Okay, and I think we are live. Hey everyone. Can you hear us? Brian hello? Hey there. Yes, I can hear you clearly. I hope our audience can as well. Okay guys. Please type something in the chat. We still have like three to four minutes before
we start, but we want to test if everything is working okay. There's a group chat there on YouTube. You should be able to see it. And I see Brian just posted a message there. Tell us if you hear us well, if the video
quality is also like bearable. I just checked out the YouTube Live link. And it looks like it's working all right. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, so their messages don't appear in our
chat or something, in the internal Google Hangouts chat? All right, that's interesting. Yeah, so everyone's saying hi to you right
now. If you opened up the actual YouTube stream,
the live stream, you can see all the comments coming through. Yes, okay cool. Yeah, we have ... Hey, everyone. Nice. Okay, so you're checking out the messages
in the YouTube live stream, right? Not in the window that you are communicating
through. Yes exactly. So it's not showing up in our Hangouts. It's actually on the YouTube page itself. Okay, let me open it. Or, probably I should not open it while I
present. I will open it while you'll be presenting
so that not to take bandwidth out of my part. Okay, guys, we still have one minute to go. Maybe tell us where you're from like classic
move of webinar presenters. I can tell you that I am from Singapore. It's 5:00 am here, so if I look like someone
has beaten me, please pardon myself. I just got up like an hour ago. But I'm sure I'll be able to make it. I think you look great, Tim. I wish we could all look that good at 5:00
am in the morning, so you're doing great. Brian Peters. I'm based out of Denver, Colorado, but currently
in San Francisco for a few conferences that are going on this week. Drift and Salesforce are both having their
conferences this week, so big week in the Silicon Valley. Yeah awesome. And I'm pretty excited that Ahrefs and Buffer
are teaming up to do something together. I think this is the second thing that we do
together. First thing that we wrote a blog post for
you guys. I think it was received pretty well. Now, we're doing webinar, and who knows what
next. I like generally enjoy what you guys at Buffer
are doing, or Buffer. What's the correct spelling? Same with Ahrefs actually. So like I'm looking forward to doing more cool stuff
with you. Agreed yeah. Thanks Tim. Yeah, this is a great partnership because
I feel like you're so knowledgeable in SEO, we have the social media content stuff sort
of figured out, so I feel like this webinar should be a good partnership. At least hopefully we'll be able to teach
folks some stuff today. Yeah, I'm hoping so. Okay, so it's 5:01 am here, and we can start. Let me share my screen. It would be this. Okay guys. Please tell me if you can see these slides. I'm now in present mode. And Brian, please confirm that people are seeing
slides. Yes, Tim, you are good to go. We can all see them. Okay awesome. So today, Ahrefs and Buffer are presenting a
webinar on how to build your website traffic with evergreen content and social media. So basically, if you have a blog or if you're
publishing content on your website in some form, you're going to learn a few awesome
tips from us today. So the two presenters are Brian Peters. Brian Peters, tell a little bit about yourself,
what you're doing at Buffer. Yeah absolutely. Thanks Tim. Yeah, so, like I said, I'm working at Buffer. I'm the digital marketing manager and strategic
partnerships director here. Basically that means I do a little bit of
everything: social media content marketing. I host and produce our podcast, The Science
of Social Media, do some advertising. So, yeah, a little bit of everything, as many
small businesses know that you can wear multiple hats throughout the day. Awesome, same with me. I am head of marketing at Ahrefs, but I do
a little bit of everything from hiring to working on our product, to writing articles,
and even doing webinars, as you can probably tell. So this is it for the short intro, I guess. Let's talk about the good stuff. We are actually doing a giveaway. So you can win one of these three Ahrefs accounts,
like six months long. And all you have to do is compose a tweet tagging
Ahrefs, tagging Buffer, and pasting the link to the live stream, to the YouTube live stream
that you're watching right now. And like optionally, you can also include some comments. You can include some feedback of what you're,
because you can tweet like during the webinar with some of your insights, maybe take screenshots
of some slides that you enjoyed and post them to Twitter. And, yeah, you can get a kind of "extra points"
for mentioning my Twitter handle and Brian's Twitter handle. So, yeah, we want some engagement. We want you guys to help us bring a little
bit more people to the webinar, and in exchange three lucky people will get free Ahrefs accounts
for six months. I think it is a good deal. And actually, I have right now, I have a tradition
to give away something during each time I'm talking live because it really boosts engagement
and it really brings more people to the webinar, so it's a win-win for everybody. Okay, now let's start our webinar from a little
bit of credibility just in case you don't know about Ahrefs or you don't know about
Buffer, or you haven't heard of any of our companies. So here's organic search traffic, which means
the free traffic that is coming from Google to blog.bufferapp.com, which is Blog Buffer,
Brian's blog. And you can see that till 2017, just in search
traffic alone, we're not counting like social media traffic, direct traffic, and all other traffic
sources, they were doing half a million visits from search per month. That's half of visits from Google per month. That's a lot, especially considering that
Ahrefs underestimates traffic. It tends to underestimate traffic. I'm sure they were doing more. Like in just a few seconds, I will give Brian an
opportunity to come in, but I see that in January 2018 and further, they almost doubled
this traffic. And right now, they're doing almost 700K from
search alone. Brian, do you want to add anything about your
real traffic numbers? I know you guys at Buffer are like super open
about everything about every numbers, so I wonder like how far off the Ahrefs estimation
is. Yeah. Thanks Tim. Yeah, actually it's not too far off. We're closer to about 1.3 at the moment, on
pace for just over 20 million for the year. So very close, but yeah, it's an honor to
be able to say that number out loud. It's still sort of a dream. Yeah, so guys, as you can see, Brian is not
some random blogger. He's a guy who's responsible for one of the
biggest blogs in our industry, so you're going to absolutely learn some awesome tips from
him. As for myself, this is the organic search
traffic to Ahrefs blog. As you can tell, what we did is we took our
blog from almost nothing back in 2015, and in the last two years we were able to kind of generate
the critical mass and kickstart our growth. As you can see, it looks almost like a hockey
stick. And again, this is search traffic. It doesn't account the social traffic, the
direct traffic, and all other traffic sources. So you can see we're doing pretty well with search
traffic alone. Okay, so how did we achieve that? We achieved that with a combination of smart
SEO targeting search engines, what people are searching for, and strategic content promotion. And SEO is clearly what I'm going to talk about
because Ahrefs is an SEO tool and I'm in charge of marketing for SEO tool. And strategic promotion is what Brian is going
to talk about because strategic promotion always involves a lot of social media sites,
a lot of community sites, and all the other stuff that Brian is going to tell you about. Okay, so let's talk about SEO. I'm sure that some people might not be impressed
with what I'm going to talk about because SEO is like such a popular topic. There are tons of articles about it. There are tons of videos about it and like. It feels like everyone knows already what
