In the book “Storytelling in business. How to talk to people so that they listen to you, they believe you, they agree with you ”authors Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow share a fail-safe formula to help you build an audience with content.

Good storytelling develops relationships and grabs people’s attention. And historically, the best relationships with consumers have developed precisely with those companies for whom stories work. We’re talking about newspapers, magazines, TV networks, Netflix, HBO. These companies boast loyal followers that the rest of us can only get to for money.

What is worth learning from them? What’s their secret? Upon closer inspection, you can see that they all, in fact, work according to the same time-tested scenario.

We call this “flywheel” system. First, content is created, then the methods of its distribution are determined, after which the stage of optimization of both the first and the second begins.

You may remember Upworthy, a well-intentioned site launched in 2012 by a pair of smart, socially-oriented journalists. Upworthy amassed an incredibly large audience simply by turning our flywheel faster than any other publisher.

Upworthy’s strategy was to take an inspirational video created by someone else but go unheeded by a wide audience, repackage that story into a beautifully designed article with a new headline, provide it with an attention-grabbing photo and intriguing introduction (create), and then share this new version of the story with multiple Facebook users (get across).

The authors of the site then checked if the new version of the story was able to attract more attention than the original (optimized). Have people read the entire article? Have you watched the entire video? Did they share the link?

Thus, the creators of Upworthy tested dozens of versions of similar stories. They came up with new headlines, inserted new photos, and shared content with different Facebook user groups until they found the best headline and the perfect picture (created) to give the story the maximum chance of going viral. An optimized version of the story was sent to everyone they knew via e-mail (reported).

Thanks to this strategy, the site grow traffic five times faster than any other media company in history – because it turned the flywheel faster than anyone else.

But a word of caution: After years of growth, Upworthy’s traffic dropped sharply when the company stopped using its flywheel.

There were several reasons for this. First, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm, blocking Upworthy-style content after dozens of copycats began using its most successful headline templates. As a result, Upworthy traffic crashed in just a day. And instead of optimizing the process with these changes in mind – finding another way to deliver the content to the audience or adapting the strategy for its creation – the site did not adjust.

Upworthy’s abrupt disappearance from the top of the traffic charts is also significant because every good storyteller uses one version of the flywheel (create, communicate, optimize) to build an audience, but only the best of them never stop improving and adapting.

Want some good news? Modern technology makes it possible to do this more efficiently than ever before. Before the internet, creating, communicating, and optimizing required a print press, delivery trucks, and a staff of delivery boys. Today, a laptop and an internet connection are enough.

But now that we know about the flywheel, the real test begins. How to get the most out of it?

Deliver: the target of storytelling

One important factor to consider when thinking about what content to create is how you plan to communicate it to your audience. So let’s focus on the second stage of the flywheel.

There are new ways to connect with your audience every day, so we can’t tell you exactly where to send your content tomorrow. What is known for sure is that the new rules of the media game provide brand owners and aspiring publishers with perhaps the greatest networking opportunity in history.

However, in the world of social networks, everything is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to predict which tactics will be optimal. However, we can give you the formula to help you calculate it.

Roughly speaking, there are two types of companies: B2B (a business that offers goods and services to another business) and B2C (a business that offers goods and services directly to consumers). Typically, their goals fall into two categories: branding (what people will think of you and how) and conversion (getting a person to take action, such as buying something or consulting a salesperson).

Some companies may fall into several categories at once, and that’s okay. It’s just that they will have more difficult tasks than others.

Website

No matter what category your company falls into, the most powerful way to reach your audience is with a website. This is where you control both the branding and the conversion process. Through the site, you can make people see exactly what you want to show them, and so that they have a desire to take the actions that you expect from them.

But with rare exceptions, the entire potential audience of the company does not flock to its website on its own, so you need to look for other ways to reach consumers.

Email

The second most effective way of establishing contact is in the territory of potential consumers. This is their email. This method is also suitable for all categories of companies. By sending an email, you largely control both the branding and the conversion process. The content comes from you and goes directly to the recipient’s inbox.

