After I heard this, I had a private chat on Facebook with Marcus about this……he said:
Behind the analysis is our massive 7 year historical Research Cloud
I aggregated all domains that used to have at least one ranking in the past on keywords with at least a search volume of 10.
Then I checked how many of these domains still have at least one ranking
Only 11% are left!
(from checking the top 30 results).
I also asked him,
What do you think % would be if you took just “expensive” commercial phrases and checked ?
and he replied
If you take commercial queries probably the number if domains disappeared is higher
So yea, 89 % of websites that ranked 7 years ago in the top 30 no longer rank for anything in the top 30 today. I totally believe this (and love that it’s backed up with Marcus’s analysis from SearchMetrics historical research data)!
I believe that those 89% of websites were sites that were doing “artificial things” (ie, crappy link building) to get those old rankings, and today they are penalized and fried by Google.
More thoughts on things like analyzing backlinks knowing that 89% of sites from 7 years ago are penalized today…
Internally, at Ninjas, we have some tools that analyze backlinks for projects like doing a disavow analysis, or for services like finding common competitor backlinks that we might want to try to get for our clients as well….and in these link analysis’, we look at Majestic domain backlinks to websites, and we cross reference this with how these sites rank in Google using tools like Spyfu and/or SEMRush…specifically looking at the history of the sites performance for keywords in Google…for example, you can have a backlink from SomeWebsite.com which has backlinks to it from 1000 other sites….but if SomeWebsite doesn’t rank for ANYTHING of ANY Value, then chances are, the site has been penalized in Google. Looking at charts from SEMRush or SPYFU for these sites often show that sites like SomeWebsite.com, at one time, ranked for lots of phrases worth lots of money….and then the site got fried by Google, and now it doesn’t rank in the top 10 for any phrase worth any $.
In any link profile which I analyze, about 2/3 of the links are from sites that are fried in Google (sites that don’t rank for anything worth any value in Google. Google has fried a lot of sites…a lot…actually, 89% to quote Marcus and his data….
Here’s also an area where if you’re focused on Moz, Majestic, ahrefs or other sites “Domain Value” you’re being fooled…this is because they’ll show those sites as high value (lots of backlinks), when in actuality, the site is worthless because it’s been banned in Google for ranking for anything of any value. (For example, it may show a moz domain authority of 50….but if the site is penalized in Google, it should be a domain authority of Zero).
So keep in mind that even most backlinks you may have to your site aren’t worth a damn because they’re from sites that have been fried in Google. Seven years ago someone may have had 1000 links….and today only 11% of those links may count because 89% of those sites are penalized, and thus links from them are probably useless as well….the question in analyzing backlinks really becomes, “What backlinks to you have of Value”?
I should notes that there are exceptions…. lets say you have a backlink from a boy scout chapter websites, or Bob’s Rock Hobby Website….they might not rank for commercial phrases, but that’s ok….the ones you have to look out for are the sites who once ranked for a bunch of phrases, but now they do not….part of that 89%.
Does everyone realize that the majority of websites are worthless today?
Do you ever feel that all the work that you put into maintaining an interesting and useful social media stream is not getting the results it deserves?
I do!
I spend hours every week working on our social accounts. Finding great links to share, thinking about the wording of the updates, selecting or creating great images to go with them and then scheduling them.
The problem is that minutes after the tweet go out or an hour or so after the Facebook update goes out they cease to be useful and all that work stops paying off.
Today I want to show you a tool that I’ve been using this year that extends the pay off and makes the work you put into your social media much more worthwhile!
Meet my friend…. Edgar
This time last year after creating a video on how I approached social media I had a number of ProBlogger readers suggest that I check out Edgar – a tool that is great for managing social media updates.
The fact that I heard the recommendation several times within a couple of days made me curious, so early this year I decided to sign up and give it a go.
I was immediately struck by how powerful the tool was.
How Edgar Works
I’ve created a video below that walks you through exactly how I use Edgar – here it is.
