Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

  Lou Bortone on ▼▼▼ Watch and Listen Below! ▼▼▼ If you want to increase online visibility for your business, the universal advice is that you need to post videos. Everywhere, all the time, videos. Algorithms love videos, Kids love videos. Grandmas love videos. Videos, videos, videos! I was a slow starter when it came to posting videos for my music and my businesses. I've had a YouTube channel for a long time and it sat for years while I worked up the nerve and figured out how to use my camera. A few years ago, I heard about a class called 31 Flavors of video. In that class, I learned about 31 different kinds of online video I could make, I joined a Facebook group where I got daily feedback. And I gained some amazing tools and resources that helped me make good decisions about equipment, production, scripting, and more. In this episode, I'll introduce you to Lou Bortone, the creator of the 31 Flavors of Video, as well as programs like Fast Forward video mastermind, and the new ...

One of the most popular episodes of Your Own Best Company in 2021 featured an energized and inspiring conversation with The Lead Boss, Cat Stancik. In this "Best Of" clip, Cat shares her social media content strategy, the 4 Ps: Popcorn Positioning Prospecting and Pitching Cat uses and recommends this conversational content framework as a part of her lead generation strategy that centers on building strong relationships and finding leads among the people you're already connected with. Find the entire episode here: https://youtu.be/BIYdUP2ZNlw To learn more about Cat, visit https://actionincubator.com #socialmedia #leadgeneration #contentstrategy 

Social media captions and hashtags are powerful ways to be found online, but many creative people make common mistakes in how they're used. A musician may be inclined to talk about their composition or recording process and reference the music in their hashtags. [hashtag]musicperformance, [hashtag]Americana, [hashtag]songwriter, [hashtag]originalsong. I suggest the captions and hashtags be more about the audience's story related to the creative work. If I wanted to make my caption and hashtags for my song, Hard to Be a Cowboy, I might want to write it like this: My Uncle Charlie was my [hashtag]boyhoodhero, a real [hashtag]wyomingcowboy who was a [hashtag]familyman, a [hashtag]proudamerican, and a positive [hashtag]malerolemodel. This song is my tribute to him  https://youtu.be/z8JgVaJGETg This caption and hashtags give a glimpse of the story of my Uncle and make it visible to the people who may see it in searches for keywords and included hashtags. #marketingtips #creativebusi...

Some of us believe that we can turn our successes into formulas and that if we can just figure out what people want to see and hear, they'll want to consume the content we create. We study analytics to see any patterns of predictable behavior to replicate what has already been successful, only to find that we could release the exact same video on two different days and get two entirely different reactions.  Yet we keep looking for the magic formula - that one piece of virality that will push our visibility from obscurity to influencer overnight. We study trends and attempt to read the minds of potential content consumers, trying to know in advance what they will be in the mood for and then bending our creativity in that direction.  It seems that of those who have been successful, extremely few were overnight. The majority of people who have grown large audiences have been consistently releasing the best content they could muster, and the audience decided if it was interesting ...

What if 96 percent of people looking for a service like yours were ignored by the top-performing competitors in your industry? By now, the easiest to find customers in your industry are finding the companies who can afford the most expensive ads, keywords, and the top of page one on Google. But imagine if you found a closet full of bankers' boxes with people who wanted your service but couldn't access it as easily as the customers your competitors have the resources to reach. Wouldn't it be worth it to find ways to serve them? That's what Scott Schang did. He used blogging as a way to teach people who had been refused mortgages on their first try how to succeed on their second. The sales in his division tripled. Now Scott teaches other mortgage vendors how to reach their customers through content marketing using blogs, videos, and other channels. He's taken his most successful content and packaged it so that other people in his industry can share in the success he...

This thing called Influencer Marketing isn't a new idea. Advertisers have been using influential spokespeople for at least a few centuries. And marketing itself is pretty much just influencing people, so this phenomenon of the influencer marketer is an interesting one. I have a client who aspires to this but has a misunderstanding about what it takes to build a following and become influential. Her question to me seemed like she was asking for a shortcut. She wanted to be able to attract a following quickly and start charging businesses to advertise their stuff. I know this happens sometimes and especially with the popularity of social media, it's becoming more and more of a thing. But I think it's important not to lose sight of how sustainable influence is created and that is what this Coffee Break is about. My answer - focus on making a positive difference and people will start to follow you. When people start to follow you you're an influencer. The rest is just a num...