is SEO, like just put your keyword in title, content just build a few links, and like what's
interesting about it? And people usually when they come to webinar,
they're looking for growth hacks, silver bullets, magic pills, and all that stuff. But actually, the statistics say something
different about the knowledge of people in SEO, because here at Ahrefs we did a study
of almost one billion web pages with content, just think about that for a moment about the
size of this number, one billion pages with content. And what we discovered is that over 90% of these
pages get zero visits from search. They are not seen in Google search results
for even a single keyword, so they get zero traffic. It's like 90% of content that exists online
doesn't get any traffic from search. And then, if you look at the colors of the pie chart
and compare it to the legend, you will see that another 4.5% get from anywhere from one to
ten visits per month, which is also nothing. So the vast majority of content that is published
online doesn't get any search traffic, which makes me think that SEO is actually a good
topic to talk about. And one more note, at the bottom of the slide,
you can see a link to the blog article on Ahrefs' blog where this pie chart is coming
from. So if you want to read more, you can just later
check out ... I think we'll post the slides in the description of this video once the
webinar ends, so you'll be able to check out the slides again and click all the links and
read all the content that was referenced. Okay, so since 90% of content that is being
published online doesn't get any traffic from Google, how to be in the other 10%? Well, if we look at the big picture, it all
comes down to two fundamental things. First is you have to find evergreen topics
that have huge traffic potential, huge search traffic potential I'd say. And second, build quality backlinks to your content. So let's cover those two things real quick and
see if I'll be able to tell you any good tips. So how to find evergreen topics with huge traffic
potential. When I say "evergreen," I say that is something
that people are constantly searching for. You know that there's search demand. Like every single month people are searching for a
specific question, for a specific issue, and you get a chance to pop there, pop in the
top 10 search results with your page and get some of these people to your website. And it will be consistent, so every single month
you will be receiving visitors who are looking for this specific thing in the search engines. So one of the best things that I know to find
awesome topics, awesome content ideas that get consistent search traffic is to research
your competitors, research their websites, and see where they get their own traffic. So on the example on my slide, you can see our own blog, ahrefs.com/blog, and I'm using our own tool, I'm using Ahrefs, to see which pages
bring the most traffic to our blog. So as you can see, all I need to do is enter
the blog address in the tool called Site Explorer, go to the report called Top Pages, and I will
see a breakdown of pages with estimations, how much traffic these pages are bringing
from search, and also the value of this traffic, the estimated value of this traffic, which
is estimated based on cost per click of each keyword that a page is ranking for, and the
actual number of different keywords that each page ranks for. So as you can see, the page on Ahrefs blog that
brings us the most traffic is about website traffic, as you can tell from the URL, because
the URL is /websitetraffic. The second best article that we have is about
free keyword research tools. The third is about submit website to search
engines. And now you should have, if you're not familiar
with Ahrefs, you should have now an idea of how it all works and how easy it is to pretty
much browse the website of your competitor and see what are their best performing articles,
how much traffic they're bringing them exactly from search, and how many keywords they rank
for. And I'm reminding you that we are doing a
giveaway. You just have to tweet insights from this
webinar mentioning Ahrefs and Buffer Twitter handles and you have a chance to win Ahrefs
account. So other than just looking at the top pages of
your competitors, you can actually click on this little Expand button and see all the
keywords that each individual page is ranking for, which helps you a lot in creating your
own piece of content on the same topic. Because you can see all the relevant search queries
that people enter into Google to find this kind of page, to find the page that would answer
these kinds of questions, and you can pretty much create an outline for your own article
and you can pretty much know what kind of things you should cover in your own article
to be able to answer all these relevant search queries. So this is pretty awesome, and we're doing it
ourselves quite a lot. We always research other blogs in the SEO
industry and find awesome topics that we could cover on the Ahrefs blog. And as you've seen just like a few minutes ago from the search traffic of our own blog, it works pretty well for us. So the next thing, the next best way to find
awesome topics with stable search traffic potential is to use a keyword research tool. We have one in Ahrefs, it's called Keywords
Explorer. But there are like a ton of different keyword research
tools. I think if you just Google for keyword research
tools, you'll be able to find some free ones, some premium ones, but clearly free ones will
only get you so far. If you're serious about your business, if
you have a little bit money to invest, you should probably go for a premium tool, especially
because keyword research is not something you should do like every week. You can just do keyword research, get enough
topics to target like in the next six like to 12 months, and then just cancel the tool probably. I shouldn't be saying things like that, but
this is true. You can do like extensive keyword research and
then capitalize on what you've done. So how this works is these keyword research tools,
and specifically Keywords Explorer in Ahrefs, we have a huge database of the actual searches
that people put into Google. And we have the so-called search volume, or otherwise
called volume as you can see on my slide. This is how many times a specific keyword, a specific
search query, is being entered, is being searched into Google per month. So you can see what I can do is I can search
this database. So if I use any general word, in this case weight
loss or I can just put cats, or I can put parenting, or I can put, I don't know, guns
or whatever, we will return, the tool will return you all the search queries that contain
your words or your phrase in them, so you will get all the relevant search queries with
the target keyword in them. This is called keyword research, and then
you can see how many searches per month each of those keywords get and what is the keyword
difficultly. I will talk about it a little bit further. So then when you get a huge list of keywords,
a huge list of keyword suggestions, you can easily refine it. So I suggest to refine your keywords and look
for great opportunities by using filters. So for example, keyword difficulty is a proxy
to how many backlinks the top 10 ranking pages have. If you're not familiar with the concept, the
more backlinks the top ranking pages have, the harder it would be for you to rank there
unless you get as many. So if you want to rank in top 10 Google search
results, you should see how many backlinks the top ranking results have and build the
kind of the same amount of backlinks, or even more to your page to be able to rank in top 10. So what I did here on the screenshot, I limited
keyword difficulty up to 10, which means that top ranking results don't have a lot of backlinks, so I won't need to do a lot of link building to rank the top results. And then I also, on the right hand, I used the
so-called modifier. I used the word 2018 to see which searches like
people enter with 2018 in them, which would be something fresh, something recent, and
which will show me some interesting results. I could also use some other word modifiers