For those of you who prefer to read…. in short here’s how Edgar works:
Note: Laura Roeder the founder of Edgar has a special offer for you below that you’ll want to check out if considering Edgar.
You set up two things before Edgar goes to work (and starts saving you a lot of time!):
Firstly – Edgar allows you to create a library of social media updates for Twitter, Facebook (pages, profiles and groups) and LinkedIn.
You save each update as a certain ‘category’ of content.
For example you might have categories for ‘evergreen blog posts’, ‘quotes’, ‘promotions’ etc. This takes no longer than scheduling a normal social media update.
Here’s a screenshot of some of the newly added updates that I’ve put into the ‘ProBlogger Evergreen Blog Posts’ category for my ProBlogger Twitter Account.
Secondly – You then set up a schedule for when you want updates to go out from each category and choose which social accounts they should go out to.
For example you might choose to have your ‘evergreen blog posts’ to go out on your Twitter account at 9am and 9pm every day and for them to go on your Facebook page at noon every weekday. Then your ‘quotes’ might go out on Twitter at 3pm and 3am and your ‘promotions’ might go on Twitter every Wednesday at 7pm.
Here’s a screenshot of part of the schedule of tweets for the ProBlogger twitter account:
You can set up as few or as many slots in your schedule as you like.
Then… Edgar goes to work and uses the updates you have put into your library to create a queue of updates that he’ll then start posting at the times and on the accounts you’ve set up in your schedule. The queue never runs out – it keeps repeating for as long as you leave it set up.
Here’s the next few updates that are scheduled in the queue for the ProBlogger Twitter account.
Once updates go out, Edgar gives you analytics on how they perform in terms of how many likes, comments and shares they got – so you can see what updates work and what you might want to improve or remove from your library.
How I Use Edgar
Edgar works on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’ve chosen to use it mostly on my Twitter accounts at ProBlogger and Digital Photography School and it has completely changed the way that those accounts operate and the results have been fantastic.
Before Edgar both of those Twitter accounts were pretty embarrassing.
I used them largely to:
have automated tweets go out every time a blog post or a job on the Job Board went live (the tweets had no images and were simply a blog title and a link)
the occasional personal tweet (when I remembered to put one out)
promotional tweets every time we launched anything
Both tweet streams had very little in the way of visual content and didn’t have much personality to them. I knew I could so much better and that the result was that we were not getting the traffic or engagement with readers on those accounts that we could potentially have received.
When I came across Edgar I decided that Twitter would be my first testing ground for the tool and began to create my library of tweets an to construct my schedule.
At first I only had a schedule with a handful of slots in it and my library only had 20 or so updates in it (mainly evergreen blog posts). I didn’t want my followers seeing the same tweets all day every day so I started slow.
Gradually over the last 10 months I’ve added more and more content to my library which has enabled me to add more slots to the schedule.
Today I have over 2400 updates in my library and Edgar posts hundreds of updates to different social media accounts for me each week.
I’m still careful to keep adding fresh content into Edgar every week to mix things up and do add extra content in each week manually (more timely tweets, community questions, polls etc) to mix things up – but I’m happy to say that I’m now proud of my Twitter accounts and the resulting extra traffic and engagement that the accounts have had makes the effort of setting Edgar up worthwhile.
An Investment Worth Considering
As I speak about in the video above Edgar does have a monthly fee (starting at $49 a month). When I first saw this it did make me think carefully about if I should sign up for it. That kind of monthly fee is not to be taken lightly. However as I thought about the amount of time Edgar could potentially save me and the increased traffic and engagement that it could drive, I realised it was an investment I needed to make.
In many ways I see Edgar as doing the work that I could have otherwise outsourced to a virtual assistant. But at $49 a month I suspect that Edgar is achieving more each month than I could expect to get from a person that I paid that much.
Edgar will not suit every budget and is probably more suited to some types of blogs than others. My blogs are largely full of evergreen content and so my social media accounts can likewise focus upon sharing that kind of content. If your blog is more news focused or needs to mainly be sharing timely content then it may not be as effective for you.