If you do not have email addresses for your target audience, then you will have to lure them in some way. You will need to catch the eye of potential users in those places where they usually spend time on the Web.

Social network

Where to find your audience? What social networks? What sites? What communication channels does she prefer? What applications does he use?

The category to which your company belongs will help determine this. If it’s a B2B company interested in promoting a brand, by far the best solution would be to find contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and podcasts. If this is a B2B company interested in increasing conversions, then you should probably focus on Google Search, SlideShare, and similar company subscriber lists.

If you’re developing branding for B2C, you can target the same places as B2B, but go for Instagram and Reddit over LinkedIn. If you’re a B2C company looking to boost conversions, then it’s best to channel your energy towards Pinterest and Instagram.

The type of content depends on which channels you intend to use to deliver your content to your target audience. Your stories should match the specifics of the selected channels.

Further, the strategy is simple. Each story should bring the audience at least one step closer to the center of the target. Your LinkedIn posts and YouTube videos should include an email invitation to subscribe to additional content. And top-notch content in your mailing list should draw people to your site – over and over again.

Again, platforms will change over time, but the principles behind this technique shouldn’t.

Once you have an overall strategy for reaching out to your audience, you can start thinking about the content and format of your stories.

Create: funnel story matrix

Just as strict requirements for haiku structure make it immediately easier to compose an impromptu poem, so the parameters of the diagram below help you craft stories to build relationships with consumers in the ways we just talked about.

We call this strategy the funnel matrix.

The funnel-shaped die has two axes. The first one roughly corresponds to the stages of a typical sales funnel: awareness, interest, purchase. They, in turn, roughly correspond to the stages of our target: while your audience uses some kind of digital communication channel, you are trying to attract their attention. Once you succeed, you should interest her in cooperation. And at the stage of communication between a potential client and your sales representative, your task is to persuade him to buy.

Which stories you tell depends on your current relationship.

Optimize: improve efficiency

In the third stage of our flywheel, the winner is determined among the competitors. The winner is the one who, based on in-depth analysis, makes the necessary adjustments in the first two stages of storytelling (create and convey).

The essence of the third stage is to study examples of successful stories, highlight their common elements and the most effective techniques, and then simply repeat what works best.

It’s like endless racing. We put 10 horses on the tracks, according to the results of the races, we select two winners, we get offspring from them, again we select the best from the offspring, and so on over and over again.

But which story should be considered successful? What content parameters really matter?

At the moment, content marketers want to divide all content parameters into two groups: useless and overriding. But in this changeable area, there can be no absolute values.

Content goals should be driven by your company’s business goals and, in turn, indicate key performance indicators (KPIs) that are relevant to you. Take a look at an example of a table from the Content Methodology Practical Experience Report:

We consider the following indicators to be the most interesting.

Number of users involved

The number of people who spend at least 15 seconds viewing an article.

Share

This is also an important indicator. If a person takes the time to share your content with their contacts on social networks, then your content deserves it.

Average time spent on site
The average length of time spent by a person on your content while performing some active actions: scroll, click, select text. (In other words, he didn’t just open a tab to keep himself busy while lunch was warming up.)

Average viewing depth

This indicator tells you what percentage of the article is viewed by users. If they read no more than a quarter of the text, the headline may have misled them and the article didn’t live up to expectations. If the average viewing depth reaches 90 percent of the text, then you are doing everything right.

Social elevator

This indicator is calculated simply: clicks on links in social networks/clicks on the site + 1. It tells how much additional organic social traffic content can bring, and helps to select priority distribution channels.

Average content per user

Are visitors staying on your site to read more than one story?

Qualification of press mentions
This metric measures the relevance of content-triggered press mentions based on the relevance of a particular publication to your target audience and the reach of that mention. We, for example, actively invest in our own research. Not least because they bring us a lot of attention from the mainstream media.

