Make Me Over - Carney
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Make Me Over

Get more love on your blog, boost your ad relevancy score, &…the most boring ad ever?

How to Makeover Your Blog to Get More Traction (with Julie Solomon)

Oh, blogs, how little we speak of thee. Facebook and Instagram get most of the marketing love, but that blog you meant to start three years ago should actually be a fundamental piece of your business. The foundation, not an extremity.

“That’s where the heart lives. That’s where the story and brand of the business truly stems from and truly lies.”

That’s how Julie Solomon approaches her own blog. She’s a blogging expert and thriving entrepreneur, so we’re taking notes. Her blog acts as a resource for other bloggers, creatives, and influencers to level up their brand, business, and income. She’s killin’ it.

Amy Porterfield linked up with Julie to talk about the blog hustle and the crucial connection between blogging and successful businesses. Plus, Julie shares her strategies for blogging that get real results (i.e., awesome engagement and traffic). Who says you can’t teach an old blog new tricks?

Tune in below:

  • (04:45) How Julie got her start and her journey through the PR biz
  • (09:20) How she took her blog from a hobby to a business
  • (12:05) First steps people need to do before creating their blog
  • (12:17) Why Julie calls her blog “the headquarters”
  • (14:05) Why it’s so important to get weirdly specific about the questions you ask about your audience—like, what’s their favorite Margarita flavor?
  • (18:15) The 3 statements you should tackle when writing for your specific audience
  • (18:35) What is the most unique way that you can reach your audience? What are you providing and how are you going to be a solution provider for them?
  • (19:20) The five core values a great blog post stems from
  • (23:13) Julie’s steps to stay consistent
  • (27:10) The biggest mistakes bloggers make
  • (35:22) Julie’s favorite tools to promote her blog posts
  • (38:02) How to know if you have a “healthy” blog
  • (41:53) How your mom can help you optimize your blog (hey, her words, not ours)
  • (45:00) Trigger words: what are they and how you can use them

As always, Amy hooked it up with a beautiful transcript for all you readers out there.

A Simple Way to Improve Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score

We’re all running Facebook ads, right? No need to dive into the benefits of FB ads (but for real, there are a ton of benefits, and all businesses should be running FB ads).

One piece of your Facebook ads that will drastically affect your CTR and CPC is Facebook’s Relevance Score (RS). A high RS gets you lower CPC. When it’s super high, you can see a CPC under 10 cents. A low RS gives you a higher CPC. Like, way high. It could be over $4 per click if your RS is bad enough.

So what’s it take to get an 8, 9, or 10 for your Relevance Score?

One part is niching down. You need to be pretty specific, but sometimes you can get too specific. That means that no one will click on your ad.

Your solution to this problem is what Larry Kim calls the Inverted Unicorn Method. The idea is rather than target a number of correlated interests, you should target two completely different interests with the same ad.

In today’s Read, Larry outlines how he does that exactly. In his example, the two completely different interests he targeted were people interested in liberal politics and Star Trek fans.

The reason he targeted those groups is that the content he promoted appealed to liberals, and the creative he used appealed to Star Trek fans. That little intersection of people interested in both was his sweet spot.

His results on a $400 ad spend:

  • Over 1300 likes
  • 235 shares
  • 68 comments

The story was also picked up by multiple national media publications. Pretty good work for $400.

So how can you do this? Let’s say you’re Salesforce. You could write a piece of content about the sales strategies of a well-known entrepreneur – Elon Musk, for example. Then run a campaign for that content targeting salespeople who are interested in Elon Musk.

Get the full story here →

The Most Boring Ad Ever Created

…so boring that we couldn’t even use a screenshot from it for the image of this section.

Want to know how to create the most boring ad in the history of advertising? Take notes from Big Tobacco. They’ve managed to pull it off in their latest court-ordered ad.

Obviously, the boys at Big T weren’t too happy that they were forced to create these ads so they dragged their feet—for 11 years! Yeah, that’s right. In 2006, they were ordered by the U.S. District Court to create ads about the dangers of cigarettes, and they only just got around to it.

We’re almost impressed with how boring these ads are. And that’s obviously by design. They’re so boring that you’ll probably never pay attention to them if you see them out in the real world. Just look at the boringness of the print version of these ads.

It’s truly a great lesson in how not to create an ad. If you want to create something that catches people’s eyes, do the exact opposite of this:

Hey, Look at This

We love data and predictive analytics as much as the next marketer, but don’t forget you’re marketing to real humans. Sometimes data makes you lose sight of that. Marketoonist hit us with an especially relevant comic.

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