It’s also worth noting that while Edgar will in the long run save you significant time if you use it to the extent that I have – it does take some work to set up.
I’ve taken the approach to add in a 4-8 updates every day of the year so far. That’s about 10-20 minutes work per day for me to set it up. This has enabled me to get almost all of my evergreen content from my archives into Edgar.
Once I’m finished putting in that archived content I will be able to reduce my daily work in Edgar to less than 5 minutes a day (just adding in new fresh content). So it takes some work to set up – but has some serious long term benefits of doing so.
I would highly recommend Edgar. It is something I’ve been paying for all year and a tool I’ll continue to use going forward as a key part of my social media strategy.
A Cyber Monday Offer from Laura Roeder
Laura Roeder is the founder of Edgar and is someone that I’ve long admired both in her drive and ability to get Edgar developed, launched and used by so many – but also in her own use of social media.
Laura has developed a fantastic guide for effective social media marketing for entrepreneurs which I think makes a brilliant companion to Edgar. It’s called Social Brilliant and it’s all about how to carve out your niche and build a great business using social media.
For the next 5 days you can pick up Social Brilliant training course for $199 and you’ll also get 6 months of Edgar for free (normally $49 a month). That’s $294 worth of Edgar for free when you pick up Social Brilliant for the next 5 days only.
Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate for Edgar or Social Brilliant but Edgar is a sponsor of the ProBlogger Podcast. I want to be perfectly clear that I do have a sponsorship arrangement with Edgar for transparency’s sake but also want it to be clear that I’m a paid up user of Edgar and have been using it (and will continue to use it) every day since January of 2015.
At the same time, would you feel less stressed and more accomplished knowing you’ve written your articles for the week or even the month and all you have left to do is hit the publish button?
In this article, you’ll learn why you should batch your blog content to do just that.
Let’s take a look at how batching your content can help!
What Is Batching?
Rather than rush to create new content on certain days of the week, the art of batching involves writing everything on one day or in one sitting.
This way you don’t have to worry if you completed your post for the day in case things get too hectic.
Here are some ways that batching your content can help you.
5 Reasons to batch your blog content
1. It saves time
We’re all well-intentioned to write a blog or article. Except life can get in the way.
That hour you thought you had free became a meeting or last-minute project. When that happens, you scramble to get your corner written, and in turn, you put out a mediocre article or you just don’t write one at all.
By batching your blog content, it helps save you time because you plan out and write it ahead of time.
2. Reduces stress
When we don’t write our content ahead of time, it can add unwanted stress because it’s constantly on our mind or on our to-do list.
Couple that with the fact that we might be too busy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Not only do you not grow your business, you also lose any momentum you’ve built up because you didn’t complete a task you set out to do.
By batching your content, you won’t have to worry if a post is done since you’ll be planning them out and writing them ahead of time.
3. Keeps you on schedule
At the beginning of every month, you should create your editorial calendar. This is what you plan to work on for the month. It includes projects and content you need to create.
Once you’ve come up with the ideas, it’s time to put them into action. Often times, we get part of the equation right – we do the planning but don’t execute the content.
To solve this dilemma, spend a day planning out what you need to create and the spend a day writing it all.
Not only will this lower your stress levels because it will be done, you’ll also be making progress and building momentum as you move from month-to-month.
4. Boosts your productivity
By writing all of your content ahead of time, it helps you build momentum.
The momentum can propel you forward and give you confidence to tackle other tasks you’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t because they seemed too challenging.
5. Free up time for other tasks
One of the single best reasons to batch your blog content is because it helps you get more done. And we’re not just talking writing more content.
By focusing your energy for one day, you can complete your blog posts for the entire month.
This would give you with even more time to work on other areas of your business. For example, maybe you needed to complete a website redeisn you started or put together more videos.
By batching your blog content, now you have more time and the confidence to help move you forward.
Your Turn
As you can see, batching your blog content can have tremendous benefits for your sanity and your business.
It can also help you build lasting habits that carryover into other aspects of your business.
While these are just some of the benefits to batching your blog content, can you think of any other reasons batching your blog content would help you?
