Bobbie Byrd and Lisa Stauber, Co-Host of Twitter Chat #BlogElevated
By Cheval John
January 24th, 2017
Today’s episode of What’s The Word? features Bobbie Byrd and Lisa Stauber, Co-Founders of the Blog Elevated conference.
The conference evolved from the houston bloggers association which was started in 2010 to connect fellow bloggers in the houston area on growing their online presence.
They later created Quirky Owl Media, which became the parent company of the blog elevated conference and the twitter chat.
In this episode, you will hear:
-what led them to form the conference
-should businesses embrace live video
-their thoughts on snapchat
Snippet on Vallano Media TV
Full Episode on BlogTalkRadio
Website: www.blogelevated.com
Twitter: @BlogElevated
Quotes from Bobbie Byrd and Lisa Stauber on
INFLUENCER MARKETING
Lisa: I think because the opportunity is just there.
It’s one of the ways that you can monetize your instagram channel or your snaps or your tweets or your blog by doing partnerships with brands.
Their biggest asset is their reader’s trust.
So when you become an influencer, you are basically able to leverage that trust into an income.
Now some people will just show anything for any money and they quickly lose that trust and find that their business flames out.
So the smart influencers are authentic and were already sharing everything they do anyway.
If we really love an appliance, we share it.
If we really love a meal at a restaurant, we already sharing it.
So it’s just a way to make an income stream from things we are already doing.
Bobbie: As far as influencers, many of us already have the followings built up behind us.
If it’s something you want to promote, there is nothing wrong with making money of of that.
From the business side, it’s genius for these companies to be using them.
This past weekend, I went on a sponsored trip out of town and I just shared it on my social media accounts.
I had several personal friends, not even people are outside of my immediate friend group, asking questions and saying, “We Want To Do That.”
It’s just because of what they saw me doing.
I can take that same message I’m sharing with my personal friends and share it with my fans which are over 50,000.
I think for the bloggers perspective, it’s something that’s easy to monetize if you truly love it.
If you are a brand and you are not doing that, I think you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
TWITTER CHAT #BLOGELEVATED
Lisa: The chat has really kind of changed over the years which originally started as houston bloggers chat.
During our meetups, we would tweet using houston bloggers as a hashtag.
Then people would say, “Oh, I can not come to the meeting or I missed it or can I follow the hashtag.”
So it kind of grew from there.
We would do our meetings once a month and the other three weekdays of that month to keep the connection strong.
We kind of tweet about what was in the news or if some big new thing happens.
We would just tweet back and forth.
It was a really small group of people.
But the chat became more popular and we started having people from other cities joining.
So we had Dallas saying, “I’m not in houston, can I come to houston bloggers chat” which obviously it’s on Twitter.
We had people in Austin and in San Antonio and people who did not live near a city, but really crave that connection with bloggers.
Maybe they lived in a small town and did not know one other single blogger around.
So we morphed into Texas blogger chat and found that we were doing it three weeks that we did not meet and a lot of people missed out on the fourth week because it was a bigger chat.
So we moved it to a different night and we’re chatting every week.
From there, we created the conference and changed the hashtag to blog elevated so we could encompass everybody interested in the conference and everyone attending the conference because we have a pretty heavy Texas group at our conference.
We also have people from other countries attend.
We are an international conference at this point.
DIGITAL MARKETING
Lisa: If there’s one area of digital marketing that’s over-saturated, it’s the coach of the coaches.
The people that will have a webinar to teach you how to do webinars, but only ever had a successful webinar about webinars.
It becomes an echo chamber.
So our Twitter chat gives us the opportunity to show that we’re not just people who talk about blogging, we really have actionable things that will move your blog forward.
One of the hearts and soul of blog elevated is we are trying to avoid cliques and welcome everybody.
We are also helpers.
We try to always be serving our audience at all times.
It also because it’s the opportunity to reach out to bloggers one-on-one a lot of times during the chat or after the chat asking a more specific question.
We can help them right then and there because again, we’re all about education and helping bloggers.
Whether they come to our conference or not, we’re still gonna help you.
I think the conference is a great opportunity to get all in one area all at once to meet with brands and network with other people and hear from other speakers.
If you really want to blog, you do not have to go to a comprehensive e-course or buy an ebook.
You an figure it out just by having other bloggers help you.
From a business perspective, it’s also given us cold hard numbers that we can share.
I do not think a lot of attendees know that we do not make any money off the ticket sales.
We have the ticket sales to confirm that you are attending and to cover things like coffee and your lunch.
We do not make a profit off of the conference.
What help us run the conference as a business is getting outside sponsors.
BLOGGERS PITCHING TO BRANDS
Lisa: We get between five and thirty million impressions in a single hour on the blog elevated twitter chat.
We usually trend in houston and at times nationally.
Those are numbers that the people who want to work with us can take to their bosses and say, “They are not just shooting in the dark or hoping to get results.”
We can show exactly how many people saw it, how many people retweeted, how many people stuck around.
It is really helpful to give us proof of concept.
Bobbie: Our numbers are proof.
They need to know without a doubt that you can provide value to them.
If you want to sell $100 course to twenty people and yet you do not have any proof that shows you can do what you are trying to sell, it’s gonna be hard.
You gonna have to work quadruple the amount of time that you would if you just simply went out and offer your services for free for a little bit.
We’re big of don’t work for free.
But there is a big difference between working and serving others.
That’s where you kind of have to figure it out.
