The Ultimate Guide for Converting Blog Readers into Raving Social Fans

How can you turn readers into RAVING social media fans?  

Having social media influence means you can create triggers to educate, and persuade others to take action – especially to share your posts.

As a blogger, the biggest challenge you’d ever encounter after hitting the publish button is reaching out to online users who can willingly share your content to a wider audience.

I don’t know about you, but when I started doing content marketing in 2011, I made a tone of mistakes. Of course I didn’t realize that even a rookie mistake can cost me a profitable business.

Not too long ago, I discovered how to fit the broken pieces of puzzle together. When you employ content marketing, you can easily develop a strong WHY for distributing your content as well as identify your core target audience.

In this post, I’ll leave no stone unturned so you better read it from start to finish.

At the end of the post, you’d be able to tell a unique story that your audience is ready to share. That way, you can become more productive and reach fresh audience for your business.

To make it clearer, you’ll learn how to:

1. Identify the most powerful social media platform
2. Figure out your core audience
3. Use the 1-2-3 Persuasion style
4. Understand and create viral posts

Who are social fans?

The screenshot below explains it better. Take a look at how excited these social fans are:

So before we get right into the meat of the post, I know you’re probably asking who social fans are and what role they play in your content distribution.

Well, social fans are special group of people who admires the content you create, and are ever ready to share it with their friends and networks. Your social fans are not only on Facebook and Twitter. Most of them are active on syndicated social networks like Q&A sites and forums.

Here’s an excerpt of how it works: Apple AppStore has more than 10,273,000 likes on their facebook page. 63% of these people are raving fans, which means they’re on the waiting list to download the next application for use on their iPads and iPhone devices.

And not only AppleStore, other industry experts like Seth Godin (261,627 likes), Brian Tracy and a whole lot of entrepreneurs have social media influence because of their raving fans – people who believe in their products/services and trust them, too.

If you run a personal or corporate blog, you should strive to reach a wider audience. You can’t grow your blog by staying indoors; get off your blog space. So much is happening on the social media scene.

As a rule of thumb, publish less, but spend adequate time marketing that piece of content and get eyeballs onto it. To achieve this goal, you need to build a decent social media influence. Become a social media giant.

Now you know who a social media fan is, don’t you? Next, let’s dig deep into the table of contents:

The most powerful social media platform

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are powerful tools to grow your business.

But are they the only platforms for building social influence? Hardly.

Your blog is first and foremost a social media platform, and very powerful also for growing your business. Most bloggers haven’t known this, which is why they spend more time tweeting to their tiny followers and wondering why no one retweets.

The truth of the matter is that you can tap into your blog to engage your readers and creatively nudge them to promote you.

If you know how to write epic content, you can easily make yourself attractive to the one reader who is dying to share your content.

To successfully achieve this feat, you’ll want to go narrow on your niche as you possibly can and become an expert who’s worth listening to, and then you can spread your wings wider as your loyal audience grows.

Just like those popular social media networks, it’s vital you perceive your own blog as a social platform too, and as such, you need to communicate VALUE, using case studies, stories and anecdotes – laying out your usefulness in an interesting manner just as you’d on Facebook or LinkedIn if you really want to be noticed.

Here’s the recap of what you should do in order to make your blog a social media platform:

1. Start to perceive your blog as a social space, not only for publishing posts, but also for relationship building.
2. Go narrow on your topic first and broaden out later as you grow your loyal audience.
3. Communicate value, become an interesting personality, especially when answering questions.
4. Be personal: focus on the ONE person who is dying to share your content and you’d consequently attract a host of admirers.
5. Never hoard life changing information – think abundance and just share your best kept secrets with readers. This is the ultimate way to win their hearts for the long haul.

Figure out your core audience

You know great customer service when you experience it, don’t you?

In the same vein, when you figure out your core audience, your entire blogging endeavor becomes easy, and helping them becomes your second nature.

Your core audience would definitely read your content if it appeals to them. And to ensure your content is always appealing and relevant to these people, you could use survey monkey. Simply create smart & simple questions such as:

• Is the title of this post relevant to you?
• So far, are you excited with what you’re reading?
• Do you want me to cover a specific topic instead?
• Are you likely to share this post with others?

You can have radio buttons and check buttons to present your options. Ideally, after creating the questionnaire, copy & embed the survey form (html code) directly on your post using inframe.

If you need help on how to activate the html, watch this audible slideshare presentation here.

Who is your core audience?

First, the term “core” simply refers to the central part of a thing. So if you’re in the business of selling information product of how to win more clients, who do you think is your core audience?

If you’re not sure, the list of your core audience can be endless: SEOs, business coaches, start up entrepreneurs, content marketers, bloggers, keynote speakers, personal coaches and so on.

Out of desperation to attract the right people whom you think would do business with you, you can reach out to A-list blogs, run PPC campaigns, share content on social networks as well as use email marketing.

At the end of the day, you may run at a loss, and the reason is simple: you’re not cleared on whom your “core” audience is. You’re still guessing (or better yet, assuming).

From the list of people who may likely need your product above, it’s important to ask yourself an emotional question first, before reaching out to them. The question is, “what am I trying to achieve?”

Are you trying to help entrepreneurs who are struggling to win more clients, or you simply want to show someone who has no client at all? These two people truly need clients, but their taste and challenge is quite different.

As a content marketer, my job is to help website owners create and massively distribute the content, so that it can naturally generate qualified traffic and sales.

So if a potential customer comes to me but has no website, I’ll first encourage him/her to start a brand new website or purchase an established one. Because this is the only way I can track results more efficiently.

My core audience must have a website, but my general audience needs to promote their content, with or without a site. Do you see the major difference?