If so, please share them with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below. I would love to hear them!
Christian Karasiewicz is the CEO and Founder of Social Chefs, a digital training site that teaches you how to create winning recipes for success in social media marketing and business. Follow him @ckroks.
I know. We’ve even talked about it too. And Dooce said she was over it. And then Mia Freedman jumped in. But there is no denying the landscape is changing. Ramsay gives us some stats that might get you thinking… and possibly Tumblr-ing…
Are you part of the 70% of content marketers who are now making double the amount of content you were a year ago? Or are you keen to get stuck into the nut and bolts of content marketing? Moz has just released a huge guide (nine chapters worth!) to get you moving. With added Carl the Content Cat, of which I am a fan.
That’s a number not to be sneezed at. The founder of analytics platform CB Insights gives us an insight into how he keeps on rolling in those potential-customer numbers.
I did not know they announced this in October, but I noticed the other day the count had disappeared here, and thought it was something wrong from our end. Twitter says it’s because the wanted to consolidate and simplify their platform… I’m not sure how I feel about this. My poor Tweet button looks empty and sad next to its other populated friends.
Of course there’s backlash, and with backlash comes a hashtag: #SaveOurShareCounts. If you’re annoyed, let ’em know!
Taking a great photo on your smartphone is not as simple as pointing and shooting – as we’ve all learned the hard way. Simple tips will help you look like a pro in no time.
All the Instagram secrets from Pitchfork’s manager of day to day social output across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr, their quarterly print publication, and music festivals, and email marketing – a huge job where she’s learned a lot.
So what are your thoughts? Upset with Twitter? Think blogging’s not dead? How many outbound links are you comfortable with?
Stacey Roberts is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.
December 1st is World AIDS Day. To help build awareness and raise money for AIDS research, nonprofit group (RED) is partnering with Snapchat for a new geofilter that will raise $3 for every snap sent on Tuesday. The donation will come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the filter will go live at midnight PT for the following 24 hours. The three (RED) filters feature words like “World AIDS Day” and “Join the fight.” The Gates Foundation will donate up to $3 million, which should be an easy figure for Snapchat users to collectively reach. In addition to Snapchat, the foundation will also donate $1…
December 1st is World AIDS Day. To help build awareness and raise money for AIDS research, nonprofit group (RED) is partnering with Snapchat for a new geofilter that will raise $3 for every snap sent on Tuesday. The donation will come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the filter will go live at midnight PT for the following 24 hours. The three (RED) filters feature words like “World AIDS Day” and “Join the fight.” The Gates Foundation will donate up to $3 million, which should be an easy figure for Snapchat users to collectively reach. In addition to Snapchat, the foundation will also donate $1…
Do you ever feel that all the work that you put into maintaining an interesting and useful social media stream is not getting the results it deserves?
I do!
I spend hours every week working on our social accounts. Finding great links to share, thinking about the wording of the updates, selecting or creating great images to go with them and then scheduling them.
The problem is that minutes after the tweet go out or an hour or so after the Facebook update goes out they cease to be useful and all that work stops paying off.
Today I want to show you a tool that I’ve been using this year that extends the pay off and makes the work you put into your social media much more worthwhile!
Meet my friend…. Edgar
This time last year after creating a video on how I approached social media I had a number of ProBlogger readers suggest that I check http://ift.tt/1SsBeSK Edgar – out a tool that is great for managing social media updates.
The fact that I heard the recommendation several times within a couple of days made me curious, so early this year I decided to sign up and give it a go.
I was immediately struck by how powerful the tool was.
How Edgar Works
I’ve created a video below that walks you through exactly how I use Edgar – here it is.
For those of you who prefer to read…. in short here’s how Edgar works:
Note: Laura Roeder the founder of Edgar has a special offer for you below that you’ll want to check out if considering Edgar.
You set up two things before Edgar goes to work (and starts saving you a lot of time!):
Firstly – Edgar allows you to create a library of social media updates for Twitter, Facebook (pages, profiles and groups) and LinkedIn.
