Dozens of students, fellow marketers and entrepreneurs took the opportunity to attend a FREE General Assembly Event, “Growth Hack your Content Marketing with Vincent Dignan” in the Seaport. Vincent, founder of the content writing and marketing company, Magnific, is a brilliant, eccentric and inspiring dude.
All of the content below are his ideas that I just needed to share with the World Wide Web.
Golden Rules of Content
- Scannable
- Repeatable
- Predictable
- Know Your Audience (e.g., Mint’s blog is doing it right)
- Write Something People Want to Read
- Distribute It To Your Own Channels And Measure The Results
- Distribute It To Other Peoples Channels
- S.M.A.R.T Goals (Simple, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic….
- Learn The Basics on www.GrowthHackers.com
- Don’t Sweat The Small Things On Day One
- Be A Mixture Of Mad Men (Take Risks!) And “Math Men” (Google Analytics, Bit.ly)
- Pour More Resources Into The Ones That Work (e.g, blogger outreach/influencer reach)
- Rinse & Repeat (GET EYEBALLS first)
“For whatever industry, start by identifying the problems of the industry your writing for”[Tweet This]
How to Find Content Marketing Ideas
“Write the Damn Thing”
- Choose between your personal brand vs business brand – pick one style and stick with it
- Write Simple
- No more than 25 words in a sentence
- Keep paragraphs short for people’s short attention span
The Best Free Writing Editor: Hemingway Editor/App! Copy and paste your text into this editor and press submit. It will tell you if your sentences are hard to understand and how to simplify your reading.
Introduction to Destruction
- Your introduction is the most important because it will determine if someone reads the article!
- Open by starting right in the middle of an interesting story or give an amazing fact
- Your content should make them forget what they are doing any HAVE to read.
Remember: Facebook is the ultimate distraction and is just ONE CLICK AWAY [Tweet This]
How to Craft an Amazing Body
- Insert Great Graphics (learn Photoshop or pay for quality photos)
- End on a High Note
- Don’t Go Crazy with Links
How to Craft an Ending
At the end of every article, ask the reader to share it. (Why Not?) People love the feeling of sharing useful information to their network and to be known as super resourceful.
How to Get Your Content Seen
- Hustle, Hustle, Hustle > Meet People in Real Life and build relationships
- Get Active on Slack Communities??
- Turn Your Talks Into Blog Post And Blog Posts Into Talks
Cool Content Marketing Tools
Stocksnap.io (Free stock photos)
Charlieapp.com (100s of sources of the person you’re going to meet with; good for meeting editors and journalists)
Email Hunter (find all the email addresses at company)
Voila Norbet (find anyone’s email address)
Discover.ly (good for warm intro from friends)
Snip.ly (attach a call-to-action for every link you share)
iEmoji (Lookup, Convert and Tweet with Emoji)
Reaction GIFs (gifs from youtube)
Similar Web (how many visits a website gets per month)
Social Media Tips
Be Aggressive. Ask influencers for shout-outs or pay influences for shout-outs
“Success in social media is 10% content you produce; 90% how you distribute”
- Get a Following
- Broadcast to Your Following
- Reap the Benefits
- Profit?
BIG TIP: DONT POST ABOUT YOURSELF (your readers do not care). Write about topics people will actually engage with.
It’s OK to steal content. Find a competitor’s article that performs well manually or using a content marketing tool, such as BuzzSumo (paid), Ahrefs (paid) or SEMRush (paid)
Tips for Instagram
- Finding the ideal user is critical
- Brand Awareness is better than Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat
- Look at #hashtag followers use (e.g., niche hashtags)
Tips for Facebook
- Your personal profile needs to be your public profile.
- REMEMBER: No one ever leaves Facebook—from CEOs to interns.
- People tend to reply on Facebook.
- Facebook Loves: Embedded video (#1) > Text (#2) > Pictures (#3) > External Links (#4)
- Getting 10 likes within the first 10 minutes improves changes of recency. To get likes as quickly as possible, tell your employees to like the post.
- Big product launch? Release content at the same time by multiple people
- Spend some money on Facebook Paid Advertising and target custom audiences
- Spaceship.rocks (Get as many highly-targeted leads as you like)
Recommendations for Twitter
- Don’t use #hashtags
- Tweet to five or six people every day who will love what you’re doing
- Only retweet compliments
- Tweet the same article 5 times
- Pictures are most likely to be retweeted
- TWEET MORE (50-100 times a day)
- Audiense (formerly SocialBro)
- Crowdfire/Tweepi (people general follow back)
Finding Twitter Influencers
- Ninja Outreach
- onalytica (Post to multiple linked groups at once)
- Social news sites can bring good traffic
Recommendations for Reddit
- Don’t only share your articles; interact!
- Find the content for all your social channels
Write 25 Headlines; Otherwise People Won’t Click Your Links
- Track it with bit.ly
- Post the headline variations on Twitter (Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday) –which go the most clicks? On Friday, pick the winner and run a paid post on Friday
- Buffer (for timing tweets)
Reaching out to the Press
Share the performance of the individual article you are pitching to reports for social proof.
SEO Tools
- ClickMinded > SEO Checklist
- Photobucket/Flickr/Yelp
- Long-Tail Pro (to find long-tail keywords)
Email Tools
- Mail Chimp = Basic Package (Free!)
- Too Lazy? Revenue.com
- Kickbox.io – Get rid of broken email addresses $10 to verify 1000 email addresses
- Mailstrom (clean up your inbox)
- Wavelength – trade email lists = reach thousands (get on other peoples mailing list)
- Rebump (best way to get your emails answered)
- Quickmail.io – (Cold Email)
- Trello (tasks)
- Stay Focused (Get Off Facebook; Chrome Plugin)
Slideshare of the Presentation
HTML version of Vincent’s presentation slides
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