In this episode you’ll learn practical hacks that authors can use to get more traffic to their content. I think you’ll enjoy this interview with P.J. Simmons from Gospel Driven Entrepreneur.
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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- The types of hacks that can be used to expand your reach in writing.
- How you can get the most out of Twitter for your blog.
- How can you leverage Instagram for your writing.
- And more!
About P.J. Simmons
P.J. Simmons serves as the Founder and Director of Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, a podcast and resource company that inspires entrepreneurs to leverage their work in bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. With over 100 interviews, Gospel Driven Entrepreneur has grown to be one of the world’s top faith inspired entrepreneurial podcasts on iTunes. P.J. lives in Atlanta, GA
Find out more at www.gospeldrivenentrepreneur.com
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Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below:
SHELLEY. This is episode 24 of “Author Audience.”
ANNOUNCER. Welcome to the “Author Audience” show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, and change lives. Here’s your host, Shelley Hitz.
SHELLEY. SHELLEY. Today I’m rolling out the red carpet, and I’m inviting you to join me in this expert interview with PJ Simmons. Hey, PJ!
P.J. Hey, how are you?
SHELLEY. Great. I’m so glad that we are more than overcomers, right? We’ve had some tech issues today, but we are going to get this message out to those who need it, and I’m so excited to have you on here. For those of you who may not be familiar with me, my name is Shelley Hitz, I’m the owner of Author Audience Academy, and I’m a true believer that success leaves clues; and that’s one of the reasons that I do these interviews. Those who have had success have something to teach us. I’m a lifelong learner. I don’t know about you, but I love to keep learning. So today I’m hosting PJ, and he’s going to be sharing about hacks to get more readers and specifically more stuff on Twitter, which is really exciting to me because I’ve been focusing more on Twitter this year. So, PJ, I’m just going to share a bit of your bio, is that okay?
P.J. Yeah, please do.
SHELLEY. Awesome, so PJ Simmons serves as the founder and director of Gospel Driven Entrepreneur—love that, it’s so cool—a podcast and resource company that inspires entrepreneurs to leverage their work and bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. With over 100 interviews Gospel Driven Entrepreneur has grown to be one of the top faith-inspired entrepreneurial podcasts on iTunes. PJ lives in Atlanta, Georgia—I have cousins who live there, so that’s awesome—so welcome, PJ.
P.J. Thanks for having me. I’m excited that we were able to finally figure it out and get together today.
SHELLEY. That’s right. One of the things as an author is that you write this book, or you have this blog, and you have this content, you have a passion to help people with that content, or entertain them if it’s fiction, whatever it is, but you want to reach your audience. Sometimes you feel like it’s just crickets; you have all this stuff to share, you have all this content, but how do you find the people who really need it? What are some hacks that you have found to reach more readers that you could share with us?
P.J. Absolutely. I have quite a few of them in the tool bag. You mentioned Twitter earlier. I definitely have a couple more that I would love to share outside of that. I guess I can start by telling how where I was and how I saw a jump in my readership and listeners with, specifically, the podcast, because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half. About four or five months into launching our podcast, Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, I had a conversation with an individual from Orlando, Florida, who had found some success in podcasting, content development, and getting people to visit his site and that kind of thing. I would never have guessed this, but do you realize that people actually troll hashtags on Twitter?
SHELLEY. I believe it.
P.J. I didn’t believe it at first, and I was like, “Who just looks up random hashtags?” I always thought that the greatest time to look up hashtags in Twitter is when you’re watching an awards show, or something that the whole world is watching, because it’s just the funniest stuff that you can find on there.
SHELLEY. It’s entertaining, right?
P.J. Very entertaining. But I started leveraging hashtags, using that prime real estate of those 140 characters to drive more traffic to my content. Once I started doing that, we saw a jump of 300 percent of people finding our content.