You save each update as a certain ‘category’ of content.
For example you might have categories for ‘evergreen blog posts’, ‘quotes’, ‘promotions’ etc. This takes no longer than scheduling a normal social media update.
Here’s a screenshot of some of the newly added updates that I’ve put into the ‘ProBlogger Evergreen Blog Posts’ category for my ProBlogger Twitter Account.
Secondly – You then set up a schedule for when you want updates to go out from each category and choose which social accounts they should go out to.
For example you might choose to have your ‘evergreen blog posts’ to go out on your Twitter account at 9am and 9pm every day and for them to go on your Facebook page at noon every weekday. Then your ‘quotes’ might go out on Twitter at 3pm and 3am and your ‘promotions’ might go on Twitter every Wednesday at 7pm.
Here’s a screenshot of part of the schedule of tweets for the ProBlogger twitter account:
You can set up as few or as many slots in your schedule as you like.
Then… Edgar goes to work and uses the updates you have put into your library to create a queue of updates that he’ll then start posting at the times and on the accounts you’ve set up in your schedule. The queue never runs out – it keeps repeating for as long as you leave it set up.
Here’s the next few updates that are scheduled in the queue for the ProBlogger Twitter account.
Once updates go out, Edgar gives you analytics on how they perform in terms of how many likes, comments and shares they got – so you can see what updates work and what you might want to improve or remove from your library.
How I Use Edgar
Edgar works on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’ve chosen to use it mostly on my Twitter accounts at ProBlogger and Digital Photography School and it has completely changed the way that those accounts operate and the results have been fantastic.
Before Edgar both of those Twitter accounts were pretty embarrassing.
I used them largely to:
have automated tweets go out every time a blog post or a job on the Job Board went live (the tweets had no images and were simply a blog title and a link)
the occasional personal tweet (when I remembered to put one out)
promotional tweets every time we launched anything
Both tweet streams had very little in the way of visual content and didn’t have much personality to them. I knew I could so much better and that the result was that we were not getting the traffic or engagement with readers on those accounts that we could potentially have received.
When I came across Edgar I decided that Twitter would be my first testing ground for the tool and began to create my library of tweets an to construct my schedule.
At first I only had a schedule with a handful of slots in it and my library only had 20 or so updates in it (mainly evergreen blog posts). I didn’t want my followers seeing the same tweets all day every day so I started slow.
Gradually over the last 10 months I’ve added more and more content to my library which has enabled me to add more slots to the schedule.
Today I have over 2400 updates in my library and Edgar posts hundreds of updates to different social media accounts for me each week.
I’m still careful to keep adding fresh content into Edgar every week to mix things up and do add extra content in each week manually (more timely tweets, community questions, polls etc) to mix things up – but I’m happy to say that I’m now proud of my Twitter accounts and the resulting extra traffic and engagement that the accounts have had makes the effort of setting Edgar up worthwhile.
An Investment Worth Considering
As I speak about in the video above Edgar does have a monthly fee (starting at $49 a month). When I first saw this it did make me think carefully about if I should sign up for it. That kind of monthly fee is not to be taken lightly. However as I thought about the amount of time Edgar could potentially save me and the increased traffic and engagement that it could drive, I realised it was an investment I needed to make.
In many ways I see Edgar as doing the work that I could have otherwise outsourced to a virtual assistant. But at $49 a month I suspect that Edgar is achieving more each month than I could expect to get from a person that I paid that much.
Edgar will not suit every budget and is probably more suited to some types of blogs than others. My blogs are largely full of evergreen content and so my social media accounts can likewise focus upon sharing that kind of content. If your blog is more news focused or needs to mainly be sharing timely content then it may not be as effective for you.
It’s also worth noting that while Edgar will in the long run save you significant time if you use it to the extent that I have – it does take some work to set up.
I’ve taken the approach to add in a 4-8 updates every day of the year so far. That’s about 10-20 minutes work per day for me to set it up. This has enabled me to get almost all of my evergreen content from my archives into Edgar.
