Another channel for explosive growth
In the book Traction by Weinberg and Mares, they mention targeting blogs as one strategy for explosive growth. Since original content is king and Steemit provides a huge opportunity for blogs there are strategies and tactics that are useful for reaching out to blogs & bloggers. We can also look at some success stories of companies that have successfully reached out to blogs and simulate their efforts.
Mint is a money management software that was able to gain 1 million active users within 6 months. They had 20,000 signed up before they even launched. The Mint team's initial goal was to get 100,000 users in 6 months so they started out with a variety of different outreach efforts to: Tech Crunch, Dave McClure, Mashable, reddit, Digg, Paul Stamatiou, Okdork and financial bloggers. They also used Google Ads. What they found when they reached their goal was that the best channel was targeting blogs. It converted 65% of the traffic and drove more than half the 100,000+ users out of all channels combined. Mint's team did a couple things to enhance their outreach to bloggers. As part of the signup process, users could embed an 'I Want Mint' badge to their personal blogs, Facebook, or other Websites and gain early access to Mint. They made these badges easy to share and embed. They ended up getting 600 blogs and 50,000 users that signed up through these badges! The backlinks also gave a huge boost for search engine traffic. Secondly they sponsored blogs directly because bloggers often don't make money for their writing. Noah, head of marketing at Mint simple sent a message with “Can I send you $500?” on the subject line, told them about the product and requested ad placement on the blog. Most bloggers were happy to share the product to their readers. Finally Mint struck a deal with Motley Fool which has over 3 million readers. Noah also used the same blog strategy with his startup AppSumo, a company that sells software bundles and educational products. He tailored a bundle for Lifehacker readers and they helped him promote his company. AppSumo now has over 800,000 customers. For both Mint and AppSumo, focusing on the right industry blogs was critical to their high adoption rates.
Some tactics:
Search engines – search for things like 'top/best blogs for x'
Youtube (also Vimeo/Dailymotion) – search keywords for industry, find influencers, reach out and build relationships
Delicious – use keywords to find links that others have saved...
Twitter – find influencers. You can use tools like Followerwonk and Klout...
Social Mention – helps determine sites that have most frequent mentions for keywords...
Medium/Tumblr – just search for the most popular bloggers for different categories on these platforms.
Talk to people – just ask your target audience what they read directly!
You can also go to link sharing websites such as reddit(of course), Product Hunt, HackerNews, Inbound.org
Conclusion & Takeway for Steemit:
There are two groups of concern for Steemit: 1) Readers 2) Content creators/curators.
Targeting blogs to increase readership
First Steemit can reach out to bloggers in certain target demographics. Looking at the popular category topics on the right: crypto-news, politics, photography, bitshares, news, technology, beyondbitcoin, gardening, cannabis, funny are the top 10 categories that aren't steem related. It would be good to reach out to blogs in those categories first to attract readers that want a consistent flow of good content. We can use the tactics listed above.
Targeting blogs to recruit content creators/curators
Since Steemit is a blogging platform itself, reaching out to blogs for bloggers is a strategy. This can be self-improvement blogs, blogger advice, 'how to make money blogging' websites, blogger networks, blogger affiliates etc. Creating a 'I Got Paid at Steemit' badge similar to Mint would be great. People can post it on their blogs, provide evidence on an 'I Got Paid at Steemit' thread and post it here to get paid. Reaching out to topic/niche blogs directly from the top 10 non-steem categories would be good to further enhance the quality of those categories. Referrers could send emails out with the subject "Would you like $XXX dollars for your post?" .. you can email them a links of posts that have earned the most money in a particular blog category. We would also need to create incentives for those referrers in the community, because this outreach takes work. Using STEEM giveways for these efforts might be appropriate. There are probably formal referral programs in the works, but you might be able to just create a referrer's thread to keep track of and upvote successful outreaches in the meantime..
What strategies & tactics do you think would be most effective for bloggers? What additional strategies & tactics do you think would be effective?