Typically how we’ve done that is—same way with authors if you have certain buzzwords or content like a nice witty sentence or something—you have certain buzzwords that are geared toward your niche audience. Whether that’s “Hey, I’m writing fiction” or “I’m writing about flowers” or cats, dogs, whatever it may be. Using certain hashtags to represent that. For us we would say something like, some type of witty sentence, a link to our podcast, and then we’d #Entrepreneur, #Business, #FaithandWork, and my goodness readership, listener-ship, just immediately went up there.
That’s been one of the biggest Twitter hacks, in conjunction that I think pairs with that, in regard to Twitter. Twitter is actually a more interesting mode of people finding content. So, if you ever notice yourself, or think about yourself, if you’re big on Twitter, if you Tweet a lot or read a lot on Twitter; here’s what I’m typically doing, I’m usually on my iPhone.
SHELLEY. Me too.
P.J. I’m scrolling somewhat super-fast, so I’m not taking time to read this Tweet, this Tweet, this Tweet, every single one. I’m looking for something that piques my interest or some type of buzzword; it has to be psychological, just what your brain does. This is why I’m a huge proponent of Tweeting often. At Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, we Tweet about our content once an hour, every hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; that’s what we do. The reason being is because just like me, and just like you, you’re doing this on Twitter trying to find something interesting. People are never on Twitter for half an hour, forty minutes, to get to the level of digging really deep in your timeline to find your content. That’s why you have to constantly be Tweeting. The glorious thing about that—what we do at Gospel Driven Entrepreneur—we use a program called Hootsuite, which is a total Godsend.
SHELLEY. Yeah, I’ve used it for years as well.
P.J. Yes, just scheduling social media. So I sit down on a Saturday, spend an hour or two scheduling my social media for the rest of the week; all I had to worry about the rest of the week is just sharing it.
SHELLEY. Checking in, and yeah that’s super smart. I heard somebody talking the other day that some people are hesitant about automating social media because it’s spammy or something, but they said, “It’s the difference between scheduling social media and automating. When you’re automating DMs or automating replies, that to me feels spammy, but when you’re scheduling, that is super, super smart because who is sitting at their computer every hour on the hour ready to send a Tweet? You need to have some of those tools, and it’s like hiring a VA, you’re hiring Hootsuite as your VA to send out those Tweets at those times.
Hashtags are really smart, but I know a lot of authors get super confused, so can you really break it down? What is a hashtag, if somebody doesn’t even know; it used to be “It’s a pound sign!” Now it’s, “What’s a hashtag? I’m confused!”
P.J. Exactly. After Jimmy Fallon people are finally getting the idea that this is a hashtag. In social media hashtags are basically clickable links that compile – whether it’s a Tweet or a Facebook, or even on Instagram – everything that has to do with that specific word; that social media platform immediately pulls all that content into one space. You have individuals, say writing, for instance, some people maybe writing about nonfiction, some maybe talking about leadership, some maybe talking about how to build a deck on your backyard. They can hashtag that content, #writing or #author, and if you search on Twitter #author or #writing, it immediately pulls all that content into one space. What happens, just like I said I never would have imagined anybody doing this for some reason, people are actually searching social media—just like you do in Google where you search for keywords to find information you want to know; people are doing the same thing through social media by searching hashtags. That’s the purpose of a hashtag.
SHELLEY. I like to say it’s kind of like a list. Some people will actually go and look through that list and see what’s interesting, like you said, to them. If somebody is trying to decide what hashtags to use . . . like you said, you used Business, Entrepreneur, Faith and Work, and stuff like that, how did you find those hashtags to use? Was it experimenting and seeing what got the most engagement? How did you decide on which ones you wanted to use?
P.J. It definitely is experimenting. One really cool route that I took in that process was, specifically, through Twitter you can actually look up specific hashtags and see how many Tweets are caught under that hashtag. For instance, I can search #Entrepreneur and it will tell me this many people have Tweeted about entrepreneurship, whereas if I did something like #PostitNotesandBusiness, that’s a super, super niche to where it really doesn’t give a wide enough, broad array of people to be able to find it. If I’m able to connect, and my goal with hashtags is to basically have the monopoly on my list, I want to own that real estate of when people come and search for Entrepreneur or Business or Faith and Work, I want them to see Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, Gospel Driven Entrepreneur.