Once I’m finished putting in that archived content I will be able to reduce my daily work in Edgar to less than 5 minutes a day (just adding in new fresh content). So it takes some work to set up – but has some serious long term benefits of doing so.
I would highly recommend Edgar. It is something I’ve been paying for all year and a tool I’ll continue to use going forward as a key part of my social media strategy.
A Cyber Monday Offer from Laura Roeder
Laura Roeder is the founder of Edgar and is someone that I’ve long admired both in her drive and ability to get Edgar developed, launched and used by so many – but also in her own use of social media.
Laura has developed a fantastic guide for effective social media marketing for entrepreneurs which I think makes a brilliant companion to Edgar. It’s called Social Brilliant and it’s all about how to carve out your niche and build a great business using social media.
For the next 5 days you can pick up Social Brilliant training course for $199 and you’ll also get 6 months of Edgar for free (normally $49 a month). That’s $294 worth of Edgar for free when you pick up Social Brilliant for the next 5 days only.
Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate for Edgar or Social Brilliant but Edgar is a sponsor of the ProBlogger Podcast. I want to be perfectly clear that I do have a sponsorship arrangement with Edgar for transparency’s sake but also want it to be clear that I’m a paid up user of Edgar and have been using it (and will continue to use it) every day since January of 2015.
At the same time, would you feel less stressed and more accomplished knowing you’ve written your articles for the week or even the month and all you have left to do is hit the publish button?
In this article, you’ll learn why you should batch your blog content to do just that.
Let’s take a look at how batching your content can help!
What Is Batching?
Rather than rush to create new content on certain days of the week, the art of batching involves writing everything on one day or in one sitting.
This way you don’t have to worry if you completed your post for the day in case things get too hectic.
Here are some ways that batching your content can help you.
5 Reasons to batch your blog content
1. It saves time
We’re all well-intentioned to write a blog or article. Except life can get in the way.
That hour you thought you had free became a meeting or last-minute project. When that happens, you scramble to get your corner written, and in turn, you put out a mediocre article or you just don’t write one at all.
By batching your blog content, it helps save you time because you plan out and write it ahead of time.
2. Reduces stress
When we don’t write our content ahead of time, it can add unwanted stress because it’s constantly on our mind or on our to-do list.
Couple that with the fact that we might be too busy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Not only do you not grow your business, you also lose any momentum you’ve built up because you didn’t complete a task you set out to do.
By batching your content, you won’t have to worry if a post is done since you’ll be planning them out and writing them ahead of time.
3. Keeps you on schedule
At the beginning of every month, you should create your editorial calendar. This is what you plan to work on for the month. It includes projects and content you need to create.
Once you’ve come up with the ideas, it’s time to put them into action. Often times, we get part of the equation right – we do the planning but don’t execute the content.
To solve this dilemma, spend a day planning out what you need to create and the spend a day writing it all.
Not only will this lower your stress levels because it will be done, you’ll also be making progress and building momentum as you move from month-to-month.
4. Boosts your productivity
By writing all of your content ahead of time, it helps you build momentum.
The momentum can propel you forward and give you confidence to tackle other tasks you’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t because they seemed too challenging.
5. Free up time for other tasks
One of the single best reasons to batch your blog content is because it helps you get more done. And we’re not just talking writing more content.
By focusing your energy for one day, you can complete your blog posts for the entire month.
This would give you with even more time to work on other areas of your business. For example, maybe you needed to complete a website redeisn you started or put together more videos.
By batching your blog content, now you have more time and the confidence to help move you forward.
Your Turn
As you can see, batching your blog content can have tremendous benefits for your sanity and your business.
It can also help you build lasting habits that carryover into other aspects of your business.
While these are just some of the benefits to batching your blog content, can you think of any other reasons batching your blog content would help you?
If so, please share them with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below. I would love to hear them!
Christian Karasiewicz is the CEO and Founder of Social Chefs, a digital training site that teaches you how to create winning recipes for success in social media marketing and business. Follow him @ckroks.