like, let's say, best or buy or for or probably put some questions like how/why. Actually, we have a dedicated report with
questions, but still you can use all this kind of modifiers to look for search queries
that also mention some specific word and it will help you to kind of filter and search through
the keyword ideas that you have and come up with interesting topics to target on your
own blog. Okay, now listen to me very carefully. Something super important is about to follow,
something that I don't see other SEO specialists, SEO professionals, or should I say SEO gurus,
talk about when they talk about keyword research and picking topics to target on your blog
or your website. So, oh, this slide got corrupted a little bit
for some reason, but still, you should never rely on the search volume alone. And we have a nice illustration for that. So it's like holding an elephant's trunk with
your eyes closed. And you might think that it's a snake, but it's
actually an animal because there's a layer that you don't see when you look at the search
volume. And I'm reminding you just in case you're new
to SEO, search volume is how many times people enter a given keyword, a given search query
into Google. So if you just look at the search volume of individual
keyword, you might make the wrong decision. So here I have a great example. It's like super vivid. We have two search queries, so "SEO tips,"
this is something that people enter in to Google 2,700 times per month, as you can see
from the volume column. And we have another search query, "submit website
to search engines," which according to our data people enter every month into Google
1,400 times. So as you can tell, SEO tips is almost twice
more popular than submit website to search engines. So most people will make an assumption that if
they write an article about SEO tips and try to rank for SEO tips, they will get twice
as much traffic as they would get if they would target topic of submitting website to
search engines, which get twice less the search volume. But this is not true. So what I have here is a report from Ahrefs. We can show you traffic that is coming from
search to any URL that you put into Ahrefs. And as you can see at the top, we have the article
that ranks number one for SEO tips, or at least it was ranking number one at the time
I was doing that screenshot. And it was like a few months ago, to be honest, because
I used it in my article, but still. So the article about SEO tips, as you can tell,
is getting almost 2,000 visits from search, and right below it there's article about submitting
website to search engines, and it's getting 16,000 visitors from search, and the arrows
show why that happens. Because when people search for SEO tips, there
are only so many keywords how to search for it, like "SEO tips," "SEO advice," maybe "best
SEO tips," "easy SEO tips." So there are only 148 keywords that this article
might rank for because there's not so many ways how people would kind of phrase their search request. There aren't so many unique ways to ask for
it. But if we're talking about the topic of submitting
website to search engines, there are just so many ways how people search for it, like
"how to submit my website to search engines," "how to submit someone's website to search
engines," "how to get my websites to search engines." There are tons of different search queries
how to search for the same topic, and because Google will realize that all these searches
mean the same, it will rank pretty much the same pages for all these searches, and that
is why the total traffic coming from all search queries related to the topic will be quite
huge. So as you can see, based on the search volume
alone, SEO tips looked like a twice better topic to target. But if you look at the traffic that is coming
to the actual top ranking pages for each keyword, you'll see that the second keyword, submit
website to search engines, will get you 10 times more traffic if you were to rank for
it in top 10. And here's another research that I want to reference. What we did here at Ahrefs is we studied how
many different keywords, how many different search queries a page, an average top ranking
page, the page that will rank in Google top 10, will also rank for because a page cannot
rank for just a single keyword. I'm pretty sure there are dozens, hundreds,
sometimes thousands of relevant keywords, keywords or search queries that mean the same
thing. and Google can realize that. Google can see that and it ranks the same
pages there. So an average page will rank for over, an average
top ranking page, the page that ranks number one in Google, will also rank for almost 1,000
relevant search queries. So this is why you should always study how much
traffic the top search results get and not rely solely on the search volume of a keyword. Of course, the search volume of a keyword
and total search traffic potential are well correlated, so in general, the more people
search for a certain keyword, the more you can get traffic in total if you rank for it. But there are many, many exceptions and you
might overlook them if you don't look at the traffic of the top ranking pages. And here, actually, is the easy way to look
at the traffic of the top ranking pages. In Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool that I mentioned
before, if you enter any keyword, if you enter any search query, what we are going to do is we're
going to do the top ranking search results, and for every search results, we will show,
for every search results for every top ranking page, we will show you the traffic, the total
search traffic that is coming to this page. So as you can see, these are the search results
for the keyword "submit website to search engines," and right now the number three result
right under "featured snippet and related questions" is an article from Ahrefs. And you can see that our article gets over 5,000
visits from search every month. So by studying the search results for every keyword
that I'm considering, I can see what kind of total search traffic I can get from ranking
in top 10. So this is very insightful, and I want you to
remember it because the search volume alone can be a little bit deceiving. Okay, so this was the first part, the part
about keyword research. I hope I didn't go too deep and my tips were
actionable and easy to understand. And let's talk about building backlinks a little
bit. So actually, the topic of link building is super like
large and complicated. There are tons of things I should cover, but
we don't have a lot of time on this webinar because I have Brian coming up to talk about
content promotion, so I'm just going to briefly talk about three things. I'm going to briefly talk about guest blogging,
outreach, and content promotion. This will go to Brian, actually. So in terms of guest blogging, this, again, this
is a pretty big topic. There are tons of things that I would love
to tell you, and this is why I recently wrote an article on Ahrefs' blog about guest blogging
for SEO, about guest blogging specifically with a goal to build quality links to your
articles, to your website, to help it rank higher in Google. And essentially, it all comes down to two challenges. The first challenge is to find blogs to guest
post for, and the second challenge is to create a lot of content because if you're guest posting,
you want to do this at kind of scale. You don't want to write just three guest articles
and call it a day. You want to write a few dozen because only
a few dozen links will make some visible impact. Like just two or three links won't get you too
far. So if you want to learn more about guest blogging
for SEO, about guest blogging to get links, just google like "guest blogging Ahrefs" or "Ahrefs
guest blogging," I'm sure you will find my article. It's pretty detailed. And if you will have any questions then, you can
just email me or tweet me. I'll be happy to help you understand the parts that weren't so clear for you. Okay, in terms of outreach, this is pretty
... Again, I have another article on Ahrefs' blog which you can easily find by simply typing