Like many solopreneurs and freelancers, I've fallen for the belief that you have to be everywhere in order for your marketing to reach more people - every social media channel doing posts, stories, shorts, videos, live videos, reels, carousels, albums, polls, emojis, 24/7/365. And then you have to have a blog, a podcast, an email newsletter, a YouTube Channel, a snail mail publication, and a quarterly postcard to your old alumni mailing list. It was exhausting, impossible to maintain, and ineffective in reaching the right people for my business. A few years ago, I did an experiment. I evaluated all the marketing efforts I'd been doing to see which ones were getting the most desirable results. I wanted to know what they had in common. What I found ended up being the catalyst for my ideas around helping people identify their unique marketing modality. I discovered that the social media and content marketing content that was working best for me featured me in a speaking situation,...

We've been talking about working with social media algorithms. One of the ways you can learn what types of content algorithms prefer is to do some simple testing. In this coffee break, I have a couple of simple suggestions for ways you can test the performance of your content.  The Care and Feeding of Your Social Media Algorithm is this Saturday, January 8th, 2022 from 9 AM-Noon Mountain Time. For information and registration, see the Workshops page on my website, franklintaggart.com.  #testingcontent #messagetesting #socialmedia

Today on the Coffee Break, we're talking about what algorithms do and why it's important for businesses and marketers to make friends with them rather than fight them. They're learning about us constantly then taking what they learn to build more experiences we'll want to have. If your posts aren't getting much response, the main thing to wonder is what can be changed to satisfy the algorithm's rules. If you want more people to see, interact with, and share your social media posts, join the workshop on Saturday. Details here: https://franklin-taggart-coaching.teachable.com/p/the-care-and-feeding-of-your-social-media-algorithm #socialmedia #smallbusiness #contentmarketing

I get almost daily inquiries from people about why their social media posts aren't being seen. Most of them haven't heard about algorithms, and if they have, they've heard mostly negative things. In this Franklin Taggart's Virtual Coffee Break, we ask and answer the question, "What is a Social Media Algorithm?" and we learn why that matters to businesses and marketers. The main thing to know is that the primary goal of an algorithm is to generate users' experiences. Social media platforms want people to stay engaged on their apps and they use algorithms to direct those experiences. I'll be offering a workshop this Saturday, January 8th, 2022 that will help people start to work with algorithms to create better-performing social media experiences. The workshop will be recorded and available in my school the day after the live event.  More information at https://www.franklintaggart.com/p/workshops.html  #socialmedia #algorithm #userexperience

  ▼▼▼Watch and Listen Below!▼▼▼ The need for business owners to consistently create marketing and sales content that stands out in an increasingly noisy marketplace reaching the right people with the right message at the right time. Cynthia Trevino teaches life coaches, creatives, and consultants how to get their amazing knowledge out of their heads and onto paper, so they can show up online and share...consistently!  She is a writer who’s been blogging since she had to explain what a blog was,  she’s published a book, and is a master * content re-purposer * She’s 100% a late bloomer, waiting to become an entrepreneur till she was over 50 and after a massive corporate downsizing. She says, “ I'm a master at brainstorming...it's one of few valuable lessons I learned "in corporate.“  Cynthia serves solopreneurs who want to show up online, having their messages and content ready to share so they can start relationships with their audiences of future clients, customers, ...

I recently wrote a guest post on the Loveland Business Development Center blog about podcasting. I'll be offering a free Lunch 'n Learn presentation on podcasting on Friday, June 15 at noon at LBDC. Check out the link to read the post and register for the session. You'll leave the workshop with tools for planning, producing, and promoting your podcast, and you will be able to get yours started right away. https://lovelandbusiness.com/an-easy-way-to-grow-and-reach-your-market-podcasting/

I listened to a podcast the other day in which two women were talking about their success online, which apparently had something to do with something called content. In the course of the 50 or so minutes they were talking, the word "content" was spoken between 5 and ten times a minute. Content, content, content. Creating content, content marketing, content, content, content, more content. This generic term has come to mean less and less, and it leaves a taste in my mouth comparable to that brought about by the generic beer I tried after the high school football game all those years ago. I can still bring the taste to mind, and it isn't a fond memory. It used to be that people wrote articles, or stories, or songs, or screenplays, or they made films, or wore out their dad's Super 8mm camera, spending their hard earned lawn mowing cash on getting those films developed, then splicing their masterpieces together on the kitchen table with a pair of scissors and Scotch...