This is a guest post written by Alleli Aspili.

In order to track the performance of your social media efforts, conducting regular social media analysis is a must. One way brands track their campaigns is by using memorable, unique, and relevant hashtags.

Hashtags are used to find and follow discussions about brands, promotions, or events. If managed correctly, hashtags will help you track how many people are participating in your campaign and what they are saying about your brand. To help you manage hashtags effectively, here are some tracking tools that you can use.

RiteTag

If you want to find the perfect hashtag for your campaign, use RiteTag. It provides actionable engagement analytics on hashtags and gives you tips to improve an update in progress before you send it out through its social media optimization check-up. Its browser extension allows you to schedule updates with your optimized hashtags wherever you are.

Hashtagify

With Hashtagify, you will be able to find the best hashtags for your needs by having access to 46,363,710 (and counting) Twitter hashtags based on different metrics. What’s great about it is that it helps you understand how closely different hashtags are linked to each other and enables you to identify who the top influencers are.

RebelMouse

RebelMouse is a social enterprise CMS that helps brands create and curate original content that grow audiences, increase engagement and build loyal and lasting communities. It’s best if you’re running a campaign on multiple platforms. It allows you to fetch hashtag conversations and features Google Analytics, social sharing, RSS feeds, content moderation and a custom domain feature that lets you embed RebelMouse to your website.

Tagboard

Tagboard allows users to search, select, and display relevant text, video and image posts around a hashtag from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Vine. It further allows you to select specific posts to feature on your website, in a TV broadcast or on large displays.

Talkwalker

If you’re looking to do more in-depth analysis rather than just track hashtags, Talkwalker is the one to use. It provides fast and efficient social media reporting using high-quality proprietary data for more accurate social media listening, including emotions, key influencers and a variety of demographic data. It lets you benchmark your brand against competitors too.

Trendsmap

Use Trendsmap if you want to get a bird’s eye view of what the world is talking about. You can zoom in and out of the map and instantly see the most popular hashtags in every country in the world. This is great if you wish to understand how certain hashtags are being used globally.

Twitter Binder

Twitter Binder is a tool used specifically for Twitter allows you to analyze, classify, report and share your hashtags on Twitter. You simply have to enter a hashtag and the platform will provide you with a report of actual tweets, retweets, conversation, associated images and links related to your hashtag.

Conclusion

Managing hashtags is an important task in managing and maintaining social media campaigns. Using these tools will help you determine what works and what doesn’t so that you can develop better campaigns that will generate more business for your brand.

Guest Post Written By Alleli Aspili

I am Alleli, a Senior Specialist for Business Development in Infinit Outsourcing, Inc. (Infinit-O), an ISO-certified BPO company that caters inbound call center, finance and accounting and healthcare outsourcing to SMEs. Responsible for maintaining Infinit-O (http://www.infinit-o.com/), Infinit Contact, Infinit Healthcare, Infinit Datum and Infinit Accounting online brand and content.

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on July 14, 2015.

7 Best Tools To Track Your Hashtags On Social Media was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you should include a relevant blog image for all of your posts.

Images are helpful all around — they help with engagement, shares, and even Google rankings. I’ve even talked about using images in tweets before to boost performance.

I’ve accumulated tons of links to great free blog image resources for years. Unfortunately, these links have been scattered everywhere:

• Bookmarks (in several browsers)
• Evernote notes
• Emailed links to myself
• Even written physical sticky notes

Then last weekend my wife was assigned the task of creating a brochure for work. She asked me about the tool that I like to use for Twitter images.

I started to answer her, but then I realized that there were just too many good resources to leave her with just one.

So instead I started compiling my master list of all my favorite blog / social media / brochure / invitation / etc. image tools and resources.

After I had gathered all the links together, I simply emailed them to her. But then I realized that it was an awesome list, one worthy of being shared with you, here.

The Ultimate List of Blog Image Tools

So here it is, my ultimate list of image creation tools, image editors, free stock imagery sources, infographic creators, some miscellaneous resources, and the one premium tool that’s actually worth paying for. This isn’t just another list of every single image creation tool out there. These are the services and resources that I’ve hand picked. These have stood the test of time (at least until Saturday, May 16, 2015) and are the easiest to use.

All-In-One Image Creation Tools

Canva

Canva is awesome. I’ve even talked about it before as one of my favorite blogging tools. It’s been my go-to tool for creating blog and social media images for a long time now.

It’s on a sort of “freemium” model, with the option to buy images within the platform for $1.00. However, for as long as I’ve been using it, I still haven’t spent any money on it (mostly thanks to the resources below).

Canva has a very simple user interface. You can choose a template then drag icons, text, backgrounds, and even your own images onto your template.

It comes packed with tons of fonts and style options so that you can create a unique image for every blog post.

If you’re not already using Canva, I highly suggest you start. It’s awesome, it’s free, and it will make your blogging so much easier.

Pablo

One of Buffer’s side projects, Pablo is a new all-in-one image creator.

Pablo’s options are limited purposely, in order to help you keep image creation to the necessities. The tagline for Pablo couldn’t be more fitting — “Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds”.

You can add headline text, a sub-headline, logo, and a background photo. There are a few minimalistic styling options, but nothing too crazy.

Everything here is about creating a simple image really fast.

Photo / Image Editors

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a really easy to use free online photo editor. To get started you select what you want to do:

• Edit
• Touch Up
• Design
• Collage

It doesn’t really matter which option you select, as you’ll just start off in a related area of the editor interface.

Once you’re in the interface, you’ll see dozens of options for basic edits, effects, touch ups, text, overlays, frames, textures, and themes. There are so many things you can do in PicMonkey, there’s no excuse for not making your images the best they can be.

Pixlr

Pixlr is a more advanced online photo editor. It has options for layers, filters, smart “wand” selections, and more. If you’ve used apps like Photoshop or Pixelmator before, you’ll feel right at home with Pixlr.

While this app does have a bit of a learning curve compared to Canva or PicMonkey, it also has a lot of power, enabling more advanced image editing.

Free Stock Images

TheStocks.im

The Stocks is basically a stock image aggregator.

You navigate different stock imagery sites using the links on the left bar. You might notice that some of the links there are also included below, as there is some overlap.

Overall, it’s a great place to find lots of different stock imagery styles. Most of the time, I don’t even have to leave this website to find an image I like.

Unsplash is one of my favorite stock image sites and is included first in the list, for good reason.

The one nuance is that there isn’t an overall search function, because it is simply pulling in a bunch of different websites. Luckily, some of the sites like Pexels (see below) have their own search.

Because everything is royalty free you don’t have to worry about paying or anything like that.

Unsplash

As I mentioned above, Unsplash is one of my favorite stock image sites. I just really like their photography style and the quality of their images.

They have outdoor photos as well as more classic indoor stock photography. They’ve also recently added a search function which makes it much easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

10 new photos are added every 10 days, so make sure to keep checking back in for new awesomeness.

Pexels

Pexels is my go-to site if I have something in mind to find, or even if I just want to browse some awesome images.

The search function is really good and lets you find exactly what you’re looking for, if they have the image in stock.

They have plenty of high resolution, professional quality images, all royalty free. Most of the images here are outdoors, but there is also a good mix of other stock imagery.

Most of the images are great for blurring out slightly and overlaying some text for a blog post image.

PhotoPin

PhotoPin has a great search function and tons of images pulled from the Creative Commons.

Because the images come from the Creative Commons, in most cases you’ll need to give photo credit. Luckily, PhotoPin makes this super easy.

When you click to download an image, you can select the image size you want and PhotoPin automatically generates HTML code for attribution. This way you don’t have to worry about formatting or anything. You can just upload the image to your site and add the attribution with it.

PhotoPin is supported by premium images which show up at the top of search results pages, but there are plenty of free images as well.

Pixabay

Pixabay has nearly 400,000 images in their repository, and all of them can be used without any worries. You don’t need to add attribution, and you can use them in work where you’ll be paid.