into Google "outreach Ahrefs" or "Ahrefs outreach," and you will find this article. It's called How We Use Blogger Outreach to
Promote Content and Build Links. And the outreach has two of its own challenges. The first challenge is actually similar to
the challenge of guest blogging, so you need to find outreach targets. You need to find people who you're going to
reach out to and your message, your email, what you have to say would be relevant to
them. So you have to find relevant people who would
be interested to take a look at your content and maybe then tweet it or link to it or promote
it to their audience in some way. So this is the first challenge, and in this article
I'm covering where to find these people. And the second challenge is to craft an outreach
email, something that they're going to open, read, respond, and if you're lucky, they might
even act on it. And as for crafting emails, I have another article. Like, guys, I'm sorry that I keep referring you
to articles, but I just don't want to give you like any quick short tips and call it a day
because each of these topics requires some like interesting strategies, some interesting tactics,
some interesting tips. So there's an article called I Just Deleted Your
Outreach Email Without Reading and No, I Don't Feel Sorry. And it basically talks about the psychology of
reaching out to people, what you should say, what you shouldn't say, and like what expectations
you should have about them reacting and replying to your outreach emails. So actually, like I will finish saying that there's
nothing like super scientific about guest blogging, about outreach. It's pretty easy, but you need to understand
fundamentals and you need to understand the common issues that people are making when
trying to guest post for others, and when trying to write outreach emails and get on
the radar of fellow bloggers, of fellow people in your industry. Okay, and content promotion, this is something that I want Brian to cover because they're clearly better at content promotion than we are at
Ahrefs because their blog is like 10 times larger. So I'm actually, I'm going to be making notes
myself. I have my notebook here. And just before Brian starts, I will remind you
that there's a giveaway going on. I've used a lot of Ahrefs tools in my slides,
and you have an opportunity to win one of three Ahrefs accounts for six months. That's like half a year. And all you need to do is compose a tweet. You need to mention Ahrefs' Twitter handle. You need to mention Buffer Twitter handle. You need to put the link to the webinar that
is going right now, just copy/paste the link from YouTube, and probably write your short
comment or anything like that because we need a little bit more people to watch this webinar
and to get a little bit more exposure. So, yeah, let me mute myself now and give Brian
the microphone. Tim, that was amazing. We're back. Thank you. Awesome. I think my favorite takeaway from all that
was, you know, I mean there's a lot of takeaways, but particularly not to base all of your, I guess,
SEO efforts on just keywords alone, because I think that's what I do a lot of times is
just, "Oh, let's target the most heavily used keyword and let's write content around that." We got some really good questions, which I
think we'll save for the end, but I'm excited to ask you. We got about three really good ones. But I'm going to go ahead and share my screen
here. Let's see. And, Tim, can I make sure that you can see the
slides? Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. Okay excellent. All right, one of my favorite slides, back
to the beginning. So, you know, Tim, thanks for all the awesome SEO tips there and strategies. I'm excited to go read some of those posts. On the strategic promotion side, that's sort of where I have a lot of fun and I get to share about today, so thanks for your attention and thanks
for being here, everyone. I really appreciate it. So basically, once you have all of this awesome
content by doing all the steps that Tim just outlined, there's still no guarantee that
people are going to visit your website. It takes a little while to get ranked in Google. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to build this library of content. But in the mean time, there are things you
can do that will essentially help to boost your initial results and eventually drive
people to your website. And it's sort of like the flywheel effect, right? You get people to come in through non-organic
means, like social media and referrals and backlinks, and it sort of all builds into this big content ecosystem. But basically this slide's saying even if
you have the best SEO strategy in the world, there's no guarantee they'll come. So you have to have sort of this backup plan
going simultaneously as you work on your SEO strategy to make sure that you're driving
consistent traffic to your website, because, of course, as businesses we all need to survive. So, there are tons of ways, obviously, to effectively
promote your content. I took a lot of these tips ... Brian Dean
is a really great SEO resource. But essentially, you could use podcasts or blogger
outreach or share videos on LinkedIn, or promote your blog posts and videos on Quuu
or create YouTube channel. Ahrefs has a really great YouTube channel. Definitely check that out. But as Tim, we're going to cover two main things
today. These are the two things that have really
worked well for us at Buffer. The first one is amplifying our content with
video, and the second one is advertising with top performing content on Facebook and Instagram. These seem, you know, as with SEO, they seem like easy
things to do, but I think there's some really proven formulas you can use to create videos
and to create ads that drive consistent traffic to your website rather than it being a guessing
game. That's the thing I'm trying to help you with
today is removing the guesswork from your blog promotion techniques and doing things
that I promise will work. So let's dive into a couple. First things first, of course, amplifying your content
with video. So out of all the techniques and tactics, why
video, right? Why is video one of the best ways to do it? There's a ton of stats out there about why
video is one of the most important mediums currently for consumers, but I want to point
your attention to a couple. Facebook, for one, generates eight billion
video views a day on average. Social video generates 1,200% more shares than
text and images combined. Companies using video enjoy 41% web traffic
from search than non-users of video. And all in all, video is the primary way that
people are consuming content in 2018 and beyond, outside of reading content of course, right. So video is super important for your brand to
build a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. Product showcases, it's just a super robust
and versatile way to educate your customers and your potential customers, right? And at the end of the day, what else are we here for than to help our customers solve the challenge, and video is a great way to do that. So this is pretty much the formula that we use. It's going to seem straightforward, but I hope these are some tactics that you walk away with today. So when you're thinking about promoting blog
content on your website, don't guess. Don't guess at which content you think people
are going to like the most. The first way that I find content that we
should be creating, essentially videos for to promote, I go into Google Analytics, I
will sort our blog content by the most page views, and then I will, you know, go back through the
last three months, and then I'll show 100 in the column. And you'll all of a sudden have one to 100, depending
on how much blog content you have, ideas for videos that you can then create for social
media for your website, for your blog to embed in your blog posts themselves, et cetera,
et cetera. So this is what I do first. First step, going into Google Analytics, sort
by most page views, and start ideating and creating lists of topics that would make for
a good video. And you see here, this is what we essentially
did for the last year. And I'll show you some stats about how much video
