RE: Looking Outside of STEEM to grow your Blog #3 Collecting Email Addresses
I've been doing it for a couple of months now: offering an RSS feed link and a mailing list to subscribe to. For now, still without incentive, but I will probably add one soon.
The problem is that since the by SteemIt itself provided RSS feed is gone, you are forced to use external services - unless you post on WP and cross-post to SteemIt, of course.
I do have WP blogs, but most of my SteemIt posts are written on the platform. (I should really change that habit and start writing from my blog again.)
The fact that I use the platform to write my posts - something most people do, btw - makes I need to rely on a service like FetchRSS which is pretty limited, even when you sign up for the paid version.
IMO, a big part of your mailing list should be automated. But you can't automate a mailing list without an auto-updating feed. I don't have a clue why it is taking SteemIt almost a year to implement a feature that would give authors on here such a broader reach. 'They are working on it'... lol.
I've been in internet marketing for 15 years before I came to SteemIt, and it still surprises me that some of the basic marketing techniques are completely ignored here. When I first arrived here, about 15 months ago, there wasn't even a single piece of info to be found on marketing.
I know have a very common link underneath my signature that shows people they can sign up for my mailing list. I am thinking about adding an incentive to it, which will make the announcement 'more visible'. It would be a more obvious CTA.
I'm really curious to see how the...
- hahaha, only now I see this is one of your posts, @paulag. I should pay more attention. (Can't watch the video right now, so I was just going by the written text)
I wanted to say that I was curious about how the 'early adopters' would feel about offering a mailing list incentive. Somehow I have the idea a lot of them would disapprove.
I could be wrong, of course.
Things might have changed.
A year ago, I got flagged down to rep 11 because I used affiliate links...
Still, I think building a mailing list is very important. However, it is not easy to get that message through to your following...
Good morning @simplymike. You have left some amazing comments here on this post, thank you for adding so much value.
I came across your youtube video last week when i was trying to do something around RSS feeds. there is so much basics missing here on steem its crazy, including the ability to get stats. Trying to attract influences here is impossible when they do not have the ability to see what works and what does not work.
We came to steem around the same time and we experienced the same thing, lack of marketing tools, lack of information and lack of knowledge and now that you mention it, I actually remember you being flagged for the links.
Things do seem to have changed a little. Many people place CTOs in their posts, but most of them are still only for internal steem stuff.
You have way way more experience in this field than me. I would love to see you do a series to help educate the steem users, I know I could learn a lot from you myself.
I'm not a wizard when it comes to those things - I mean, I'm no Jerry Banfield or Joe Parys, lol. It's more like 'in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' - haha, story of my life.
But I do know some basics, and if I don't know them, I'm very good with Google Search :0)
Things have definitely changed since I first got here. I've come across some very interesting marketing-related articles these last couple of months. But like everything here on SteemIt, it's hard to retrace them once the post has reached payout and disappeared into the dungeons of SteemIt.
I wrote a couple of posts on how to reach a broader audience myself, but I can't find them, lol. I only set up IFTTT to save links to my published posts in Google Sheets in May of this year. To find anything I wrote before that time, I need to go digging.
There are so many good posts about the importance of SEO, or with tips on how to generate external traffic. I have a step-by-step guide on how to set up a newsletter subscription service... but as with everything here on SteemIt, after 7 days, you have to start all over again.
There's one post on SEO in particular I can always retrace, because it is also a WP blog post and ranks high in Google (as any SEO-related post should), and I go back there from time to time, just as a little reminder.
http://infobunny.com/steemit-blog-seo-optimise-steemit-blogs/
I took a quick look at @infobunny's SteemIt blog, and he has quite some marketing tutorials on it. It's a shame new SteemIt users never get to see them.
I have been thinking about creating a page on my blog with links to the best marketing-related articles, and then add a link to that page in my header, but I'm afraid it won't serve a purpose. The average user here on SteemIt believes that the internal audience is the limit. If I remember correctly, it used to be one of SteemIt's advertising pitches: 'the audience is already there' or something like that.
I'd love to help educate users, but I think the hardest part will be to make them understand it's important to look further than SteemIt alone.
The more quality articles we can get high in the search rankings, the better for the blockchain.
But if we want to educate users, we must realize we have to start at level -1. The average user has no idea about how search engines work, don't know the importance of keywords, never heard of a meta description... they are basically a blank canvas.
I think it would be an interesting challenge, though. After all, I am a teacher by profession, and I simply love teaching.
I'll continue my page-long comment as a reply on your other comment. As I had plenty more to say on the new ads and the kind of traffic SteemIt generates, but I wanted to finish this comment first.
(If this doesn't help me to rank higher in Asher's league tomorrow, nothing will, lol)
When I started out on Udemy as an instructor, the sales pitch to get new instructors was very much the same as steem. Earn money with little or no experience. Once they onboarded you as an instructor they pushed you to learn how to market your course online. I think its still more or less the same. 99% of instructors started on level -1 and guess who I met there, yep jerry and joe.
now the steem is getting more non crypto people I don't think it will be so hard to get them to understand they need to look further than steemit. simply put, steemit is a limited audience and if we have 5000 active individuals i would be surprised.
I didnt seen @infobunny before - looks like they could also use steempress. Such a pity they didn't get traction here on steem.
with regards finding your posts, I use a data query to pull all mine into a spreadsheet. Im about to head out with the kids now, but when I get back I will pull a sheet together for you, just so you have it handy
Oooh, that would be so cool! No more wasting hours looking for a post I wrote 13 or 14 months ago....
Jerry was a big guy in the B2B internet Marketing biz when I just started. I learned a lot from him and did business with him. That was like 10 years before I arrived here. I was really surprised to find him here, being a big hit again.
But what surprised me even more was the absence of all the other big names I was dealing with day in day out. There's one I found here once, but he was gone before he started.
But even then, so many people on here have been in marketing - professional marketing - before they came to SteemIt... it's really almost unbelievable.
And all of them seem to have left their skills at the door. Lol
I think you might be right about how the non-crypto people will make it easier to deliver the message.
If only I had some stats.... I mean, I have so many systems set up to broadcast my posts to a zillion different places and I have absolutely no idea what is working and what is not.
It would be so much easier if you could just show people 2 case studies that show the difference between an SEO optimized post that was promoted outside of SteemIt, and just a regular post.
Who am I kidding? I don't even know if there would be a significant difference between the two...
lack of stats is a big problem, I actaully was going to do a video on that next week. Maybe someone will do a pull request on steemcondencer after they watch my video....lol if only..... a pull request and changes the the code is way above me so I need to get people on my side.
Im just running that data query for you now. I will DM you on discord with the file