When you perform a search, the first few images are sponsored by Shutterstock. They’ll have a faded out watermark. However, all of the rest of the images are totally free for use.

When you click in to an image, Pixabay even gives you more information such as the photographer, type of camera used, camera settings, and more.

Pixabay’s huge inventory and ease of use definitely makes it one of my favorites.

Infographic Creators

easel.ly

As the URL suggests, easel.ly makes creating infographics very easy. You start off with either a blank slate or a pre-built template.

From there, you can customize your infographic. There are options to add new objects, backgrounds, shapes, text, charts, or your own images.

The interface is simple and easy to use to create awesome looking infographics.

Update: Canva has added infographic templates, so you might want to try those out as well.

Miscellaneous

Blurgrounds

Inspiration Hut has provided a great free resource for background images.

The images are very simple abstract blends of two or three colors. They are great to use when there isn’t an applicable stock image, or when you don’t want to use a plain solid color background.

So far they’ve released 120 variations, all free for you to download and use in your projects.

Subtle Patterns

Sometimes an image or colored background just doesn’t meet my design needs. In that case, a pattern may fit the bill.

Subtle Patterns has 400 nicely designed stock patterns for use on your website, images, or anywhere else you may need the use them. They also have a Photoshop plugin ($11.99) so that you can easily feed all of the patterns into your Photoshop panel.

Iconfinder

Icon Finder has been a lifesaver for me many times. There are some cases where Canva just doesn’t have the right icon, or in the right style.

The service includes 525,000+ free and premium icons in a multitude of styles. The filtering system is very easy to use, and you can easily find just free icons.

The One Paid Tool That’s Actually Worth It

99designs

Up to this point, all of the resources I’ve mentioned have been free, or at least “freemium”. However sometimes you just need to shell out a little cash to get a truly premium result.

One good example of this would be for your website logo. Your website logo is a permanent and prominent fixture on your website. Because of this it is often wise to invest some money into making it the best possible.

99designs is an awesome and affordable service. For as low as $299 you can have professional designers compete to win your favor.

Best of all, the process is really easy.

You just sign up, post your request, choose a design package, and then amazing designers from all over the world will send in their version for your logo or graphic.

Then you get to choose the one you like best and the winner gets the money, while you get the downloadable high quality file.

It’s a great system for website owners like you and me. We get to have an awesome graphic, but we also get ideas.

While you can only download the graphic you chose as the winner, you can of course look at the other options. This gives you the opportunity to think of other graphics to design in the future. It can also teach you about various design styles that you can try to mimic.

I recommend the free tools above for normal everyday blog images. However, I advise using 99designs for logos and other prominent graphics because of their intrinsic value.

The link above to 99designs is an affiliate link, so I do make a small commission if you use it, at no extra cost to you. If you do wind up signing up through my link, thank you so much in advance!

Summary

There are hundreds, if not thousands of image and graphic creation tools available online.

However, many of those tools are difficult to use, overly monetized, or outdated. In addition, there are many cases where stock photos provided on a site have confusing attribution policies or use cases.

Because of all this, the list above is my personally curated blog image resource list. And now it’s yours to do with as you like.

So when you’re writing your next blog post, keep these tools in mind. You could even bookmark this page so that you can always come back to it whenever you need it.

If you use any awesome tools that I’ve missed, give me a shout. Otherwise, go forth and make awesome images!

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on May 19, 2015.

How To Create Amazing Blog Images [Resources] was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I first launched my blog, I was super excited about my layout choice. My theme looked exactly how I had imagined.

However, there was a problem. My website page load times were terrible. I desperately needed to speed up my website.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this same problem at some point in your blogging career. So in this post, I’m going to discuss what I did and what you can do to speed up your website page load times.

Why Should You Care?

Not only do users not like slow loading websites, but Google doesn’t like slow websites either.

This infographic from Quicksprout is a bit old, but is still just as relevant.

Ironically, by including this infographic on this page, I’ve slowed down its load time. There are some cases like this where you’ll just have to weigh the pros and cons for your audience.

My Slow Website Page Load Time Woes

After clicking around just a couple pages on my website, I noticed that the load time was slower than most sites I visited.

I thought maybe it was just me, that I was imagining that my site was slower because I was paranoid.

Then I thought maybe it was just my internet service provider. Or maybe it was because I was signed in to my site as a WordPress admin.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe it was because of my theme.

If you take one glance at my homepage, you’ll notice that there are a lot of “boxes” that contain posts, much like Pinterest. If you resize your browser window, those boxes will rearrange themselves to fit the screen.

While this is a cool effect, it also takes lots of code to execute. All that code means that the website is a bigger file for users to download.

I came to the conclusion that my theme was fairly taxing for browsers to load.

I decided that I had two options.

1. Scrap my beloved theme and use a simpler one, like so many other blogs.
2. Do research and work hard to optimize my website for speed.

I didn’t want to be just like everyone else. I wanted my blog to have a unique feel. My theme was chosen for a reason, and I wasn’t going to throw it away without a fight.

So I picked option #2.

In this post I’m going to let you in on the steps I took to improve my website’s load speed.

What You Can Expect After Making These Updates

Before making these changes, my website averaged at least 5 seconds to load. Most of the time it was between 5 and 15, sometimes as long as 30.

After making these updates, my site consistently loads in under 3 seconds, sometimes even under 1 second. In this test, the site loaded in just 723 milliseconds.

If you want to see how much the following tips improve your page load times, go ahead and run a few tests through tools.pingdom.com.

I recommend that you click the settings drop down and switch it to the city nearest you. Then run five tests to get an average page load speed.

The great thing about all of these updates is that besides the hosting cost, they’re free!

Most of the services that I’m going to talk about have a “pro” plan, but it isn’t required for what we’ll be doing.

Now let’s get to it.

1. Sign Up For Bluehost & Install WordPress

To take advantage of the tips I’m going to talk about, you need to use Bluehost and WordPress.

Bluehost is a great, reliable hosting service that’s also super affordable. It comes with an easy to understand user interface, and one-click WordPress install.

If you’re not already using Bluehost, you can easily signup for Bluehost hosting and then use their one-click WordPress install.

Please note that the link above is an affiliate link, so I do make a small commission (no extra cost to you) if you wind up signing up for Bluehost. So thank you in advance for using my link! I am running this website on Bluehost, and definitely recommend it whether you use my link or not.

Signing up for Bluehost and installing WordPress is a fairly simple step-by-step process, but definitely contact me if you have any questions.

2. Update Your Bluehost PHP Settings

If you’re not very technical, this step may seem intimidating. But trust me, it only takes a few clicks and can make a world of difference in page load times.

If you followed step 1, you’ll have signed up for Bluehost and your website is now running on WordPress. Now it’s time to sign in to your Bluehost account.

At the top in the navigation, click the “cpanel” link.

This will take you to the full cpanel page, instead of the abbreviated version on the homepage.

Now you can scroll down until you find the “software/services” section.

Click the purple “PHP Config” icon. This will open a new interface. The interface might take a minute to load.

On the page that appears, you might have one of the PHP 5.2 options selected. If so, you’ll want to switch it to PHP 5.4 (FastCGI).

If you’re working with a brand new Bluehost and WordPress install, you should be able to make this switch without any problems. However, if you’re on an older site that has had changes made to the .htaccess file, make sure to heed Bluehost’s notes to back it up first.

After you’ve switched the setting to PHP 5.4 (FastCGI), make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to save your changes.

3. Setup CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a great free service that can really help to speed up your website.

CloudFlare’s features include DNS management, CDN (Content Delivery Network), optimization settings, and security settings.

If you don’t know what those terms mean, that’s completely fine. Basically, CloudFlare will just help your website load way faster.

In fact, CloudFlare says that on average a website using CloudFlare loads twice as fast, uses 60% less bandwidth, and has 65% fewer requests. All great things.