views this actually produced. But I would take some top blog posts from the
Buffer blog, Top Marketers Guide to 30 Best Books, 17 Ways to Get More Views and Engagement,
Simple Facebook Posting Strategy That Helped Us 3X Our Reach Engagement, and then I would
simply turn those into videos, embed them on our blog posts, send them to our customers
in an email, put them on YouTube, promote them on social media, advertise with them
on social media. What that did was drive hundreds and thousands
of views to the content itself, and then thousands of visits to the blog post itself where people
could read more, right? So these videos aren't an entire summary of the
blog post. They're a teaser as to the content you're
going to get from reading the content. So it's essentially just find the most popular
content, create videos essentially summarizing it. So I promised I'd show you a video. So between June 1st, 2017 and July 31st, 2018,
this is Facebook alone. We drove more than 1.7 million minutes viewed
of our videos that were strictly based off blog posts alone. So when I said before, "If you generate it, it
doesn't necessarily mean they will come," well, a lot of times people don't necessarily
know of your brand yet, or they're , you know, not in a place where they can click on a link and
read an entire article. What videos do is help to supplement your
written content, your website content, into easily digestible pieces of content that people
can view in 30 seconds to a minute. And if they want to see more, that's when you
give them a link to go check out your website for more. So once that all wrapped 1.7 million minutes, which I thought was pretty awesome. So with video, obviously, it's a win-win-win. So studies show that videos and graphics perform
three to five times better on average than generic link posts on social media. Blog posts with videos are more likely to
be shared. And it gives people a variety of ways to consume
your content, sorry, typo there, to consume your content. So, a win-win-win. Videos or graphics are going to get more engagement. Blog posts are going to get more engagement
and shares if there are actually videos embedded on there. And, of course, it gives people a variety
of ways to consume your content. So not everybody wants to read a blog post, some
prefer to watch a video or listen to a podcast. It just makes your content more evergreen
and more robust. So all of that was to say, if you have current
blog content, that's how you create videos to promote your blog content. Now, if you don't have a ton of content on
your website or on your blog, that's okay. And a lot of times you can use the strategy that
I'm about to give you to supplement what Tim talked about on the SEO side of things. So you can, there are other ways you can develop really
great ideas for your blog outside of keyword research, even though obviously keyword research
is one of the best ways to do it. So there's things like YouTube search bar, Ahrefs'
Keywords Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, FAQs on your website, so what questions are
your customers asking you, Quora, Reddit are all really good resources. So let me take an example here. So, what do I mean by YouTube search bar for developing content that will get shared and popular topics for your blog? So the YouTube search bar is one of my favorite
tools. Believe it or not, it's free. All you have to do, similar to Ahrefs' Keywords
Explorer, is you go in and you start typing a keyword that's relevant to your niche. So for us at Buffer, it might be "social media
marketing," right? So I start typing in "social media marketing,"
and YouTube, just like Google, starts to return the most popular keywords around the term
that you're typing into the bar. So right here, as soon as I type in "social media
marketing," I'm presented with five to eight, I would say, really great ideas for topics
that would make popular video content. Then you could take that video content and
make it even more evergreen by producing a piece of blog content, a website page, whatever
it may be. So you can actually, instead of starting with
your blog content to promote your content, or sorry. Instead of starting with blog content, you
can actually start with the video side of things and make your way back towards blog
content. So for this one, I'll give you an example. So, as you can see here, actually this is a real
life example. I typed in "social media marketing," and if
you look down about six or seven down it says, "Social media marketing for small businesses." Well, I went ahead and turned that keyword
into 13 proven social media marketing tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Currently this video has more than 46,000 views. It has generated more than 5,000 visits to
our website, and has generated over 100 plus Buffer for Business leads for us, which I've
eventually turned into customers. And what's great about this technique is that
if you're out of blog content to promote and you're doing all the things that Tim said
with SEO research, there's still more ways to generate really great content to promote
using video. And YouTube's a great channel to do that. We also put this video on Facebook and Twitter
and elsewhere. And so, it's really a full ... Each promotional technique
does not live in a silo. It does not exist by itself. It all feeds into each other, and that's how
you should be thinking about your promotional strategies, especially when it comes to your
website and blog content, is that everything feeds into each other and everything should
be thought of holistically rather than like a single strategy for each platform. You got to think, "Okay, if we create this
piece of blog content, we're also going to want a video. We're also going to want maybe a podcast episode,
or we're also going to want a social media campaign around it." The more you treat each individual blog post
that you write as a mini campaign in itself, the more successful your content's going to
be. That's something that I hope you walk away
is that each blog post really is a mini campaign, or a mini or an opportunity to create a campaign in
and of its own. So don't just create the blog post and let them
go. Create the blog post and create a promotional
strategy around it. And then, of course, you know, again, if you're still
fresh out of ideas after you've created videos for your blog posts and you're wondering what
to do next, well there's, you can start to think about your promotional content in two buckets. And this is what we do at Buffer. We actually have two teams that are sort of  focused on each of these, I guess as you will, buckets, right? So on the left side, we have Create Awareness,
what some people call top of the funnel ToFu content. Thought Leadership pieces, blog teasers like
I talked about announcements, how-to’s, etc. And then you can start to move people down
the funnel, what I'll talk about with the advertising side of things, and you can start
to convert them to actual customers, so webinars, product demos, product onboarding, personal
messaging, FAQs. So, like I said before, think of your entire promotional
strategy holistically and think about how you're going to create videos and create other
types of content that fits into the part of the journey that your customers are actually
in. Because sometimes people aren't ready to buy
from you, right? Sometimes people are thinking about other
products or they just want a specific problem solved now, but they might be open to buying
from you down the line. So think about your, not only put your strategy
into, you know, holistic thoughts, but then you can start to break it down depending on where your customers
are in the funnel. Which is a perfect segue, I hop into the
second part of what I'll be talking about, and that's advertising with top performing
content. And we'll leave some time for Q&A at the end. Tim, I know we got some great questions for
you. So, in 2018, if you're on social media and you're
looking for a really creative way to drive more traffic to your websites, advertising,