SHELLEY. Every hour on the hour.
P.J. Yes, every hour on the hour—definitely a lot of experiments, researching, and it’s super easy to do. Just type in certain key words that you typically use for your content; just hashtag whatever word and you’ll see some with more tweets under them than others, and I would just go with the ones that have the most Tweets.
SHELLEY. Yeah, another thing that I recently found out about: have you heard about the tool Twitonomy.com?
P.J. I haven’t, no.
SHELLEY. Twitonomy.com. I can put in your user name and see what are the hashtags that PJ is using the most. It will tell me what hashtags you’re using the most. So you could also go to influences in your niche and search for them on Twitonomy.com and find out what hashtags they’re using. That will give you a few to start with, to start looking on Twitter and say, “How many people are using this?” Maybe it’s just something they randomly chose and they didn’t have a strategy on that hashtag. I feel like sometimes that’s what it is, but that’s just another little tool that people can use.
For scheduling, something I started to use, that I’m really liking, is Post Planner. I can actually choose to have my post automatically rescheduled on a certain basis. You have to be really careful with that because Twitter doesn’t like to duplicate content, so you don’t want to have to do it all the time or every Tweet. What I’m doing is I’m scheduling some of those and evaluating which ones do the best and keep those in the queue, and then change up some of the other ones, they allow you to edit it before it goes live again. So, that’s a real time-saver and can be a great tool for people too. Tell us a little bit, because you’ve also said you’ve had some success on Instagram. Tell us a little bit about Instagram.
P.J. Instagram is the—not necessarily the next big thing—it is the thing now.
SHELLEY. Especially with young people.
P.J. Yeah, definitely when you’re engaging millennials, the twenties, thirties, getting into teenagers, those type of things, Instagram is huge. Mainly because we are such visual creatures as it is, already, you’re starting to see a lot more sponsored Instagram posts. If you guys are on Instagram, I’ve actually caught it beginning to up its game in the last two weeks, just more ads coming on Instagram. Just like Twitter it uses the exact same format as far as leveraging hashtags for people to find your content. Just like Twitter you want to use that real estate for hashtags. The great thing about Instagram is that there is no character limits, so that is huge when it pertains to telling more compelling stories and narratives for your image. You have much more of an opportunity to share your personality, your brand, how gifted you are at storytelling through the process of using Instagram more than being limited to 140 characters through Twitter.
On Instagram you can write a couple paragraphs of twenty-five different hashtags, and if you’re creating really good images with really good content, people are going to notice, people are going to engage with that. That is another great tool to drive people. It’s, first off, another avenue, another mode that you can write, that people can find your content. Secondly, you can link your website, your blog, whatever to your Instagram account. That’s something that I typically do on my Instagram account is saying, “To read more, find out more, click the link in the bio,” and it automatically shoots them straight to your website or straight to your blog.
SHELLEY. Yeah, I think with Instagram the limit is thirty hashtags right now.
P.J. You found the limit!
SHELLEY. Yeah, so I just copy and paste. I have a file in Evernote where it saves all of mine. I have some that are just about quotes, because I share a lot of quotes and stuff, and I have some about my Christian faith, and then I have some about Entrepreneurship and Business, and authors and stuff too. I just use the same ones, but it’s so true that if I forget or I don’t have those hashtags on an image one day, the engagement decreases by so much. It’s so smart, if you are on Instagram or Twitter, to really spend a little bit of time up-front researching the hashtags, keep them in a file somewhere; I use it on Evernote so I can access it on my phone if I’m posting from my phone, or on my computer if I’m posting from my computer, but have it somewhere, even Dropbox. Keep using different ones on Twitter and see which ones do best, but on Instagram I just keep copying and pasting the same thirty.