Are you working for them or are you serving and helping them?
If you are serving them, it’s gonna come back to you and you will see a payout in that as well.
Lisa: It also helps you build your portfolio.
If you are new to an area, maybe you have never run facebook ads before and you help somebody and you are not charging them because you are learning yourself.
Plus, you help the other person and you can build your portfolio and show concrete results.
Rachel Moffett, Blogger at Define Your Hustle
By Cheval John
Rachel Moffett made an appearance on What’s The Word? to share about her journey to becoming a social media manager for Express Writers.
Her journey began when she started blogging in 2009.
Along the way, she founded her website, Define Your Hustle.
In this episode, you will hear:
How Express Writers’ twitter chat, #contentwritingchat, build a deeper community with their audience
Why blogging takes a lot of work
Why putting a year into blogging does not make you an overnight success
This episode was recorded on Facebook Live via Blue Jeans Network
Snippet on Vallano Media TV
Full Episode on BlogTalkRadio
Website: www.defineyourhustle.com
Twitter: @redheadrachel
Quotes from Rachel:
INFLUENCER MARKETING
I think a true influencer is really somebody who has trust with their audience.
I think there is a lot of misconceptions that just because you have a million followers on Instagram, you are an influencer.
It’s a lot more effective to have a smaller highly engaged audience than a huge audience that is not paying attention and is not listening to anything you have to say.
If they do not trust you, they are not really going to buy into what you are trying to sell or anything like that.
So I do think it really has to do with trust and building a relationship with your audience if you really want to be a true influencer on social media.
TWITTER CHATS
Twitter just makes it so much easier to have a conversation with people in real time.
You could certainly have conversations on Facebook or Instagram as well.
I do feel on Twitter, people are a lot more open to having a conversation and I think twitter chats kind of break the ice a little bit and makes it easier to reach out and start a conversation when somebody might be a little afraid to reach out to someone new.
LIVE STREAMING
The reality is it’s a really powerful way to connect with your audience.
Whether it is live video or if it is pre-recorded YouTube videos, your audience gets to see you and hear you.
It is like they are right there with you and interacting with you in a way.
On a blog, they are just reading written content.
While that is great and I love reading blog posts, I think there is something really special about that connection you have where you can have a real time conversation with somebody over a live broadcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, would you share it with your friends and colleagues.
Also, who would you like to hear from on this show?
Influencer Marketing: A Modern Marketing Tactic
By Cheval John
Today’s post is written by Brooklynn Boyer.
Brooklynn is the Manager of Marketing and Success for Social Peeks, a social ambassador and influencer marketing platform which connects businesses with influencers.
You will see some insights on why businesses are using influencer marketing.
You can also visit their website at www.socialpeeks.com.
Without further ado, here is Brooklynn
If someone told you that Influencer Marketing started in 1937, would you believe them? It’s true.
From Dale Carnegie’s original publication of How to Win Friends & Influencer People was sparked during a movement of Hollywood actors and actresses – now it’s used in a similar scope with social media stars.
It’s said that, “in the next five years, it will grow to become a $5B to $10B market.”
Yet so many people are ignoring the Influencer Marketing trend.
Instead of another convincing blog post to jump into the Influencer Marketing world, we’re going to explain to you why a cut of your marketing budget would have the best ROI (cough cough 9x ROI according to VentureBeast) in an Influencer Marketing campaign.
Here’s 5 reasons why you should consider Influencer Marketing before it’s too late:
1. Organic Traffic Is One Of The Highest Converting Traffic Sources In Marketing.
Micro-influencers are considered organic traffic because their campaigns are genuine and organic in the sense that they don’t just post anything.
Celebrities, with the right price tag, will generally post what they’re handed.
Micro-influencers tend to do the research, play with the product and express their experience.
2. Ad Blocking Software Is On The Rise.
People are blocking the targeted ads that ‘bug’ them in apps, on websites, and in their search history.
Finding other ways to get into your customers peripherals isn’t hard, you just have to look in the right spots.
Influencer marketing allows this connection with your customer, and they accept it as a valuable and genuine offer.
Why?
Like we said above, these influencers are experiencing the service or product before they ‘get social’ with it.
So their audience and fan following trusts them to only represent the brands that are 100% effective and straight up awesome.
3. Video, Interactive Content, And Image-Rich Campaigns.
We practically just described influencer marketing in 3 words.
These types of marketing material have the highest engagement – and they’re practically all that micro-influencers share.
They care about their following, so when brands want to jump in on the action, they care about what the message is and how it comes across.
This is like an extra layer of nurture and customer care that gets put into every single campaign.
4. Influencer Marketing ROI Can’t Be Beat.
As simple as that. With 6x ROI to every marketing dollar in 2015, influencer marketing is now averaging 9x ROI to every marketing dollar in 2017!
With an increase in marketing spend in the next 25 years, the ROI is only going to continue to grow.
The key to finding influencers who allow you to see this type of return is in their engagement rate and their followers adversity to their shared reviews or partnerships with brands.
5. This Is The Top One-Size-Fits-All Marketing Tool Strong
Influencer Marketing can essentially be used across all industries and market types.
It’s not like others that only acquire to brands, or only acquire to services, you can virtually use this tool for anything from fashion to construction – the range is endless.
Influencer-ship has finally stepped away from brands with deep pockets and influencers looking for big payouts – it’s the era of micro-influencers, and you better consider hopping on board before you miss the ship!