I know. We’ve even talked about it too. And Dooce said she was over it. And then Mia Freedman jumped in. But there is no denying the landscape is changing. Ramsay gives us some stats that might get you thinking… and possibly Tumblr-ing…
Are you part of the 70% of content marketers who are now making double the amount of content you were a year ago? Or are you keen to get stuck into the nut and bolts of content marketing? Moz has just released a huge guide (nine chapters worth!) to get you moving. With added Carl the Content Cat, of which I am a fan.
That’s a number not to be sneezed at. The founder of analytics platform CB Insights gives us an insight into how he keeps on rolling in those potential-customer numbers.
I did not know they announced this in October, but I noticed the other day the count had disappeared here, and thought it was something wrong from our end. Twitter says it’s because the wanted to consolidate and simplify their platform… I’m not sure how I feel about this. My poor Tweet button looks empty and sad next to its other populated friends.
Of course there’s backlash, and with backlash comes a hashtag: #SaveOurShareCounts. If you’re annoyed, let ’em know!
Taking a great photo on your smartphone is not as simple as pointing and shooting – as we’ve all learned the hard way. Simple tips will help you look like a pro in no time.
All the Instagram secrets from Pitchfork’s manager of day to day social output across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr, their quarterly print publication, and music festivals, and email marketing – a huge job where she’s learned a lot.
So what are your thoughts? Upset with Twitter? Think blogging’s not dead? How many outbound links are you comfortable with?
Stacey Roberts is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.
Do you ever feel that all the work that you put into maintaining an interesting and useful social media stream is not getting the results it deserves?
I do!
I spend hours every week working on our social accounts. Finding great links to share, thinking about the wording of the updates, selecting or creating great images to go with them and then scheduling them.
The problem is that minutes after the tweet go out or an hour or so after the Facebook update goes out they cease to be useful and all that work stops paying off.
Today I want to show you a tool that I’ve been using this year that extends the pay off and makes the work you put into your social media much more worthwhile!
Meet my friend…. Edgar
This time last year after creating a video on how I approached social media I had a number of ProBlogger readers suggest that I check http://ift.tt/1SsBeSK Edgar – out a tool that is great for managing social media updates.
The fact that I heard the recommendation several times within a couple of days made me curious, so early this year I decided to sign up and give it a go.
I was immediately struck by how powerful the tool was.
How Edgar Works
I’ve created a video below that walks you through exactly how I use Edgar – here it is.
For those of you who prefer to read…. in short here’s how Edgar works:
Note: Laura Roeder the founder of Edgar has a special offer for you below that you’ll want to check out if considering Edgar.
You set up two things before Edgar goes to work (and starts saving you a lot of time!):
Firstly – Edgar allows you to create a library of social media updates for Twitter, Facebook (pages, profiles and groups) and LinkedIn.
You save each update as a certain ‘category’ of content.
For example you might have categories for ‘evergreen blog posts’, ‘quotes’, ‘promotions’ etc. This takes no longer than scheduling a normal social media update.
Here’s a screenshot of some of the newly added updates that I’ve put into the ‘ProBlogger Evergreen Blog Posts’ category for my ProBlogger Twitter Account.
Secondly – You then set up a schedule for when you want updates to go out from each category and choose which social accounts they should go out to.
For example you might choose to have your ‘evergreen blog posts’ to go out on your Twitter account at 9am and 9pm every day and for them to go on your Facebook page at noon every weekday. Then your ‘quotes’ might go out on Twitter at 3pm and 3am and your ‘promotions’ might go on Twitter every Wednesday at 7pm.
Here’s a screenshot of part of the schedule of tweets for the ProBlogger twitter account:
You can set up as few or as many slots in your schedule as you like.
Then… Edgar goes to work and uses the updates you have put into your library to create a queue of updates that he’ll then start posting at the times and on the accounts you’ve set up in your schedule. The queue never runs out – it keeps repeating for as long as you leave it set up.
Here’s the next few updates that are scheduled in the queue for the ProBlogger Twitter account.