So to get started just go to the CloudFlare website.

Sign up and walk through the easy to follow steps. There’s even a video for you to watch that explains exactly how CloudFlare works.

Once you’re signed up, you’ll be able to choose the settings you want to use.

Following are the settings I use, but feel free to test to see what works best for your website.

Firewall

Security Level: Medium

Speed

Auto Minify: JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Note that we’re minifying here instead of with W3 Total Cache in the next step. I just like how CloudFlare minifies. Make sure that you only minify with one or the other.

Rocket Loader: Automatic

IP Geolocation: On

Maximum Upload Size: 100 MB

Caching

Caching Level: Standard

Browser Cache Expiration: 5 days

Always Online: On

Development Mode: Off

Again, these are just the settings that work well for my website, but experiment to see what works for you.

4. Install & Configure W3 Total Cache Plugin

This is a very important step, but it is also a little complicated. W3 Total Cache is a great plugin, but it takes a few settings configurations.

Go ahead and download and install the W3 Total Cache plugin to your WordPress website. This is typically done by following these steps:

1. Login to your WordPress admin
2. Hover over “Plugins” on the left bar and click “Add New”
3. Use the search bar to search “W3 Total Cache”
4. Click the “Install Now” button
5. The plugin should install and activate

After you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll see a new “Performance” section on the left bar in your WordPress admin.

Go ahead and hover over the “Performance” section and click “Extensions”.

Click “Activate” for CloudFlare (if you completed step 3 above).

Once you’ve activated, you should be taken to the General Settings page. You can either fill in the CloudFlare information now, or scroll to the top and follow along with my notes below.

Following are the settings that I’ve found work best. You can try turning these on and off to see what works best for your site.

All of these options are in the “General Settings” interface. You can click into each section in the navigation bar for more detail, but you shouldn’t need to.

General

Toggle all caching types on or off (at once): Off

Preview mode: Disabled

Page Cache

Page cache: Enable

Page cache method: Disk: Enhanced

Minify

Minify: Disabled (don’t want to overlap with CloudFlare, see step 3 above)

Minify mode: Auto

Minify cache method: Disk

HTML minifier: Default

JS minifier: JSMin (default)

CSS minifier: Default

Database Cache

Database Cache: Enable

Database Cache Method: Disk

Object Cache

Object Cache: Enable

Object Cache Method: Disk

Browser Cache

Browser Cache: Enable

CDN

CDN: Disabled

CDN Type: Generic Mirror

Reverse Proxy

Enable varnish cache purging: Enabled

Varnish servers: Leave empty

Monitoring

New Relic: Disabled

API key: Leave empty

Application name: Leave default, leave empty

Network Performance & Security powered by CloudFlare

CloudFlare: Enable

CloudFlare account email: Input the email you used to sign up for CloudFlare

API key: Click the link to the right to find your API key

Domain: Input your website domain

Security level: Medium

Rocket Loader: Automatic

Minification: CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Development mode: Off

Licensing

License: Leave blank

Miscellaneous

Enable Google Page Speed dashboard widget: Disabled

Page Speed API Key: Leave blank

Verify rewrite rules: Enabled

Enable file locking: Disabled

Optimize disk enhanced page and minify disk caching for NFS: Disabled

Enable Edge mode: Disabled

Debug

Debug Mode: Non selected

Once you’ve made all of these settings changes, click the “Save all settings” button.

5. Compress Image File Sizes

Image file size is a major factor for page load speed. The fact of the matter is, the bigger the image files on your page, the longer it will take users to download them in their browser.

I recommend compressing your images if you have an image heavy theme like me, or even if you are just using featured images for posts.

Most of the time you can easily compress images without a noticeable decrease in quality. It’s a quick task that can greatly improve your page load times.

There are a few free WordPress plugins for image compression. However, I’ve found that they tend to slow down my workflow as they process the images.

In addition, I like to have control over the compression of my images and the resulting files.

Therefore, I use Compressor.io.

Compressor.io is a free tool that lets you easily compress images and see exactly how much bandwidth you’re saving.

Simply upload your image file, let the tool work its magic, then download the compressed file.

From there you can upload the image to your WordPress site, use it in emails, or anywhere else where download speed is a factor.

Run Your Own Speed Test

Now that you’ve completed these optimization tasks, it’s time to check your page load speed.

Note that the traffic from Pingdom will be counted in your Google Analytics reports as direct traffic. So don’t get too excited when you see a spike in traffic if you run a lot of tests.

If everything has gone well, your website page load times should be much faster.

If not, keep experimenting with settings to find the combination that works best for you.

Summary

Website page load speed is a big factor in user experience as well as Google rankings. Therefore you should follow the steps above to speed up your website. By using several free tools, you can vastly speed up your page load times and delight your users with a page that loads nearly instantly. Not only is it great for the user experience, but it looks very professional as well!

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on May 15, 2015.

How To Speed Up Your Website In 5 Easy Steps was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many ways to go about starting a blog. However, I wanted to share what I have done so far, and what I plan to do. These are my recommendations from my past experience. I’ve set up many blogs, both successful and unsuccessful. I’ve also helped clients set up websites at day job. I hope that this can help you in your future endeavors.

1. Write 10 Posts Before Buying A Domain Name and Hosting

I have to admit, this is one that I have struggled with quite a bit. I’ve gone through many blog attempts, and unfortunately spent quite a bit of money. Most of the expense was in domain names and hosting. I spent this money only to grow bored of the blog topic before I even wrote 10 posts.

Writing 10 posts before buying a domain name shows you are dedicated to the blog. It demonstrates that you are likely to continue writing on the blog.

It doesn’t matter where you write these posts. It could be in Microsoft Word, a Google Doc, Evernote, or anything between. Just pump out those first 10 posts.

Creating a new blog won’t matter as much if you are using a free blog setup. Examples are WordPress.com, Blogger, or the like. But before buying a domain name and hosting plan, you should write a few posts first.

2. Write A Blog Post A Day

This is a continuation of the above suggestion. After you have 10 posts written, I recommend writing at least one blog post per day for a week.

If this isn’t feasible for your schedule, then you should try to write 7 posts in 7 days. So maybe 3 on Monday, and 4 on Saturday. Whatever works for you.

As with the above, this lets you determine if you will be consistent enough. You will need to write on your blog more than you think to be competitive.

3. Buy Domain Name and Hosting

Finally! For me, this is one of the most exciting parts of setting up a blog (besides the money part). Now you’ve proven to yourself that you will be consistent enough with your blog. It’s now time to spend some money on it.

Most of the time, you can get your domain name free with a year of hosting. Choose your favorite host, and get your environment setup! I recommend Bluehost since it’s so easy to use and very affordable.

Now you’ll be able to transfer all those blog posts from your computer to your website. And once you hit “publish”, you can share them with the world.

4. Use A Free Theme For Awhile

This is another reality check step. If you are like most bloggers, you’ll be using WordPress for your platform. As you may know, there are many, many premium themes available for WordPress blogs. These range anywhere from $9 to over $100 for a full featured theme.

I recommend using a free theme for the first few weeks/months of your blog being live. This will allow you to determine what you wish you had in a theme. You’ll also find what you don’t need as you write and publish posts.

5. Buy A Good, Minimalistic Theme

Spending the extra cash on an awesome theme is a good long term investment in my opinion. It is better to spend an extra $10 or $25 for the theme that will fit your blog perfectly. If you don’t, you might have to buy another theme later. Most of the themes, especially the higher rated ones, on ThemeForest are very good.

As far as minimalistic:

Personally, as a reader of a lot of blogs, I like the simple ones better. Medium is becoming popular, and so is its minimalist, clean design style.

Cluttered blogs with lots of widgets and animations make me close the tab.

In the long run, what is best for your readers is what is best for you. Readers need to stick around to read your content. If they don’t, you won’t have time to sell them on your product.

