. And if I don't publish for a week, I'll just be a distant memory. All right, so if the goal is to get email addresses, let's talk about that. How do we do that right?    


Laura:	I have to give a shout-out to Social Triggers, Derek Halpern. You should do a class with him because he actually, recently did a review of my site that we're going to post soon. They gave me a lot of good ideas for how to do this, even better than I do.    

The little box at the bottom that I have and that KISSmetrics has, I got that idea from Derek. That is one, I say, everyone should do. There is no reason not to have this little box at the bottom of your posts. Derek was talking to me about it, and he said it worked so well because if they make it that far, they clearly really love you. Most people that look at the posts are never going to make it all the way to the bottom. The people that do make it all the way to the bottom, they read your entire post right, they want to learn more from you. So always put that box in, why not?   

Andrew:	What plug-in do you use to put that in?

Laura:	I don't know. I have to look that up for you. 

Andrew:	And it can also just be added into the theme itself, but I'm wondering if there is a plug-in that makes it easy. 

Laura:	I'm sure we do use a plug-in. I'll look that up, and we'll include it in the resources that we were mentioning, absolutely put it there. See, now I'm thinking of all these changes that Derek told me to do for my site, some that I will have soon. He said that my search is too prominent, which I agree with, because this is really juicy real estate on a blog, this top right corner here. This is a great place to put opt-in, and go ahead and put the form. You know what he showed me a really good example. Who was that? I think it was on Copyblogger. They have a really nicely done opt-in box in their corner.    

Andrew:	We also saw KISSmetrics had it up in that upper right corner. 

Laura:	That's a good spot for it, and a lot of people put it along the header of the website as well. I think this is really well done, free updates, it's super prominent, you stick your email right there. 

And what Derek pointed out that was interesting to me, is I think most people make RSS too prominent. They still have RSS pretty prominent, which is probably important for a blog like Copyblogger, but you kind of have to know the scoop about RSS to know how it works. They don't have text link, but click here to subscribe. It's like if you already know the scoop on RSS you know to click this little button, but they are not making a big show of how to do it for people that don't know.              

Andrew:	I see. Great point. I keep seeing that. Now that I have noticed it, I see that a lot of bloggers will have the request for an email address on the upper right, and also on the very bottom they'll have the second request for an email address. And this goes for not just people who are professional bloggers like Copyblogger, but we looked at KISSmetrics and as you start looking at blogs of some of the stats obsessed web app creators, you'll start to see it in the same places. What about navigation and site structure?   

Laura:	I don't have much to say about that. Just do the standard thing. Don't try to come up with clever names. Don't make it too complicated. People are looking for About. They're looking for Contact. Give them the navigation that they are expecting.    

Andrew:	It looks like you leave it really light. There is not a lot going on, on the site. You trying to get people who come here to register, and then once they register, you're taking them through an email process, where that's where they often buy. Do you get more customers from there than you do directly from the blog or directly from the blog most?     

Laura:	I don't know. Because I wouldn't really know, because email a lot of it would just show direct traffic, you know what I mean? It's sort of hard to tell. Unless they clicked a link straight from the email to a purchase page, it's a little hard to tell where more come from.

I will say another reason why emails are important. There is sort of this fantasy, especially with information products, that people just come to your site and they buy. It's extremely rare to have someone, so for me I have a database so I can tell where they came in, what they opt-in for. I can see when the first interaction with me is a purchase. That's very, very rare, that the first interaction someone has is a purchase. They almost always are in my system first, and you're almost never going to get a purchase on the first visitor. They're going to, at least be a repeat visitor and that makes sense.

When you think about buying anything, if you looking for like, I need to buy a new battery. I'm out of batteries and I'm going to Amazon and I'm buying new batteries. Even something really basic, we often are like, I'm going to read some battery reviews, I'm going to see if that will help.         

Andrew:	I'll come back. I do that sometimes, too. You're right, I don't know why I do it because really if I'm going to save another buck on a battery, by flipping around on the Internet, I will have wasted my time.

Can you check out a site called springmetrics.com? I wish I could login, but I got a new account, I don't even know my user name and password. It's all in my password manager. I've installed this on my site, and it shows me what path people took to buy. What I noticed is, that often it will say this is their 6th visit on your site, this is their 4th visit on your site, and then I can see throughout what they did, and I can see they came in on the Home page and they bounced in to just, and they bounced away and they back just this specific blog post and so on, and then they bought. You're right, they're just going all over the place and then they're ending up in the shopping cart.          

Laura:	And that's how we get frustrated when we see it with our customers, but when you notice your own buying behavior. I'm just thinking about yesterday. I was buying this top from Anthropologie, but I didn't actually buy it,  I put it in my shopping cart, I read about it, I decided that I was going to get it, but I did not actually buy it for whatever reason. I'm planning on it. I just like to waste more of my own time, I don't know why.  But, that's how we buy.  

Andrew:	Let's take a look at your website one last time. And before we say goodbye, what's the first thing, now the person who's listening to us here, has watched from beginning to end, very often they take notes. I know because they email me their notes, and I love to see that. Let's give them one thing that they can do right away to act on all what they've just learned. What's the one thing that they should do first?  

Laura:	Editorial calendar, that's the most important one.

Andrew:	Editorial calendar.

Laura:	Write down 25 questions that people ask you. Like right now off the top of your head, write down 25 questions, copy and paste them into your Google calendar. Now, you have blog posts once a week for half a year.

Andrew:	That's a great place to leave it. And check out lauraroeder.com, the website's right up there. You'll get to see it as it evolves, and you'll also get to click around on some of the pages and some of the flow, that we just flew through. Laura, Thanks for doing the session with us.

Laura:	Thank you, Andrew. 

Andrew:	And thank you guys for watching us live. We're trying this here with a live audience and you got great fans, including Teresa. Should I give last names. What do you think? You do this.     

Laura:	Teresa Reed?

Andrew:	That's Teresa Reed. She's right in there.   

Laura:	I know my peeps. Hi, Teresa. 

Martha, Stacy, Howard, I see Teresa's in there. I think she just asked a question, but I don't even know how to click on it now at this stage. So I'll just say thank you, and I'll check it out afterwards. Edward, and thank you all for asking questions. I think about 100 questions submitted before the session, maybe even as many as 150. And I use those to help guide the questions which helped everyone else's session.

So thank you all for submitting those, and Laura again, thank you for doing the session with us.       

Laura:	Thank you.