P.J.Exactly, there is nothing wrong with that; that’s very smart.
SHELLEY. There is so much in social media; how do authors avoid being overwhelmed? I was talking on Periscope, and it was like bright shiny object syndrome: we can get so distracted. So how do we do these things, reach those readers, and not get distracted away from our purpose and what God has us here to do?
P.J. That is really, really good. I have a couple things. First off you want to really quickly test the avenues that work best for your audience. For some individuals Twitter is going to work a lot better than Instagram or better than Facebook. That’s going to have some toying and playing around with, but for a practical insight on how to really save time and use those things wisely, is really to consolidate all of those platforms into one. I do that by using Hootsuite. With Hootsuite I’m able to link my Instagram account, my Facebook, my Twitter, my LinkedIn, and all I have to do is come up with an update or a status once, click all four or five of the links, and it automatically shoots that out to all four or five of those rather than posting something on Twitter and then having to go to Instagram, and then having to go to LinkedIn, and all these other places. So, it’s a great time-saving hack, and a great thing is that Hootsuite is free up to a number of different platforms. So even if you just wanted to use the free platform.
SHELLEY. I did that for years.
P.J. Just use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and you should be good to go and you don’t pay anything. The next pay-up is like $5 a month, so it’s literally, totally, worth saving you the crazy amount of time it would take to go all the way and post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, all these other random social media platforms, so that’s been my biggest hack as far as using my time wisely in social media.
SHELLEY. I also heard you say earlier that you batch that. So you do it in a chunk of time one time in the week. So that is definitely a hack, and a productivity tip, to do it all at once. The other thing I wanted to bring up, as we’re winding down now, I heard you say that on Twitter you would share a witty phrase. We can be pretty boring sometimes, and I love to encourage, and I love to inspire, and sometimes I have to really think, “How can I engage?” You have to be who you are and who God has created you to be, but if you can, if you are witty, if you are funny and have that humor, or if you have a way to make it more entertaining on social media, a lot of people are there for entertainment, to be distracted, so the more you can do things like that, the more I think you can also draw people in as well. Knowing your target audience and what hits them the most, as well.
As we’re closing, I love to give a Take Action Tip. I love working with action-takers, so what is one tip that you would give today as we wind down, from what you shared, that you would recommend listeners taking action on?
P.J. I would say the biggest action step is start putting hashtags in your social media updates. You will be pleasantly surprised, I promise you.
SHELLEY. How many do you normally add on Twitter, by the way?
P.J. On Twitter I do normally two or three.
SHELLEY. That’s what I normally recommend too.
P.J. Two or three on Twitter.
SHELLEY. So that’s your assignment today: go and research a couple of hashtags and start adding them to your Tweets, see how it goes, and you can change it, ebb and flow as you go. PJ, where can people find you? Where’s the best place for them to connect with you?
P.J. On Twitter you can find me @PJSimmons, also at our company @GospelDrivenENT, and then our website is GospelDrivenEntrepreneur.com.
SHELLEY. Yes, and then he also hosts the podcast Gospel Driven Entrepreneur, so if you’re looking for another podcast and want to check him out, go over there. Definitely subscribe, check him out, and if you love the content leave a review; we love reviews, just like authors. Follow him on Twitter, and check out what he’s doing, because like I said earlier, success leaves clues. So you can just watch what he’s doing, and you can continue to learn more that way as well.
Thank you so much for being here, PJ; I really appreciate it. I don’t’ know if you know, but my husband’s name is CJ. So I was like, “Oh, another initial! PJ, CJ.” It was great to have you. Thank you so much.
P.J. Thank you. It was great being here.
*~*~*~*
ANNOUNCER. Thanks for listening to this episode of the “Author Audience” show. Connect with us online at AuthorAudience.com where you will find all the resources mentioned in today’s episode. While you’re there, grab Shelley’s free video training on how to write and publish your book using her “6-Step ASCENT Method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.
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