as scary as it may sound, is one of the best ways to do so. And, you know, back in 2016, 2015, I think a lot of businesses were like, "Well, do we really have to advertise? We're not there yet. We're still driving organic traffic to our
websites," etс., etc. I think today in 2018, it's becoming less
of "Should we be advertising?" and more of "How much money should we be putting behind
advertising?" The great thing is that you could start
small, and once you see results, you could move up. That's what we did at Buffer. We started with 10 bucks a day on Facebook
and Instagram, and now we're advertising with more than a couple hundred dollars a day to
promote our blog content across social. I want to show some stats. As Tim mentioned, we're very transparent. You can always tweet at me @Buffer or @Brian_G_Peters. I'm happy to share all of the stats with you. But let me just give you a quick example of
how powerful advertising's been for us. If you look at the one I highlighted, Facebook
Buffer Blog Traffic, in the last six months alone, we have driven more than 125,000 visits
to our blog for less than 10 cents a click. And that middle column there where it doesn't
have anything, the 1.215, that's reach. So for seven cents a click, we've driven more
than 125,000 link clicks to our blog and reached more than 1.2 million people. Now, unless you have a ridiculous amount of
organic traffic coming in, I think that as a business I would take this sort of stats
and I would be more than happy to pay for this every single time. Now, once your organic traffic starts to increase,
you could reevaluate your budget. But if you're just starting out or if you're
having trouble finding traction, I don't think there's a much better opportunity for the
cost per click at least, than Facebook is right now. Facebook and Instagram. So let me give you a quick formula for how we
decide which posts to boost and advertise with, and then I'll kind of give you some more tips after that. But essentially, we'll go into Buffer, or into
Facebook or into Twitter, and we'll just go into our analytics section and we'll look
at, okay, which posts have the most engagement and reach, and which ones are like, you know, higher than average than normal? So, looking at just, you know,  pulling up a random sampling from Buffer right now from our Facebook posts, you know, I'm going to identify a couple posts you can see here on the right. So, I'm looking at not only engagement, but I'm
looking at reach, and then I'm looking at engagement per reach, right? So, let me just ... I'll go back to the previous
slide, but looking at this, if you have to identify top performers based on what you
want your goals to be. So what do I mean by that? So at Buffer, we're not necessarily focused on
driving bottom of the funnel conversions. We're more focused on brand awareness and
driving traffic to our blog because we know if we can get people to our blog, then we're
going to convert at a much higher rate than if we would driving more expensive bottom of
the funnel advertising. So going back to this one, okay, posted on 8/29 has 748 clicks. Well, that's a heck of a traffic driver. The one below just had about 274 clicks. So that's another way to, the second bullet point here, that's another way to engage, or to decide on which ones to do. You might find a post that Facebook for whatever
reason, or Instagram gave ... amount of organic reach to. As we've all experienced as businesses over
the last year or so, organic ... But maybe the post has a lower organic reach, but it
has an irregularly high engagement rate, so number of engagements divided by reach times 100. And then that can help you decide, "Okay, well if we want to , you know, increase engagement around our brand, that might be a way to identify top performers." You can also do total number of engagement
or total amount of reach. And if you have conversions set up with your Facebook
Pixel, you might choose to boost score advertisement posts based on conversions, which is a default
obviously for a lot of businesses, but like I said at Buffer, we've realized that instead
of optimizing our ads for conversions, which are very hard to do and require a lot of A/B
testing and experimenting, we actually just optimize for clicks and engagement rates,
and we found that converts actually eventually more than optimizing ads for conversions. The second thing you're going to want to do
when you're advertising is create your ideal audience. And believe it or not, this is actually simpler
than you might think. The first one is based on website traffic. So the more traffic you drive, if you have your
Facebook Pixel set up on your website, the easier it is to obviously advertise to people
who have been there. So let me give you an example. At Buffer, we have a product called Buffer
for Instagram where you can essentially manage your entire Instagram presence, automatically
schedule. So what we'll do is we'll actually re-target
people who have been to Instagram-related blog posts with our Buffer for Instagram app. And that's been highly effective for us. That's, you know, if you're retargeting based on website traffic, that's much better for conversions. Now, if you're just starting out or if you
don't have a ton of traffic to your websites, that's okay. General demographics are also a highly effective
way to grow your brand awareness and also drive traffic to your website based on what
people might find interesting. So, the three biggest things I would say you should
target people based on with advertising: page likes, interests, and locations. So at Buffer, we might target people who are
interested in Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today, Tech Crunch, and then we'll re-target
blog posts at those people, right? So, quickly before I show you some images and
graphics that will help illustrate all of this, probably I'll find best practices for advertising. So advertising requires successful social media advertising and promotion
requires testing your images, testing captions, and testing ... Images, captions, and headlines
are obviously the three most important things, and honestly I would actually put those in
order, so images ... captions, and then headlines so you find the right combination, and
then you roll with it. When you're advertising, if you're familiar
with this, at Facebook they give you a relevancy score for each ad. You're aiming for a relevancy score from eight
to ten for that traffic driving type content. So your promotional stuff really should be in
that eight to ten range. If you're doing more bottom of the funnel
type advertisements, you could be down in the three to five and still be okay. Obviously you can start small and increase
budget with success, and immediately shut down the ads that are not performing. So I think that's the biggest misconception is
that like you have to stick with ads if they're not performing well. I'd say that's, don't do that. Just double down on the ones that are performing long well and don't be afraid to shut off unsuccessful posts. Of course, try to keep an eye on frequency
rates. That's the amount of times that people will
see your ad in the newsfeed. Generally, 2.0 is what I recommend to businesses. If your people are starting to see your ad
more than twice, they'd probably don't want to interact with it. Facebook's algorithm is pretty good with that. And then, of course, evergreen content can
run as long as you want. We have a post that's actually been running
an, we've been advertising with for more than a year. As long as the content is relevant and it's
working, let it run I always say. So... Just illustrating that point. So this is actually one of our most successful
ads, and this is the ad I showed you earlier that has driven actually more than 125,000
clicks to our blog. The caption, make sure it's a teaser. And actually a lot of people have differing opinions
on what a good caption's all about. I think the shorter and the sweeter the better,
and the more you can tease what people are going to learn in the caption, the more successful
it'll be. The eye-catching image is the second most
important thing. We pulled this off Unsplash, so don't be afraid
to use Unsplash. It's a good resource. Or, you can obviously use one of your branded