Readers bouncing off your page will also lead to lower search engine rankings. No one wants that, so do your best to lower your bounce rate.

6. Set Up An Email Capture Service

Capturing email addresses should be one of your top priorities when running a blog. An email address holds much more value than a follower on social media. With an email address, you can market to your readers individually. You can send emails that will not get filtered by social network algorithms. I’m looking at you Facebook.

There are many free email capture services that are very good. I just recommend reviewing the service thoroughly. Personally, I like SumoMe the best, but there are lots of different ones out there. You just need to make sure it integrates with all the services you need it to (such as MailChimp).

7. Offer A Free Bribe To Get People To Input Their Email

You might notice that many websites have a “Subscribe Here” and a “Get Your Free eBook” where you can input your email. Both options serve the same purpose: you can collect visitors’ email addresses. Then you can send them emails in the future.

“Subscribe Here” is simple, and users know that they will be added to a mailing list. The user understands that they will receive emails whenever there are new articles.

On the other hand, “Get Your Free eBook” gives the user even more value. Not only will they be added to the mailing list, but they get something out of it as well. This type of bribe tends to work well if implemented correctly.

8. Send Weekly Newsletters With MailChimp

Some blogs send out an email whenever there is a new post live. But if you stick with #2 above and are posting once a day, it may overwhelm your subscribers. If a subscriber feels like they are being spammed, they will unsubscribe pretty fast.

Another option is to send a weekly digest of the posts that went live in the past week. Subscribers can review the email for any posts that are interesting to them. They’ll also appreciate not being bombarded with daily emails.

9. Set Up Affiliate Marketing

Using Google Adsense for ad revenue may not be viable for small websites. To make money with display advertising, a website needs to receive many visitors. In most cases this is not achievable for a new blog.

But affiliate marketing can earn more for website owners than display advertising. With affiliate marketing, the website owner directs users to a merchant. Then the website owner receives a commission on products purchased by users.

Some examples of affiliate marketing providers are Amazon, Udemy, and CJ.

10. Share On Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, And Google+

Most people know this by now, but it’s worth stating again. When you post on your website, you should be the first to share it on social networks.

Depending on your audience, you might share on a large variety of social networks. Or you may choose to focus on just a few networks that work the best for you. Either way, work to increase your reach over time. The more reach you can get, the better.

11. Create, Sell, And Advertise Your Own Product

Affiliate marketing is great for getting started. With a larger audience, you may want to move to something with a higher profit margin. To reduce your reliance on an outside advertiser, you can sell your own products. This will lead to a much more reliable stream of income that you are in control of.

Examples of products that may be good for a first-timer:

• eBook
• Udemy Course
• Etsy Products
• Skype Lessons
• Webinars

In my case, once I have it built and released, I’ll be advertising my app. However, you can advertise whatever product you create.

You’re Done!

Once you have the steps above lined up, you can move on to more advanced steps. You’ll be able to market your products to a targeted email list. You can build your social media networks, and hopefully make some sales!

Let me know if there are any other steps that you think are important.

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on January 19, 2015.

11 Steps To Start Your Blog was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a strong social media following is an important part of any marketing campaign. When I was first starting out, everything seemed overwhelming. There are so many different networks, with so many tasks. Tasks that need completion every day. But I have since taken the 80/20 rule into consideration. Now, I’ve narrowed down my daily tasks to the ones that are the most important.

Most of the time, it’s a good idea to focus on just one or two social networks at a time. Which network you pick can depend on a number of factors, so it’s a good idea to spend some time finding the best social network for your needs.

I’ve organized my daily social media tasks into a handy list that I hope will be helpful to you.

Twitter

Right now, Twitter is my main focus as most of my target audience is there. Twitter is also quick and easy, and in my opinion, fun to use. Following these daily tasks, you can quickly build a following from nothing.

1. Schedule Posts With Buffer / Hootsuite

To schedule posts, I prefer Buffer. It is the simpler choice compared to Hootsuite. It also has more scheduling features out of the box, and I just love the clean design style.

2. Add @Mentions Of Post Authors To Tweets

When I tweet a link to an article that someone else wrote, I include their @Username. Sometimes this takes a little digging around the website where the article was posted.

This step does take some extra work. But by using this method I’ve received many follows, retweets, and favorites. This is because the authors appreciate a mention for their hard work. This is a simple addition that has a large return on investment.

3. Add Relevant Hashtags To Tweets

This is a simple step, and can increase your potential tweet reach. Use a tool like RiteTag to find hashtags that will drive the most views to your tweet.

4. Add Imagery To Tweets

If the article you are linking to includes an image (like this one), use it. Most article authors these days include well designed images, so take advantage of it. Photos boost clickthroughs by 18%, favorites by 89%, and retweets by an astounding 150%, so use them.

5. Follow Key Influencers And Put Them In A List

In general, I recommend following anyone in your niche who could follow you back. But, there are key influencers in each niche that have more pull than the typical user. In this case, I recommend following them even if you don’t get a follow back.

Put these influencers in a list, and we’ll use them in the following steps.

6. @Reply To 3 Influencer’s Tweets

Try to engage with influencers on a daily basis. Yet, make sure not to overwhelm them with constant communication. This is why it is important to build a good sized influencer list. That way you can communicate with different people on different days.

Just because an influencer has recently tweeted, doesn’t mean that they are on Twitter, or that they will reply back to you. Most influencers use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule their tweets.

7. Respond To All Tweets / DMs

Put the “social” in social media. This step is especially important if you are a public brand. Your customers may have frequent support questions. Many users are turning to social media to engage with brands. The more available and responsive you are, the better your reputation will become.

8. Follow Users With Good Follow Ratios On Tweepi

This step might be debatable, but is one that I have used with good success. Tweepi has a free service that allows you to follow new users.

In Tweepi, you can sort users by their following ratios. Try to find users who have a lower amount of followers than they are following. These users are likely to follow you back.

Other stats to check are their bio and their last tweet date. By checking these you can make sure they are relevant and active on Twitter.

9. Retweet Relevant Tweets

Retweeting is a great way to build connections with new people. Retweeting means that you agree with that person’s tweet. And you agree enough to send it to your own followers. Most users like this extra publicity. Some may take interest in your profile and give you a follow.

In some cases, it may also be helpful to retweet some tweets from your newest followers. Then try to engage with them a bit and start a conversation.

10. Retweet Between 5 & 10 times Per Day From Different Influencers

Make sure not to retweet any one person too many times per day. Instead, spread out retweets across the different influencers that you listed in step 5. Try to retweet several times throughout the day, and not all at once. This will help you gain visibility when different people are online throughout the day.

11. Leave Some Valuable Feedback In The Retweets (Change To Quotes)

This is a technique that has gained me follows from prestigious Twitter users. Some are even listed in the Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencers. This step does need some extra work, but people seem to appreciate it, and the potential payoff is worth it.

Don’t just hit that retweet button. Instead, take the time to change the retweet into a quote. You can do this with a few clicks if you are using a tool like Buffer. Or you can copy and paste the original tweet by hand. Then add something like “Great analysis! — RT @Username” before the tweet. You may need to do some editing depending on the length of the original tweet. Edits may include removing hashtags or abbreviating some words.

Most users appreciate the extra feedback. You’ll also gain some visibility with those users’ followers as well. While a bit time consuming, this method has been rewarding for me.

Update: Twitter has updated their quote feature, allowing for more lengthy comments. So now you can really start a conversation!

12. Add Hashtags To Retweets To Fit Your Target Audience

If you have the character count available for it, add some relevant hashtags. Sometimes the original author didn’t add any, or is targeting a different audience. Because you are quoting, it is generally acceptable to change the hashtags a bit. Make sure to limit to 2–3 hashtags, to not annoy users.

13. Only Retweet Information That You Are Agreeable To

This is a big one that I’ve seen many people have trouble with. Sometimes I’ll see a user’s bio that includes something like “Retweets are not endorsements”. This may keep a user in the clear from a legal perspective. But in reality, most people aren’t going to check your bio before they look at your tweets.