The greatest mistake you can ever make is to try to please every reader. Get the right people interested in what you say, do or share.

These set of people are your core audience and they’re going to support you in the social media space.

This is the summary for figuring out your “core” audience:

1. Set and write down your objective: what do you want to achieve with your blog?
2. Write to express yourself, don’t try to impress people.
3. Focus on your “core” audience. Work smarter to convert the right people in your business instead of working so hard to drive generic audience who knows what you’re doing, likes it but aren’t ready to share or work with you.
4. Great customer service can help you turn generic audience into “qualified or core” readers. How? Answer their questions and make them personal for each person, especially via email marketing.
5. Define what you do, not who you’re and your achievements. Because in blogging and business, the only person that counts is your loyal reader/customer/fan.

Thanks for seeing and treating your blog as a powerful social media platform, as well as identified who your core audience is, it’s high time you get some action. Let’s do it.

Use the 1-2-3 Persuasion style

Confession: I didn’t invent this persuasion style. Yes, I learnt it from Eben Pagan, the famous Information product expert.

Several years ago, he shared his strategy for creating info products that sells like hot cake. That was when he revealed one of the life changing marketing tricks that have helped my business.

In fact, you can apply this technique when creating your post, email letters et al.

How can you persuade your core audience (loyal readers) to cite and share your content on social media networks?

How do you convert them into raving fans so that you can work less, and get more out of your marketing efforts?

The simple answer: Motivation > Information > Action (i.e. MIA)

This persuasion style is actually in order. If you start out giving useful information, without motivating your readers, you’ll get little or no action at all.

Unfortunately, most people who want to grow their readership base make the mistake of asking people to join their email list, or subscribe to their YouTube channel right off the bat. It doesn’t work that away.

Here’s how to wrap up the MIA style and get earth-shaking social media shares on each post you publish:

Start off your content motivating people with a story. Despite how useful facts and data are, stories sticks directly into the human mind.

We’re held captive by the grip of a collapsed building. With stories, you can create memorable piece of content and persuade so strongly.

When you motivate readers through powerful stories, they don’t just get interested in sharing your content, but they’ll get committed and will do anything that needs to be done to promote you.

Readers who are committed to you have no excuses. They refuse to see that you’re ahead in business and they’re still far behind.

They’ll put all their attention on how they can make you happier, and encourage you to produce better content.

Once your loyal readers are motivated and have put excuses behind them to actually share your content via social media networks, now is the right time to give them the information.

At this stage, you’re not trying to get them to do something for you, but you’re giving them the right VALUE to do it – a good reason for them to stick to their guns and just press the share button.

In a nut shell, persuading your loyal readers to follow and get engrossed in sharing your content across major social media networks is possible, follow this proven plan:

1. Tell powerful stories: knowing that information is wired into the human brain through stories
2. Motivate readers first: make them see the abilities in them to achieve whatever your content promised.
3. Give them a reason why they should rave about you and share your post. Do this with your information, and ensure it’s useful and interesting. Social content is more like music, movies and sports. It’s got to be earth-shaking or else, your chances of converting ordinary readers into raving fans will be very low.
4. Call to action: Be specific when you ask readers to do a thing. If you want them to share on twitter, then don’t complicate issues by also asking them to share on Facebook all at once.
5. Use the 1-2-3 persuasion style in your blog posts, autoresponder emails, copy, press releases, videos, podcasts etc. In other words, motivate first, deliver useful information second, and third, call to action.

Understand and create viral content

The last piece of puzzle for converting your readers into raving social fans is when you create viral content.

But you’ve to understand what it is. How do you know for sure your idea will be shared on Facebook, Twitter and the rest of them even before you type a word?

If you want to create viral content, you’ve to analyse what content performs best for any given topic or your competitor. It’s a very simple thing to do.

In the past few months, I’ve watched a couple of websites climb the social media ladder pretty quickly because their content is shared by thousands of raving fans the moment it’s published. One of such sites is viralnova.com.

But I wouldn’t want to use that as a case study to illustrate my point because you may not have a news-based site. So, let me illustrate with  – KISSmetrics.

Let’s assume you want to create a post for KISSmetrics, but you don’t know which of their older posts have performed well in terms getting massive Facebook likes, thousands of tweets and garnered more valuable comments. The easiest way to do that is to use a free tool: buzzsumo.com

So, let’s quickly head over to that site and plug our blog URL on the search box. Once you do that, click “GO”.

The screenshot reveals the Total shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.

From the above screenshot, the posts highlighted in red outline so far have the highest number of social shares – in other words, those were viral posts, see how raving social fans helped in promoting the content:

Facebook likes: 581 & 568

LinkedIn shares: 639 & 1,412

Pins: 61 & 1

Google+ shares: 1,272 & 643

Tweets: 3,435 & 2,779

What’s in it for you?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. These popular posts reveal something striking for your good: the topics are hot and readers are dying to share it. Your job is to do more research, put your mind to work and create an epic post, perhaps, a better post that can beat the ones that went viral.

Remember the 1-2-3 persuasion style when creating your content. It’d greatly help you to position your business and achieve greater results, than you’re having right now.

Social influence takeaway

Bloggers who have raving social fans are always on top of the game.

They don’t have to work 8-hour/day to get their content noticed and appreciated by thousands of people; they simply employ the large prints: figure out their core audience, create viral content and persuade people to take action.

You too can achieve even better results. It’s all about your belief system, and how you control the circumstances of your business and blog. So what are you waiting for? GET TO WORK!

What other ways can you convert blog readers into raving social fans and get them to share your content willingly and heartily? Share your comment in the box below. See you at the top!