images. And then of course, the compelling headline is very, very critical, so How To Gain a Massive Following on Instagram. Now, I will say that this, we got to this
point because of everything Tim shared earlier, all the keyword research, all of the studying
what our competitors were doing. We knew that How to Gain a Following on Instagram
was a popular topic, so this wasn't a guess that got us here. This was very much a scientific process that
got to this ad that is obviously performing well, which you can do as well. Again, if you don't have content to advertise
with, we can reverse engineer it. And maybe even if you're advertising on social
media and you're finding stuff isn't working, we can reverse engineer it. One of my favorite tools to do that, and I'll
wrap this up here in just about a minute, Facebook Pages to Watch is by far one of my
favorite free tools online. If you have a Facebook page with more than
100 followers, you go into your Insights tab and you can actually watch your competitors,
similar to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer where you can look at what competitors are generating
in terms of search volume and search terms, same with social media. You can actually see what your competitors
are doing in terms of what's working on social content-wise video-wise topic-wise. So if you actually set this up and you were to
click on, let's say, Business Insider right there, it would actually pull up a list of Business
Insider's most successful posts over the last week ranked by engagement. So it would give you things like caption ideas,
headline and topics ideas, and then it'll give, obviously rank it by engagement. So you could start to pick and choose from your
competitors, "Oh, I see that Business Insider was successful with an Excel Pro sheet, cheat
sheet. Well, does that make sense for my business? Maybe. Even for Buffer that could make sense." So you can start to pick and choose these little ideas around the Internet and you could use it to give you a full picture outside of just
keyword research of what's trending in your industry, what's popular as a topic, because
I think one of the tougher things to do in terms of content marketing is finding not
only topics and keywords that are going to rank well on Google and these other search
engines, but finding topics that are going to be popular on social media too because
part of driving traffic to your website isn't just organic traffic, right? It's social virality and shares and word of
mouth. So that's another great way to do this, Facebook
Pages to Watch. I wanted to end really quickly by saying that
I think Instagram and Facebook Stories are the biggest opportunity for brands and businesses
right now, and I would say get on it as fast as you can because it's still an emerging
platform, advertising platform for businesses who haven't quite figured it out yet. So 400 million daily active users, very
low cost per click. I think it's next evolution advertising. We're seeing cost per click rates as low as
a few dollars. I actually added this right, this little screenshot
in right before I jumped on this webinar because I wanted it to be fresh. But we have a podcast called The Science of Social
Media. If you want to learn more, check that out. We're on iTunes, Google Play. I'm actually the host of it. But we've been trying to grow the podcast,
right, over the last couple months. We started advertising with Instagram Stories. Check out the results so far. So we've actually driven more than 2,000 clicks
directly to our iTunes listing of the Science of Social Media for about 11 cents a click
using a super simple slide on Instagram Stories. And I think this is really relatable for businesses
because it's an easy way to advertise and it's a great way to drive traffic. So keep an eye out for Instagram and Facebook
Stories in the future. They just opened up brand advertising on Facebook
Stories. So that's all I have to say for my section of
the presentation. I'm going to go ahead and exit out here and
I'll let Tim take back over in case you got any last-minute thoughts on the social side. Hey, thanks a lot, Brian. I made quite a few notes here. I didn't know about the Facebook Pages to
Watch, by the way. Probably, I'm turning back my video. Yeah, I didn't know about the Facebook Pages
to Watch. I'm definitely checking this out after our
webinar and seeing like what our competitors and other kind of relevant companies do. One other thing I enjoyed the like personally is Instagram
Stories. Actually, here at Ahrefs in Singapore, Facebook
office is right in our building, right above us on the last floor. And we've recently visited them and they did us a
presentation about their advertising and stuff like this. And they also said that Instagram Stories are
pretty big. So I'm now feeling guilty that we didn't get
to Instagram Stories just yet, but like seeing your results, like how cheap you were able
to get clicks to your own podcast, this is pretty inspiring. And I didn't actually know that Buffer already
works for Instagram, so this is also something that we are your customer, so I think we're
going to use you for our Instagram account too because we recently started to like work on
our Instagram account a bit. You just can't ignore the platforms that are
like so big. Instagram is so popular, you cannot just ignore
it. Okay, so let me as you a few questions that
I've seen in the chat, and then you ask the ones that you've seen. So, there was a question about Instant Articles,
like what about Instant Articles? I'm not familiar with what it is even, so
can you tell us about it? Yeah absolutely. So Instant Articles, for those not familiar,
is essentially Facebook's version of Google AMP, which actually Google just got rid of
Google AMP. So Facebook Instant Articles is their way of
allowing people to quickly load stories on the mobile platform. And if you have WordPress or a plugin, you can
actually just, every time you write a blog article, can you just click Enable For Facebook
Instant Articles and it'll automatically make it available for Facebook Instant Articles. So I recommend just using, if you have WordPress,
some sort of plugin. If not, I think you can actually go the Google
Developer Tools and add that to your website. But it doesn't hurt ranking at all and it definitely
helps. Now, the only thing that's tricky about Facebook
Instant Articles is it's actually not going to show up under your traffic sources because
it loads natively within the Facebook app, which is a little tricky. However, my viewpoint on that is, well, would
you rather have somebody read your article or not read it at all because Facebook's potentially
prioritizing Instant Articles? So it's a tricky stage for businesses. I haven't seen as much Instant Articles today
as I used to, so maybe they're fun phasing that out a little bit, but I would say just enable
it if you can. Okay, it sounds great. The second most popular question, actually
the most popular question was about recommending some tools for creating videos. Like what do you guys use? Yes absolutely. Sorry, I usually include that in the presentation. We had a shorter time today. Yeah. Two things I use, Animoto, A-N-I-M-O-T-O,
is one of my favorite tools for creating super good looking templated videos so you can create an Animoto account and then they sort of give you these templates you can drag and drop text
and video clips into. So Animoto, for sure. And if you're looking for more of the advanced sort of editor tools, you can use Adobe Sparks mobile editing tool, which is awesome. And then my favorite tool for actually creating like really professional looking ads, but it's a lot bigger learning curve, is of course
Adobe After Effects. And so Adobe After Effects allows us to create those
really highly curated, highly professional Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories ads,
which you can't do with the editors, but it also takes a lot longer so. Thank you. We need to tap into those Instagram Stories
for sure. Okay, and the last question that I saw, like which