If you have retweeted something, it doesn’t matter what your intentions or disclaimers were. That retweet means that you endorse the original tweeter.

So I recommend a thorough review of any possible retweets. This review should include where they may link to, and any possible hashtag complications.

Google+

Google+ isn’t popular in most industries right now. But, depending on your niche, you may be able to find an active community. I’ve found that on Google+, most people are friendly and will follow you back. It helps if you are somewhat related to their interests (make sure your bio is up to date). Even if you can’t find a community, being active on Google+ is a great way to build your SEO. Following several proactive daily tasks will help you build a following.

14. Follow Relevant Users In Communities

Communities are central to how Google+ works. Communities are built of like minded people, and are a great place to find friends. I recommend subscribing to several communities, and then monitoring them for active users.

Watch the communities for a few days. After some time you should be able to tell the active users from the auto-posters. Auto-posters are users who auto post their articles from an automated tool like Buffer. These users rarely engage on Google+ itself. Comment activity is a dead giveaway, since you must be on the Google+ website/app to do so.

After you find relevant users, add them into circles. These circles should be descriptive of their niche. For example, I have categories for SEM, SEO, social media, content marketing, and more.

15. +1 Five Influencer’s Posts

+1’ing is a lot like favoriting on Twitter. It is a simple endorsement to say that you liked the post. Your +1s are public on your profile/page, so make sure to +1 with caution.

Additionally, a +1 has a large influence on organic Google search rankings. Therefore, for publishers who are concerned about their SEO, it can be valuable.

Users will get a notice that they were added to your circle, and that they’ve been +1’d. Then users are likely to give you a follow back.

16. Comment On Two Influencer’s Posts

Commenting is a great way to show that you are active on Google+. Most users are friendly, and may comment back, so be ready to engage in a conversation.

On Google+, you can comment as much as you want. I find that a couple comments per session is all I have time for. Especially if there is an ongoing back-and-forth.

17. Share Two Influencer’s Posts

Like retweeting on Twitter, when you share a user’s posts, the post shows up on your page. So be careful with what you share, and make sure that it is relevant to your brand.

Sharing can be a great way to show your support of a good post. It is typically very appreciated by the original author.

Pinterest

Pinterest is great for visual social media. If you use imagery on your website/blog, then you should also post it to Pinterest. If you’re not using imagery, you should start. When sharing images, note that a majority of Pinterest users are women. Also, the most popular repins are orange/red in color. So try to work these color schemes in to your images when possible.

18. Repin Ten Influencer’s Images To Boards

Find at least ten great pins and repin them to relevant boards on your profile. However, remember not to repin too frequently. By repinning a lot, you could blow up your followers’ feeds and notifications. It’s important to take things slower on Pinterest than Twitter.

So, you should spread out your original pins and repins throughout the day. This will also help to reach different people who are online at different times.

19. Follow Five Other Relevant Users

Like Twitter and Google+, users on Pinterest have some of the same following trends. Users tend to follow people who are following them. In some cases, users will follow you if you have repinned some of their content.

Make sure to follow users who are relevant to your niche. You can discover this by reading their bio, and reviewing the boards that they pin to. The more related a user is to your niche, the more likely they are to follow you back. And if you’re lucky, they might do business with you in the future.

20. Comment Up To Three Times On Pins In The “Popular” Section

Take some time to scroll through the “Popular” section each day. Try to find pins that are at least somewhat relevant to your niche. The more relevant they are, the better. Once you find a good pin, take some time to craft a good comment. Don’t just leave something like “Great pin”. This provides almost no value to the original contributor.

On Twitter and Google+ you can post and reply almost infinitely. But on Pinterest there is a limit of about 3 comments per user per day. This rule was implemented to fight spam. So it is important to use your allotment of comments wisely.

Like This Post?

Visit SmartWebsiteMarketing.com to download the free Daily Social Media Checklist. It includes 38 tasks to help you succeed on the four major social media networks: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, & Google+.

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on January 16, 2015.

20 Essential Daily Social Media Tasks was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all heard that Google+ is a ghost town, and I don’t know many friends who actively use it. However, Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has run an analysis that shows just how bad it really is over at Google+.

Keep in mind though, even though the numbers look bad, it’s still important for website owners to be active on Google+. It’s an important social network, if only because Google owns it.

Enge eliminated activity not native to the G+ stream, such as YouTube upload notifications, profile picture changes, and YouTube comments, and the adjusted number of active users was just short of 112 million active users… When considering all activity, there are more than 200 million users. But only 50 million of those users have posted more than five times, and less than eight million users have made more than 50 public posts to the network…less than one percent of people have made public posts in the last 30 days.

Source: How Many Google+ Members Are Actually Active? | SocialTimes

How I Feel About Google+

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not a Google+ hater. I was an early adopter of Google+, and got on the platform when it was still invite-only.

I loved the ability to filter who was able to see certain posts. It allowed me to share different posts with my family than with my coworkers.

The overall design was nice. It was simple, uncluttered, and got out of your way.

Low Google+ Adoption

However, Google+ adoption has never been great. While it has never called itself a direct competitor with Facebook, the disparity in user base is still worth noting.

Even giving Google+ the benefit of the doubt with the most favorable statistics available, there are still only 112 million active users according to Enge.

Compare that to Facebook’s 1.44 billion monthly active users, and the difference is very pronounced.

Google+ Still Has Potential

Google+ has many vibrant communities. However, a social network is only as strong as its users. Google+ simply doesn’t have the market share to be a default social network for the average American to use on a daily basis.

I think Google+ shows promise, and I especially like their new implementation of collections, which are similar to Pinterest boards.

In addition to collections, there are a few other functionality tweaks I would like to see. I think easier “Circles” organization, more flexibility with posting, and a more intuitive mobile app would all bring Google+ up to speed in today’s social network market.

What’s A Website Owner To Do?

Even without these features though, Google+ is still an important platform for website owners. Since Google owns Google+, it’s imperative to post any new blog posts to your Google+ page or profile. I’ve written a handy guide on how to use Google+ for blogging that will walk you through how to best take advantage of the network.

Google quickly indexes those posts, and will credit them to you instead of other websites who may syndicate or steal your work. For that reason alone, it’s worth at least quickly linking to your new posts on Google+.

Summary

I think Google+ has unrealized potential, and with a fantastic marketing campaign it could regain its stature and become a default social network for many people who are looking for something different.

Even if it’s not popular though, website owners should still take the time to share their posts on Google+. It definitely can’t hurt your rankings with Google (as long as you’re sharing quality posts).

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on May 11, 2015.

Is Google+ A Unique And Valuable Resource In Disguise? was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sharing posts on social media is a fundamental part of marketing a website. However, social sharing also tends to be very time consuming. Luckily, there are some awesome tools available that can save you time.

How The Pros Do It

From watching awesome influencers such as Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, and Jeff Bullas I figured out what most people like to see, and I learned a lot.

For example:

• Pat Flynn tends to engage with his audience heavily, posts quotes, and tweets things as they happen.
• Kim Garst does a great job of tweeting very inspirational quotes.
• Jeff Bullas frequently shares links to super helpful articles on his website.

Social Sharing Best Practices

I also read up on best practices. Kevan Lee at Buffer posted a great article about the art of self-promotion on social media. In it, he discusses 6 popular sharing ratios, such as 5–3–2, 4–1–1, 555+, Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, and the 20-to-1 rule.

After reading this, I realized no one really had a perfect method for social sharing. The best way to share on social media and interact with followers varied from person to person, and audience to audience.

What I Try To Provide

I sat down and thought hard about what I wanted to provide for my audience, which is you! I want to give you the best value possible. I want to be the one-stop-shop for all of your website marketing and promotion needs.