If you are concerned about lead generation, analyze your engagement metrics: as we said before, no one gets married (or buys anything) after a first date. The chances of converting a person (to a life partner or a buyer) will be much greater after a relationship is established between you. In addition, there are additional metrics to help assess the contribution of content to lead generation.

Subscription conversion rate

One of the best indicators of a quality story is its ability to convince audiences to subscribe to our newsletter.

Lead conversion rate

It’s even better if the story convinces the reader to take an interest in the expensive software product.

Lead classification

This metric measures the likelihood of a lead converting to a customer based on a number of factors (company size, name, industry, and other information).

Possible deals

These are people who enter your sales funnel through content on your site and demonstrate a willingness to become a customer. For example, 50 percent of Contently’s customers are users who read our content or download an e-book.

You can go on and on. Trying to determine your favorite content performance metric is like picking your favorite ninja turtles character.

Another good practice is to tag your article (by topic, person, format, etc.) and compare cost metrics with return metrics. In this way, you can understand which stories do not meet KPIs, and which ones overfulfill them. In fact, you can publish dozens of articles of different formats, topics, etc., determine the winners (the most effective), and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

This leads to another important nuance. In many cases, assessing the effectiveness of content by key indicators is needed not only in order to optimize it but also in order to have a reason to report on your success to senior management and get additional resources for more ambitious content projects. The article was prepared by the service great resumes fast.

The post A Fail-Safe Formula For Building an Audience with Content appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Of course, you are.

The content is a crucial tool which is almost used for everything from our business activities.

• Want to expose the business to more audiences, you’ll need the content.
• Want to convert those readers to perspective; you’ll need the content. AND finally,
• Want to sell those prospective any of your products, you’ll still need the content.

Even every single of the marketers and bloggers understood the benefit of using the articles for marketing the business, but they still cannot affect the best practices for content marketing.

B2B content marketing research revealed that 8% of marketers have the daily content schedule, 36% have weekly, and over 11% have biweekly. However, only 44% of the marketers were effective at using content, and 26% were almost at all effective.

Different and typical marketing mistakes involved in implementation caused 26% of marketers as well as you couldn’t affect the marketing purposes—planning and practicing mistakes.

Today, In this post, I’ll talk with you a small part, but will share with you the most important and the popular mistakes which bloggers and marketers do—the wrong ways to optimize the images for content marketing.

Despite compiling headlines that transform, description, and the introduction of the article, the image is an essential and significant key that enhances your content marketing.

It’s the most fact which easily attracts human responsiveness when you’ve optimized it the right way.

Think about when the article appears on social media platforms, Image search, and when a reader is reading it.

What are you thinking regarding your images, anyway?

Obviously, I’m thinking my images are appearing friendly on different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

What’s more, I think the image speaks to the readers and as a result, is clicked by the readers to read the full article.

Once again, I think that the images push the readers to start and finish reading plus turn them to hit the share button and spread the information to their friends.

Do you believe an image can do what I said in the above paragraphs?

Well, You will believe yourself when you will optimize your images correctly and get the better results.

The visual content statistics from HubSpot told that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

73% of content creators plan to prioritize creating more engaging content in 2016, and 55% plan to prioritize creating visual content.

Image Sources: Content Marketing Institute

Although many fortune marketing companies and expert bloggers have proved the imperative of using the image in the article, the majority of the newbie and even intermediate bloggers still keep the popularity of the fault.

During the month, I’ve read a variety of blogs and found several slips which injected a virus into your marketing activities.

AND here, seven wrong ways to optimize the image for your content marketing.

Let’s dive in…

1. You Don’t Even Have a Single Image in Article

This’s the most popular mistake which frequently existed on newbies’ blogs, but sometimes, accidentally happened to the intermediates’ and experts’.

Negligence in finding relevant images for your post will make the article lose much attention of readers.

You, please do not follow this slip, but if you do, I swear to the god your blog will die. For sure, I’m not joking.