Once updates go out, Edgar gives you analytics on how they perform in terms of how many likes, comments and shares they got – so you can see what updates work and what you might want to improve or remove from your library.
How I Use Edgar
Edgar works on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’ve chosen to use it mostly on my Twitter accounts at ProBlogger and Digital Photography School and it has completely changed the way that those accounts operate and the results have been fantastic.
Before Edgar both of those Twitter accounts were pretty embarrassing.
I used them largely to:
have automated tweets go out every time a blog post or a job on the Job Board went live (the tweets had no images and were simply a blog title and a link)
the occasional personal tweet (when I remembered to put one out)
promotional tweets every time we launched anything
Both tweet streams had very little in the way of visual content and didn’t have much personality to them. I knew I could so much better and that the result was that we were not getting the traffic or engagement with readers on those accounts that we could potentially have received.
When I came across Edgar I decided that Twitter would be my first testing ground for the tool and began to create my library of tweets an to construct my schedule.
At first I only had a schedule with a handful of slots in it and my library only had 20 or so updates in it (mainly evergreen blog posts). I didn’t want my followers seeing the same tweets all day every day so I started slow.
Gradually over the last 10 months I’ve added more and more content to my library which has enabled me to add more slots to the schedule.
Today I have over 2400 updates in my library and Edgar posts hundreds of updates to different social media accounts for me each week.
I’m still careful to keep adding fresh content into Edgar every week to mix things up and do add extra content in each week manually (more timely tweets, community questions, polls etc) to mix things up – but I’m happy to say that I’m now proud of my Twitter accounts and the resulting extra traffic and engagement that the accounts have had makes the effort of setting Edgar up worthwhile.
An Investment Worth Considering
As I speak about in the video above Edgar does have a monthly fee (starting at $49 a month). When I first saw this it did make me think carefully about if I should sign up for it. That kind of monthly fee is not to be taken lightly. However as I thought about the amount of time Edgar could potentially save me and the increased traffic and engagement that it could drive, I realised it was an investment I needed to make.
In many ways I see Edgar as doing the work that I could have otherwise outsourced to a virtual assistant. But at $49 a month I suspect that Edgar is achieving more each month than I could expect to get from a person that I paid that much.
Edgar will not suit every budget and is probably more suited to some types of blogs than others. My blogs are largely full of evergreen content and so my social media accounts can likewise focus upon sharing that kind of content. If your blog is more news focused or needs to mainly be sharing timely content then it may not be as effective for you.
It’s also worth noting that while Edgar will in the long run save you significant time if you use it to the extent that I have – it does take some work to set up.
I’ve taken the approach to add in a 4-8 updates every day of the year so far. That’s about 10-20 minutes work per day for me to set it up. This has enabled me to get almost all of my evergreen content from my archives into Edgar.
Once I’m finished putting in that archived content I will be able to reduce my daily work in Edgar to less than 5 minutes a day (just adding in new fresh content). So it takes some work to set up – but has some serious long term benefits of doing so.
I would highly recommend Edgar. It is something I’ve been paying for all year and a tool I’ll continue to use going forward as a key part of my social media strategy.
A Cyber Monday Offer from Laura Roeder
Laura Roeder is the founder of Edgar and is someone that I’ve long admired both in her drive and ability to get Edgar developed, launched and used by so many – but also in her own use of social media.
Laura has developed a fantastic guide for effective social media marketing for entrepreneurs which I think makes a brilliant companion to Edgar. It’s called Social Brilliant and it’s all about how to carve out your niche and build a great business using social media.
For the next 5 days you can pick up Social Brilliant training course for $199 and you’ll also get 6 months of Edgar for free (normally $49 a month). That’s $294 worth of Edgar for free when you pick up Social Brilliant for the next 5 days only.
Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate for Edgar or Social Brilliant but Edgar is a sponsor of the ProBlogger Podcast. I want to be perfectly clear that I do have a sponsorship arrangement with Edgar for transparency’s sake but also want it to be clear that I’m a paid up user of Edgar and have been using it (and will continue to use it) every day since January of 2015.