I knew I wanted to share what I have on my blog, but I didn’t have enough content on my blog to possibly fill every need. There are tons of new tips and tricks coming out constanly. With a 9–5 job, there is just no way I can keep up. Also, there are tons of people posting awesome links on Twitter.

This means I have three objectives:

• Share awesome articles for my followers to read and keep informed
• Share my own articles
• Retweet and engage with my followers

My Sharing Ratio

I came up with my own plan to give my followers what I think is the best possible value. I call it the 3–1–5 ratio.

Just like the other ratios didn’t work for me, my ratio might not work for you. However, I think my reasoning behind my ratio and the tools I use to implement it might be useful for you.

If you just want to see how to use this ratio, and you don’t care about how to find and share articles super easily, you can skip to step 6 below.

My Failed Attempt (Don’t Do This)

I started out by visiting a few of the websites I liked. I reviewed the sites to see if they had posted anything new since the last time I visited.

If they had, I manually copied the headline of the article over to a new Tweet, and then copied the URL over as well. Then I added any relevant hashtags. To share my own posts, I did much the same thing, in a manual fashion.

I quickly realized this method was far too time consuming. I had spent hours sharing just a couple dozen posts.

It was at this point I realized I needed to find a way to at least partially automate my process.

I did some research and found there are tools available that completely automate social sharing. However, I didn’t want to take my evaluation and personality out of the equation. I still want to read through each article to make sure it would truly benefit anyone reading it.

Also, because this is my industry, I want to read the articles just to stay up to date. If I were to use a completely automated tool, I would miss out on that opportunity.

My Success

After trying out several different tools, I landed on a combination of Feedly and Buffer. These two tools alone make it very easy to find articles to share, then queue them up.

I still get to review every article before I share it, but the time it takes is greatly reduced. No longer am I manually copy and pasting headlines and URLs. Instead, these tools do that work for me.

Feedly is a free tool that lets you easily keep track of all the blogs you normally read. It brings all of their posts into one nice interface where you can sort through them and never miss a post.

Buffer is a fantastic social media tool. Their free plan allows you to schedule up to 10 posts, but their paid plan lets you schedule 200 and gives you some advanced filtering options.

With these two tools at my side, I can easily schedule dozens of posts in a matter of minutes.

I’m still refining my process, but what I am doing is working well. Since I started using this process in late 2014, I’ve gained over 10,000 new Twitter followers. In just the last 90 days, I’ve received over half a million tweet impressions, and my visibility is increasing daily.

Granted, I can’t attribute all of this growth to this method alone. Some of the credit has to go to Tweepi and my practice of following people who might want to follow me back. However, most of these people would not have remained followers if I did not provide quality content.

This process is easy to learn and implement and saves a ton of time once you get used to it. I encourage you to at least try it out, and feel free to switch things up to make it work better for your needs.

My Process

There are still quite a few steps to this process. This portion starts off assuming you’ve already created a Feedly account and have your blog feeds set up. In addition, I assume you’ve created a Buffer account and linked your Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ to it. You’ll also need the Buffer extension. If you don’t have it installed, you should do that now, then come back to this post. I’m going to go through each step and explain my thought process behind them.

Note for this article: I’m going to be using Twitter as an example, but the same basic process can be used for other social networks.

1. Create A Base Social Sharing Schedule

With Buffer, you can easily set up a basic sharing schedule by navigating to the Schedule tab.

This works well if you only want to post a couple times per day. You can simply hit the big blue button to add a couple posting times. However, I’m currently posting 32 times every day, which averages out to every 45 minutes.

I post this often because the life span of a tweet is about 30 minutes. This simply means Twitter moves so fast that after 30 minutes, your tweet may as well not exist anymore. Of course, people can still see it if they directly visit your profile. But if they are only looking at their home stream, your tweet will be lost very soon.

If you want to focus on Facebook / Google+ / LinkedIn, Buffer has put together a great infographic and article. These detail how often you should post on each social network.

Just keep in mind that posting frequency recommendations tend to change frequently. Not even a year prior to the article above, Buffer posted a similar article wherein they made slightly different recommendations.

Because I post so often, I found a tool called BufferTime to help create my base posting schedule on Buffer. This tool isn’t built by Buffer themselves, but they have written about BufferTime in a blog post, so it’s safe to say they trust it.

After visiting www.bufferti.me you’ll need to link up with your Buffer account. Then you should see a screen like this:

You can then select your social network (Twitter for me), input how many minutes you want between posts (45 minutes for me), and the time range (between 12:00 AM and 12:00 AM for me). Then click Schedule. Your new schedule should automatically be added to your Buffer account and look something like this:

For myself, I like to post all 24 hours of the day. This is so I don’t miss out on the European and Asian/Australian audiences. However, if you have a local business, you may want to keep your posts to business hours.

This part is optional, but I personally don’t like for my posts to look scheduled. So I go ahead and add or subtract a few minutes to the posting times here and there. This way it looks a little more natural. For example, my first posting time might be 12:03, then 12:39, then 1:24, etc.

2. Find Articles To Share

Next, you’ll need to find awesome articles to share. You could do this by visiting your favorite websites each day and sharing new posts. However, going to each website individually takes time. So instead, I recommend using Feedly.

Once you have your Feedly account setup, you can add in the RSS URLs of any blogs you want to follow.

(Pssst…http://smartwebsitemarketing.com/feed/).

After adding in your favorite blogs, your stream should look something like this:

As you can see, I have 26 articles in my feed that I haven’t read and shared yet. At this point, I typically skim the headlines and get rid of any articles that won’t be relevant to you guys.

After I do a cursory first glance, I right click on the headlines of each article and open them in new tabs. This way I can read the full article and use the Buffer extension to share (see step 3). If you left click the articles you’ll get an abbreviated version of the article within Feedly.

Once I’ve opened the article in a new tab, I hide the article within Feedly so I don’t accidentally share the same article twice. You can do this by hovering over the article excerpt and then selecting the “hide” button:

Note: This is also how I keep my unread article count below 100, to keep from going insane…most of the time.

3. Use Buffer To Share Articles

Now that we’ve found articles to share, it’s time to actually share them! I like to read the article first, to make sure it will be valuable for my followers. There have been times where a headline seems awesome, but after actually reading the article I realize the author is just trying to sell a product. Or it’s a short blurb, linking off to another more in-depth article. In most cases, I don’t share those kinds of articles because I don’t think they’ll provide a benefit to you.

After I read the article, I like to find the author so I can credit them. Most of the time you can find their bio and a link to their Twitter @ handle at the bottom of the article. In this case, Krista added her Twitter account as a link:

To credit her, I simply right click on the link and select the “Copy Link Address” option that appears. I’ll use this later.

Then I use the Buffer extension to easily share the article. Once you have the extension installed, you should see an icon at the top right of your browser:

After you click the button, a window should pop up with the headline of the article and a link. It might have some other default text or hashtags depending on the site owner’s settings. In this case, the Buffer pop up looks like this:

Now it’s time to customize your tweet. I like to do some formatting cleanup, add the author attribution, and add my own hashtags. You can now paste the author’s link from before. It might have the full Twitter URL, so just edit it down to show their @username so that linking works properly.

After cleaning up, my Buffer pop up looks like this:

I’ve done a few things here that work well for me:

• Added hashtag to “Blog” in the original article headline to increase visibility of the tweet.
• Added “via @KristaJeanT” to give credit to the author and increase the chances of a retweet.
• Added “#blogging” as a variation to “#Blog” to increase visibility of the tweet.

These are just quick things I like to do, and depending on your niche and audience you may have varying levels of success. However, I think it’s always a good idea to try to add a least 1 hashtag and give credit to the original author.

Now just hit the “Add to Queue” button and your tweet will be added to your Buffer queue.

4. Add In Retweets

Retweets are a great way to provided added resources for your followers. They also serve the purpose of filling extra scheduled sharing slots when you can’t find enough good articles to share.