The Case Study of My Sponsored Post

The snapshot belongs to a sponsored post on my new blog. It was a low quality sponsored review hence I intended not to promote the post. I skipped the image optimization and placed at all image.

I don’t understand what the advertiser’s opinion, but he might want only a backlink from the post; thus I gave him what he wants.

Hope you or your webmaster aren’t going to follow the advertiser. Otherwise, you’ll waste decent money for running none effective SEO campaign.

I tweeted and shared the article few times to social profiles so the post can get more traffic, was not able to share the content on the sites like Pinterest and Flipboard.

As you can see, the article only has 100+ shares of Twitter (actually, few additional social shares, but JS minifying caused error counting) with no comment.

This below image is another sponsored post.

The sponsored article has almost similar quality but is better than the previous advertiser. It was acceptable to me. Thus I created an image for the sponsored post and promoted several times on social media.

A single image made the post much better than the previous. It got over 1K+ social shares and few comments.

Yeah, it’s much more conversion than the previously posted sponsored post review.

I understand many of you can’t afford to pay for premium image stock, but you can get images for free some sites. Many online tools are available for free and you just to write the title one time, it’s enough to get an awesome image for your blog post.

Not making sure your image is visible on social media.

It isn’t a monster which will kill your blog, but in obvious, will reduce your social sharing and traffic. Sure, You aren’t going to love it.

I’m not sure what the exact problem is. However, through my personal experience, this can happen while saving the post to the drafts.

Once you wrote an article and saved to draft without an image, then you added an image(s) and hit publish button. That’s it. It’s the error time.

You can avoid the problem by just adding at least an image before it saves or publishes button.

In honesty, I don’t have to concern about the error as I’m using Easy Social Share Button Plugin for WordPress. The plugin will automatically fetch an image and description tag when I didn’t optimize.

The alternative way to solve the problem, you’ll have to fetch new images information manually on Facebook Debugger Tool if your social shares plugin doesn’t work.

See the below images:

On sharing debugger, past the URL and hit Debug button. Make sure you saw something similar to the below screenshot.

2. You Don’t Understand the Image Characters

What did you know about the images?

The image is like the human beings. It has different emotions and characters, and different images attract different audiences.

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m right.

Should I suppose to say your audience have different emotional and characters?

If you’re complicated or confused what should I say, you’re tempted to blame JeffBullas as he told me the emotions of the images.

Just repeated what he said. Though.

Whatever. Not only you but to me, it’s complicating. LOL!…

Before creating or placing an image in the article, you must think about your readers—to Identify their characters and emotions.

Anyway, what did you know related to your audiences?

• Are most of the visitor to your website or blog are males or females?
• Are they the college student or professors?
• What kind of images do they like such colors, designed or something else?

It’s much different between male and female or between the old man and adult. The image can’t satisfy the whole community, but a small group. Identify the ideal audiences of the community and offer what they’re anticipating.

The considerable the way to accomplish the purpose is to make A/B testing of the image optimization such as recoloring and use different characters or emotions.

3. Your Image Can’t Even Speak to Your Readers

Mostly, it’s a mistake when optimizing the images for content marketing.

Found a related image or thought it’s a relevant one and then put it in the article without editing or adding any context. You’re wrong if so.

The readers feel relevant to your content unless they understand the context of the image. Please look at the below images:

Which one do you love, by the way?

Just ask but don’t need your answer. Hehehe!…

Find few ways to customize your image such as adding a title or interesting quote on the picture will gain much more attention.

I’m a hybrid blogger so I can easily edit the image using Adobe Photoshop and other photo editing tools.

However, if you can’t use any photo editing software, you should find some online tools such as Canva as it’s effortless to create good images by using it.

4. Putting Only a Single Dead Body in Blog Post

Are you using a single dead body for optimizing your images for the content marketing?

I can’t say you’re completely wrong but in the most cases.

Google is enjoying longer content, and personal experience, the longer content get much more conversion than short content form.

I often publish from 1500 to 5000 plus words, and even 8000+ in some cases hence I do need 3 to 5 images in order push the reader to stay reading.

