Page 136 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

content channel. Hubspot has a simple call to action on their site:
“Subscribe to our blog. Thousands of others have.”
Collect kudos tweets: When people tweet nice things about you, start
saving them as a “favorite” tweet. Then you can link to the list of nice
recommendations as an entire stream of public, published social validation,
as in “Don’t take my word for it, click here to see what others are saying
about my (book, blog, podcast …).”
Publicize clients: Logo porn is a popular website tactic of displaying client
logos. It’s an easy way to establish credibility for your company by simply
showing who you work with. Some companies (especially large ones)
require permission before you can post a logo on your site. I’ve added this
as a contract line item: “Schaefer Marketing Solutions may name you as a
client on its website.” Customers are usually happy to help you out in this
way.

When social proof backfires

I need to end this tidy little chapter with a cautionary note. A few years ago, I
made a business decision to remove nearly all social proof from my website. In
essence, I’m not following my own advice. Here’s my story.

In the early days of blogging, there was a metric sponsored by Advertising
Age magazine called the Power 150, a listing of the most powerful marketing
blogs on earth. It was not even close to being a reliable metric. Part of it was
determined by some dude who decided if he liked how your blog looked. No
joke. The “Todd Score.” I actually increased my score by writing Todd an email
asking him to give me an extra point. Twice. Some of the blogs on the list had
been inactive for two years. It was that bad.

But like many bloggers of the day, I became obsessed with this social proof. I
put a badge on my site that displayed my daily score for all the world to see. The
{grow} blog was number 37 or 22 or whatever “Todd” had decided, I suppose. I
would flip out when it dropped. Instead of focusing on great content, I started
concentrating on pulling any string that would increase my score for a couple
days. And it was a metric that really proved nothing. I also had seven or eight
other badges on my site from every meaningless “best of” list I was on—
arbitrary awards created largely to boost egos. Social proof became a distraction,
a sickness really.

Finally my head won out over my ego and I knew I had to do a purge. My
personal philosophy had always been “create great content, love on your
audience, and the rest will take care of itself.” I had lost my way. In 10 minutes,