To find good retweets, I like to go directly to Twitter and do a hashtag search. Most of the time my searches revolve around the topics I blog about, such as #blogging, #socialmedia, #contentmarketing, #marketing, and others.

Once I see a tweet that looks interesting, I’ll follow the link and make sure it’s a good article, just like in step 3. Then instead of clicking the retweet button, I use the handy Buffer icon.

Then you can either hover over the tweet to change it into a quote with your own additions, or click the “Add to Queue” button and add the retweet to your Buffer queue.

Since it might be quite some time before the retweet is actually sent, I like to reserve Buffering retweets for “evergreen” content. So instead of Buffering breaking news, I’ll go ahead and simply retweet it as soon as I see it. But for tweets that will be just as relevant next week as today, I use Buffer to share them later.

5. Add Self Promotion

Finally, I promote myself! This is my last step in the Buffering process, but the most important one.

You may have noticed that for articles I add to Buffer, I don’t add images. Images have been shown to receive more retweets, so it would make sense to add images for everything.

However, adding images for every article I share would be very time consuming, even with the Buffer extension. Believe me, I tried it for a few weeks.

Not only is adding images time consuming, but it isn’t necessarily beneficial for my followers or myself. If a link interests a follower, then they can click it and learn more. It doesn’t really matter to me if someone retweets a link to another author’s article.

However, it is important for my followers to retweet links to my own content. Therefore, I make sure to add images with tweets of my own content.

To share my articles, I simply visit the post on my website. Then the Buffer extension automatically adds a handy “Share Image” button when I hover over featured images.

By using the “Share Image” button, Buffer should automatically add the image to your post. Next I clean up the formatting similarly to step 3 and add the post to my queue.

Once I’ve shared a post for the first time, I like to share it again on a cycle. This way all of my followers get a chance to see my posts.

Luckily, Buffer makes it much easier to share the same post again. And because I’ve only added images to my own posts, sorting is super easy.

Note that you will have to be on the paid $10/month Buffer plan for this part, but it’s totally worth the time savings.

Go to your Buffer account and click the Analytics tab at the top. Now click the “All Posts” button and switch it to “Image Posts”. All of your most recently shared articles should show up.

Now you can hover over the articles and click the “Re-Buffer This Post” button to add it to your queue. Nice and easy.

6. Sort Your Posts

Now that you have articles, retweets, and your own content, it’s time to organize them. No one wants to see 5 of your posts in a row, followed by 3 retweets and then 7 articles.

Instead, I like to use a 3–1–5 ratio. With this ratio, you add three articles, a retweet every 3rd article, and your own content every 5th post. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense, so I’ll try to explain it a little better.

It’s easiest for me to add all of my tweets in this order:

1. All shared articles
2. Add a retweet after every 3rd article
3. Add your own content after every 5th tweet (includes articles and retweets)

For example, in this screenshot:

1, 2, and 3 are the shared articles. A and B are retweets. And the tweets with images on the right side are my own content. So after every 3 shared articles, I have a retweet. Then after the first piece of my own content, “Not Using Meta Descriptions? I Am!”, there are 5 tweets: 2, 3, A, 1, 2. Then I share my own content again.

That probably made no sense. If so, just try it yourself, and start rearranging the posts. After moving them around a bit, you’ll get a hang of it (or maybe come up with something even better!)

I repeat this process over and over again with as much content as I have. With this ratio, there are shared articles, retweets, and my own content, all nicely spread out.

Even though my own content looks fairly close together, these are different articles, and there is actually a 4.5 hour gap between the two posts. Given that the life span of a tweet is only around 30 minutes, someone who saw my first link to my own content is very unlikely to see my second link.

This ratio also drives a good amount of traffic to my site, and I haven’t received any complaints about spamming my own content too much. Posting my own content more often could temporarily drive more traffic to my site, but I think it would be a disservice to my followers to not share other articles that cover more topics than my website provides.

Conclusion

There are many different social sharing ratios out there, but the one that works best is the one your audience likes. This can vary from audience to audience, and niche to niche.

The one thing that remains the same is that you should always look to provide more value for your audience. This could mean sharing more articles written by other authors, inspirational retweets, or your own amazing content. It doesn’t matter.

It took me several tries to find the best method for myself, which I’ve tried my hardest to explain in depth to you. Now it’s your turn. You can either take my method and use it, modify it, or throw it out and come up with your own. Whichever way you go, just make sure to always provide value to your audience. They’re following you for a reason. And don’t forget, social media is all about the social.

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on April 20, 2015.

How To Save Time And Rock Social Sharing was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like most people, I started out my social media career on MySpace. Those days were…interesting. Top 8 friends lists, custom profile themes, auto-playing music, and more.

In any case, those days have passed and we have moved on to nice consistently designed social media interfaces. Everyone sees the same design when they look at each other’s Facebook or Twitter profile, save their banner and profile images.

Social media platforms now lack the customization features of MySpace. Most also place their own restrictions on media post types and connection settings. These restrictions have led to specific uses for each major social network.

There are networks to find friends, connect with colleagues, discuss common hobbies, share pictures, complain about work, or anything else that is going on in our lives. Each social media network seems to have found its own culture, media type, and user base.

In addition, based on the latest reports from GlobalWebIndex.net, the social media networks besides Facebook are growing, with Pinterest and Tumblr growing especially quickly.

To me, this shows that people are leaving Facebook in favor of a social network(s) that fits their individual media needs. Instead of posting anything and everything on Facebook, users now post arts/crafts on Pinterest, short thoughts on Twitter, interesting GIFs or artwork on Tumblr, etc.

Basically, instead of making a social network fit their needs, users find the social network that fits the best.

With all of the available options, it can be a challenge to decide where to focus your attention as a publisher. It would be fantastic to be fully active on each major social media network. But as a solopreneur or small business owner, it’s unlikely that you’ll have the time or energy.

So instead, it’s best to focus on just 2 or 3 social networks that are the most likely to bring you the best return on investment. In this post, I’ll walk you through picking the best social media outlets for your brand.

Focus on 2 or 3 social networks that will bring you the best ROI

Side note: I recommend that you go ahead and claim your brand’s username everywhere possible. It’s always better to take a few minutes now to claim your username than to wait until you want it later, and have it be taken by someone else.

Facebook

The Goliath of all social media. Facebook is the one network to rule them all. Even though its engaged users are dropping, Facebook still has nearly a billion daily active users.

Facebook’s platform allows for a wide variety of media. You can post text, images, video, and more very easily. This makes Facebook a flexible platform that is useful in most cases.

In addition, there are many services that integrate with Facebook such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and CoSchedule. These services make it easy to post to and manage your Facebook profile or page.

Facebook also provides business page functionality. It is fairly simple to set up a Facebook page for your business. With a page, you get more control, and you aren’t restricted by your personal “friends” list.

However, be aware that once you create a page, you need to stay active. The only thing worse than not having a Facebook page is having a page that looks abandoned. Users will see this as unprofessional and won’t be as likely to see you as an authority.

Therefore, once you set up a page, make sure to post to it regularly. You should also respond quickly to any posts, comments, or other interaction from your fans.

Is Facebook The Social Media Network For You?

Yes. Whether you love it or hate it personally, you need to have your brand on Facebook. With such a large user base, you can’t afford to not be on Facebook at this point.

Twitter

Ah yes, Twitter. The fast moving, 140 character, link and quote machine. Twitter is one of the must-haves for nearly any niche. There is a great deal that can be done on Twitter, as well as millions of people to connect with. No matter what you’re interested in or writing about, there will be someone else with the same interests on Twitter.

Many people use Twitter as a personal social network, so you may find it a bit hard to connect as a brand. However, with the right tone, you can be very successful.

In my niche, most people post links to content they find useful or interesting. Luckily for me as a website owner, this is very helpful. I take advantage of this by posting links to my own content every once in awhile.