Also, to get more traffic from social media, the image has to differently appear on different platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Make sure you understood the social media image guidelines for various social media platforms. For Instance,

The most of the users on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+ love landscape while Pinterest’s is preferring portrait.

Did your image dynamically change its appearance on different platforms?

I always create three different demonstrations of the image on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. See below:

Yoast allows customizing the different image appearance for Facebook and Twitter as easy as hitting a social icon on left-hand-side of your SEO panel.

However, Yoast has no option to optimize the image for Pinterest thus you’ll need another plugin. I’m using Easy Social Share Button plugin, so it’s easy to do that. See below snapshot

5. You’re Using Non-Healthy Images

An Image is not useful unless it’s a healthy.

Oh, god! What do I mean healthy image?

Using various visual contents attracts reader’s attention and increases more conversion to your blog, the images, however, aren’t going to help, but damage your conversion rate.

Image puts a heavy stone on your blog and makes it steps like a turtle. The readers aren’t enough patience to wait for your blog loaded and often, switch to the better blog.

Images, in the meantime, damage your blog traffic.

Be sure, your visual content is an engagement machine, but not a heavy stone. Optimize and compress your images to speed up your blog, and the recommended file size should be less than 70kb.

The bellows are tools I used to compress images for my blog,

• https://compressor.io
• https://compressjpeg.com

I’m a serious blogger who very much cares about image optimization so always do it manually.

6. You Don’t Exactly Optimize Images for SEO Content

The marketers claim that Google is now clever, but I don’t think so as it can’t read or identify the meaning of the visual content.

Help Google to read and identify the relevance of images, and if you’ve done this right way, you’ll get extra bonus traffic from Google.

Placing the keyword in the title tag, filename, and image description is enough to be done. However, the marketers do this mistake when SEO image—they only used a single keyword for every image.

The visual content is pretty similar to the article, and it has to be natural. Using variety and relevant keywords in title tag, description, and file name help to get more visible on the result pages. What’s more, it helps the images appear friendly on social media platforms when the readers share your content.

7. Some Images Can Make You a Criminal

Another experience when my AdSense account was disabled in 2013, 2011, or 2010. Maybe, I’m not sure.

Two possible problems involved in disabling.

First, I placed double 360 x 280 ads over the post hence it made no white space on the mobile device. Second, I used free Google images with no copyright information, so I accidentally published copyright materials.

Recommended:

How to monetize Google Adsense ads perfectly?

I didn’t even think that image was a big problem, but actually, it was.

You can feel free to find images from Google, but those have no copyright information. If you don’t want later to contact a lawyer, please find reliable image sources for your content.

Here is a list of sites to find free stock images for your blog and website.

Conclusion

Research great topics and write educational or asset contents for the reader is what you must do for getting more traffic to your blog. However, making your content relevant to the users and push them to stay on reading is quite challenging. Create a variety of resources and visuals for your post to make the readers feel relevant and want to continue reading your content.

Do the image optimization properly, such as compress and using relevant keywords in images helps to enhance SEO content, so Google and readers will appreciate your blog. What’s more, using CTA such as quote and friendly text to ask the reader to share and tweet the content will bring much more traffic.

Everything came with pros and cons. An image can help drive more traffic, but also can damage your business. You might need a lawyer or shut down your blog, so please be careful in choosing the images for your content. If possible, spend some budget for images stock or equipment to develop better visual aid.

I’m sucking now!…

The above are the ways for how I optimize the images for content marketing but thought there must be a hundred ways that I didn’t experience.

By the way, you didn’t tell me how you work for creating visual content. Hit me a comment, I’ll appreciate in exchanging knowledge with you.

Oh!… wait. Do you love what I wrote here?

If you do, why don’t hit a share button to let your friend know this asset content? AND please subscribe the blog or follow me via social profiles to get more useful contents like this.

The post 7 Wrong Ways To Optimize Images For Your Content Marketing appeared first on Tricky Enough.