WMTW 031: Jeff Bullas – Super Blogger Doing Social at Scale

Posted by Toby Jenkins

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For this show, our guest was friend and super blogger Jeff Bullas.

 “If you want to be a leader you need to create.” Jeff Bullas (Tweet this)

If you don’t know Jeff, then here’s just a fraction of his online credentials:

• Ranked #8 on Forbes” The World’s Top 40 Social Marketing Talent” – 2014
• Published in the New York Times
• Huffington Post – “Top 100 Business, Leadership and Technology Twitter Accounts You Must Follow“
• He is the author of an Amazon best seller – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media”

We first met Jeff Bullas to interview him at his office in 2011 to find out how he had attracted 47,000 twitter followers. Since then, he’s up closer to 250,000 followers and has joined us as a speaker at our Social Media Down Under event.

My favourite quote from the show was:

“If you want to be a leader you need to create. The art of creation crystallises your thinking and helps you structure your thoughts.”

Enjoy the show!

Show notes:

Philosophy of upcoming book:

• Lots of business leaders grew up with mass media
• Crafting and creating online content
• Building online connections as well as face to face connections
• Based on blogging, writing, creating, immersed in digital world

Philosophy of online marketing:

• Helping people solve problems
• Educational style blog
• Trained as a teacher
• Blog evolved from curiosity
• 3 inspirations for starting blog: David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR, Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week, Blog post on Hubspot
• “If you’ve got an inkling of what you want to start a blog about, just start.”

Process to get started:

• Gut feel and fascinated by the momentum around social media
• Bought domain name
• Started blog on wordpress.com
• 12 months later transitioned to self hosted blog
• started with own domain name was really important.
• Owned assets are crucial – self hosted and own domain name.
• Advice came from Darren Rowse and other top bloggers in the industry.
• Creates the best content he can on his platform, social media is how he gets it out – Hub and Spoke model.
• Crowdsources your marketing – tribes and followers – earned media. These tribes then share your content

What has worked well?

• Twitter – Law of reciprocation – followed people and relied on people following him in return
• Facebook has reduced it’s effectiveness

What hasn’t worked well?

• Didn’t upgrade blog to self-hosted platform because of traffic issues
• Not building email list from day 1 – gives you owned channel to share your content.
• Content is what you own, you can accelerate by paying for advertising online.

Creating vs Consuming:

• “If you want to be a leader you need to create. The art of creation crystallises your thinking and helps you structure your thoughts.”
• Creating and feedback online is a powerful synergy.
• Could be curating – not always creating. List posts.
• Put content in a format that is easy to consume and adds value to readers’ lives – possibly just by saving them time and putting it all in one location.
• Can position you as a thought leader in your industry.
• If you want to write a lot, you need to read a lot.
• Feedly has taken up the mantle of pushing content to you.
• “You need to be both a creator and a consumer.”

Creative process:

• Get up early – 4:30am – Jeff’s time to create.
• Twitter feed off, no emails
• Focus on blog post for the day
• Dedicated time without interruptions – no phone calls/door knocks
• Create your space and time.
• Get inspiration and write it down
• Seize a moment – stop the car and write down an idea and interrupt a conversation.
• Inspiration sometimes moves on. Need to capture it.
• 1 blog post every day 5 days a week.
• Create a life.
• Tim Ferriss – deep long form content
• Content must be insightful, interesting, informative, angle
• You’ll need to operate on full throttle to break through
• “You need to be creating content on a consistent and persistent basis.”
• Uses a plug-in called Yoast for SEO.
• Content is shared – Twitter, Flipbook, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email subscribers, Google+
• “Hustle your content”
• Article by article – possibly create summaries on weekends.
• Repurposing blog posts to more visual formats like Slideshare.

Content Flow:

• Blog post – tweeted 4-5 times
• Social Oomph to retweet content
• Content is evergreen

Content Curation:

• 25 other bloggers that he shares daily
• Automated – Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Lee Odin, Mark Scheafer

Doing Social at Scale:

• Do need to use some automation
• Tweepy – following followers of other Twitter accounts

Content Creation:

• Snackable and easy to consume
• Structure your content
• Headline
• Enticing first sentence
• Subtitles
• Bullet points
• Numbers
• There is no commitment – you are one click away from oblivion if you are boring them.
• Stephen King – when people read something, it needs to look fluffy but not be fluffy.

Learn from:

• Stephen King – On writing – 100 pages of his writing journey and 200 pages of his writing toolkit.

Final thoughts:

• Adding value to people’s lives on online
• Developing premium content
• Monetizing the platform
• Make the journey enjoyable and make a difference to people’s lives at the same time.

Connect with Jeff:

• Jeffbullas.com
• @jeffbullas

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