If you’re in a niche that is not link heavy, find what is popular, and mimic it. If you have a particularly awesome post, then feel free to link it. But if most of the people in your niche are posting quotes, then try to post mostly quotes.

Basically, try to give your followers what they will expect, but don’t be afraid to link your content and stand out from the crowd a bit.

Twitter moves fast, so you can post fairly frequently (several times per day). I’m even moving towards posting once every 30 minutes. However, you must be careful to not spam your followers. Don’t only link to your website. Instead, mix in links to other relevant websites in your niche.

For most of us, it’s not possible to be on Twitter 24/7. Luckily, there are some tools to help out with that. Buffer lets you schedule posts ahead of time and even reports stats for you on clicks, visibility, and engagement. TweetDeck is a great tool for managing your interactions, such as mentions and retweets. With these tools, you should be able to easily manage your Twitter account, and your followers will think you’re always around.

Is Twitter The Social Media Network For You?

If you have a website or an online brand of any sort, then yes. No matter what you are trying to sell or share, you’ll find interested people on Twitter. It’s ease of use makes it a good introductory network into social media.

Google Plus

Despite morbidly low Google Plus usage, the Google owned social media platform can still be useful. There are a variety of methods to make Google Plus a viable tool for blogging.

Since Google owns Google Plus, it is still seen as a good tool for SEO (search engine optimization). Everything you post on Google Plus is almost instantly indexed by Google. So it’s a good idea to share your posts there after they go live. This way, Google will know that you’re the original source of the post.

Like Facebook, Google Plus also allows you to create a page for your brand or business. From there you can share posts officially and interact with followers.

Google Plus also has some communities with a dedicated fan base. If you can find a relevant community, it may be worth your time to engage and get to know some people.

Since Google Plus is still relatively new and Google hasn’t given up on it yet (Google is known for ditching experiments if they don’t have potential), it wouldn’t be advisable to ignore it completely. Any bit of work that you put in now may help you drastically in the future if Google Plus ever comes into favor.

Is Google Plus The Social Media Network For You?

I advise at least sharing your new posts on your profile or page. Otherwise, unless you can find an active community for your niche, don’t spend much time here.

YouTube

Google for video sharing. As a business owner and/or publisher, this is at least partially how you should see YouTube.

YouTube is another Google owned property, and therefore carries a lot of SEO weight. In addition, YouTube boasts over 1 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) unique users every month. As such, it’s a social network that is hard to ignore.

If you have content that can easily be made into a video, do it. Posting a video on YouTube gives you extra exposure that an individual blog post won’t.

Getting into YouTube will take a bit of a learning curve, and may require some expenses for equipment. However, you can get started quickly with a smartphone camera or a screen recorder.

Even if you don’t have products to show or events to film, you can still create great videos explaining difficult concepts. Pat Flynn has some great examples on his Smart Passive Income channel, such as this video:

Is YouTube The Social Media Network For You?

Does your content translate easily to video? Do you want to share concepts that are difficult to explain with writing? Then yes. YouTube is a great place to share video content, and will help you be found by a new audience that may not have heard of you before.

LinkedIn

The social network for professionals. For quite some time, LinkedIn has mostly been a place where you share your resume in a digital format. Maybe you do some job hunting or find new employees there, but not much beyond that.

However, LinkedIn has been making some changes that are repositioning it as a social sharing platform. Posting updates on LinkedIn is becoming more popular. With the advent of LinkedIn Pulse, there is now opportunity to share long-form posts.

In addition, LinkedIn’s acquisition and further development of SlideShare is positioning LinkedIn as a platform for sharing PowerPoint-esque presentations. These presentations are an easy way to share content that is mobile friendly, and visually interesting (at least when done right).

All of these changes are making LinkedIn a more viable social platform, as is evidenced by its recent surge in usage. While it’s no Facebook killer, LinkedIn has the potential to become the go-to social media network for business discussions.

Is LinkedIn The Social Media Network For You?

Do you want to reach a market of CEOs, business owners, executives, or other management? Then LinkedIn could be helpful to you. If your niche isn’t in the business world though, then I wouldn’t spend too much time on LinkedIn right now.

Instagram

Growth for Instagram has been phenomenal. And with Facebook’s acquisition, Instagram has continued to grow in user base and activity.

Since Instagram is still a young social media platform, big brands are still working out how exactly to capitalize on it to reach their markets. However, for small businesses or solopreneurs it can be very effective.

You can use Instagram either from a personal account to build your own personal brand, or from a business account. Either way, Instagram is a great way to share visual content with a young audience.

If you have clothing, gadgets, art, or anything else visually creative, you should share it on Instagram.

Make sure to take full advantage of the hashtag system in Instagram. Unlike Twitter where you should keep hashtags to a maximum on 3, there doesn’t seem to be an upper limit for Instagram hashtags. As long as they’re relevant, add as many as you can think of. This will help to spread your posts to an even larger audience.

Is Instagram The Social Media Network For You?

Do you have visual content that will be interesting to a young audience and that is resharable? Then you should get on Instagram. Even if you don’t use it personally, there is a lot of potential reach for your business on the Facebook owned Instagram.

Pinterest

The female dominated visual pinning network. Pinterest feels like it has been around forever, but really it is quite new. And as is evidenced by the latest stats, it is growing like gangbusters.

Right now, Pinterest is made up of a large percentage of females, and is dominated by arts & crafts and clothing pins. However, there are definitely niches of other topics.

In addition, the vast majority of pins on Pinterest are repins. This means that if you can create an image that is interesting, it is very likely to be shared over and over again.

I’m just getting started on Pinterest, and even though my boards aren’t in the popular categories for Pinterest users, I have seen a good amount of engagement.

I started out by creating several private boards, and added as many pins as I could, as quickly as I could. Then I made the boards public and let them sit.

Since then, I’ve seen a steady trickle of repins, follows, and likes, with no extra work. And this was all from simply repinning other pins or finding good imagery on other websites.

As long as you can create graphics that are visually appealing, you should post to Pinterest. Canva is good for this if you’re not a PhotoShop master.

Is Pinterest The Social Media Network For You?

If you have visual content, then you should definitely use Pinterest. If you like creating long, vertical infographics, then even better. Even if you don’t have visual content, sharing the imagery that you create for blog posts can be beneficial.

Tumblr

The Yahoo owned social media network / blogging platform. Along with Pinterest it has proved to be one of the fastest growing social networks.

Tumblr is especially popular for the younger audience, and is filled with GIFs, digital artwork, and short-form blog posts.

Similar to Pinterest, most activity on Tumblr is “reblogs”, where users reshare some else’s creation and pass it around the site. Some of the more popular posts can be reblogged dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times.

Tumblr definitely has a unique culture that takes some time to get used to. There is even a kind of unique slang that is frequently used.

Another advantage of Tumblr is its discovery platform. Unlike a self-hosted blog, users on Tumblr can find other relevant blogs through Tumblr’s explore section. This can generate some unexpected exposure, just by being on the platform.

Is Tumblr The Social Media Network For You?

If you have digital artwork, short videos that can be made into GIFs, or short blog posts, consider posting them on Tumblr. The discovery engine can be helpful in reaching a new audience. However, make sure to learn a bit about the culture first before investing too much time into interaction.

Conclusion

If nothing else, make sure to be on Facebook and Twitter. Then if you have visual heavy content, share it on Pinterest and Instagram. If you’re going for the business niche, use LinkedIn. If you have video content, be sure to post it to YouTube. If SEO is important to you, make sure to post to Google Plus. If you want to share your creativity, get involved on Tumblr.

Social networks are becoming use-specific, so make sure to pick the network that works the best for you, and focus your time and effort there to see the best return on investment.

If you found this article to be useful, please scroll down and click “Recommend”.

Thanks!

Find more articles like this one at SmartWebsiteMarketing.com. There you can also download my eBook, Daily Social Media Checklist, for free!

Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on February 10, 2015.

How To Choose The Best Social Media Network was originally published in Smart Website Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.