I have as well and which I'm interested in, is what about creating memes for promotion? Not just your content, but some kind of fun
stories or fun pictures or fun videos. Do you have any experience? Yes absolutely. So, I think there's an ... Actually, it's funny,
because I think there's an entire industry around the meme-style promotional stuff, right? Like there's entire Instagram accounts that
have 40-50 million followers based on pure memes. I think that I caution businesses from doing
that unless you're particularly talented at it. Because I think a lot of times businesses
try to take that route and they don't necessarily have the comedic intuition that feels on brand
that might actually grow this following. So I think if you're particularly skilled at
it and you experiment and you see some success with that, I think absolutely it's a good
strategy. I just caution brands from committing to that
and then not necessarily look, like deeply reflecting on it if it's on brand, if it actually
works or not. So I would say if you want to try something new,
absolutely experiment with it. Try it a few times. If it doesn't work, then don't be afraid to
sort of say, "Okay, we experimented, it didn't work. Let's move on to something else." Yeah, I guess if the KPI of the marketing
team is to get some kind of traffic or to get views or to get engagement, this might
work like a charm and like boost the numbers in your reports. But will it have any effect on the bottom
line because you just entertained people but you didn't really sell them like your product or
your service? That's another question. Okay, that's about it about the social part. Let's see if there were any questions about
SEO, and we're going to wrap it up. Awesome. Yeah absolutely. There's a couple really good ones. So the first one was, and I was curious about
this as well, what do you think about optimizing your content for search engines versus your
audience, right? So is there a difference or a balance in writing
for a search engine versus writing for humans? Actually, I think that right now they are
very much aligned because, from my own experience, I see that search engines, and particularly
Google, like what I feel, I don't have like any evidence to this, but what I feel is happening
is that they actually track the user behavior and what happens after a person will visit
your page. So if people will bounce, if they won't read
what you have there, your rankings will go down. But if people will stick, if they will read
the whole thing, if they will click other links and browse your website, your rankings
will go up. This is called behavioral factors. There's a lot of articles, there's a lot of
information, there's a lot of like myths about it. Like SEO industry still cannot agree if this works
or if this doesn't work, but I think it does. And this means that you should write for people. So whenever someone puts some kind of a search query into Google and opens your article, you should persuade them to stay and you should
give them what they want. This is how like Google will see that your page
has value and this is how Google will make your page climb up in rankings. And again, if you will give people what they want,
they will probably reference your article somewhere. They will send it to a friend, which will
send you more traffic, which also Google presumably might be able to see, or these people will
reference your article on Twitter or even on their website, which means they will link
to you. So by actually catering to people, to the actual readers and not to the kind of machine search engine, you're doing a lot of things right that will
help you to rank better from the kind of the machine standpoint. I hope that makes sense. Yeah absolutely. I feel like that's a great answer, and thank
you. Thanks Tim. Okay, we're out of time, but I got one more
for you because this is a really good one. I want to hear it myself as well. Okay, so if I rank ... so I'm going to give you
an example and I'm going to turn it into a question. So if I rank for best cookie recipes as a search
term in a roundup post of lots of cookie recipes, and within that same post I also rank for
chocolate chip cookie, sugar cookie, and oatmeal cookie, would it be okay to write another
roundup post specifically for oatmeal cookies, or would that potentially damage the ranking
of the original best cookies search term? Does that make sense? This is a very complicated question for a
person who got up at 4:00 am in the morning. So I didn't quite understand. Oh, let me rephrase. I can rephrase. So essentially you have a big post, like a central
hub post, right? Yeah yeah. It's actually ranking for multiple keywords. Yes. Is it okay to then write a separate post for
one of the multiple keywords that it's ranking for? Yeah, it's a good question. I say, again, look at what people want. If people are looking for a specific cookie
recipe and what they get is a list of different recipes which includes the cookie they were
looking for, it might not be the best search result for them. So if you create a page that will specifically
answer the cookie recipe that they were looking for, it would be better, especially if you
will provide a few of these recipes of the same cookie. So the cookie is the same, but you like give them
a few options like a few other ingredients that they could use, or like here's a video
format, here's the text format, I don't know, here's a podcast about it. Like give people choice, but give people choice
within the actual topic that they were searching for. And in terms of a bigger page that would list
different types of cookies, it serves different search intent. So it serves kind of search intent if someone would be
looking for what are like different cookies that I can cook at home, I don't know, DIY cook. I'm not like an expert in pastry and all this stuff,
so I'm struggling to come up with examples, but you get the idea. You need to think about search intent, like
what do people think about when they enter a specific search in Google and what is your
page perfect for? Is it perfect for a list of different recipes
or is it perfect for a specific recipe that people are searching for? This is the general answer that I can give. Excellent excellent. So it's not going to hurt the original big roundup
post, but you're only going to help yourself by creating these other smaller pages, particularly
based on search intent. Well, like I said, eventually this big roundup
post, I think the reason why it ranks for a specific cookie recipe is probably because,
as a roundup, it got some nice backlinks, so Google perceives this as an authority piece. And when Google sees some page as an authority
because it has a lot of backlinks, Google starts ranking it for kind of loosely related terms. But if you will write an article about, like
a specific-focused article on like a specific cookie recipe, and that article will also start generating
backlinks so Google will see that it is a quality article, it will eventually like push out
the bigger roundup out of the search results. If more people will write quality articles
with that specific recipe, there would be no point for Google to rank a roundup post
there. But roundup post will rank for its own terms. So, yeah, always think like what would be best
for searchers? What would be the best search result for people
who are looking for a specific thing and be that best search result. Excellent. Love it. Thanks Tim. Okay, I think that's it for the webinar. I'm hoping that we were able to teach people
some good tips because I tried to bring some SEO people to the webinar for them to learn
about social media marketing, and you brought some people from the social media marketing
field to learn about SEO. So I hope you guys enjoyed the webinar and feel
free to reach out to myself and Brian on Twitter or email, ask us questions. As you can see, Brian is like super open about
what's happening in Buffer. We are at Ahrefs, we are not like 100% open,
but we are also sharing like everything we can, and we are trying to help people in every
way we can. So, yeah, guys, I hope you enjoyed the webinar. Let us know your feedback. And, we'll see you somewhere next time. Bye.