{"id":480,"date":"2023-03-14T16:19:24","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T16:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/?p=480"},"modified":"2023-03-22T18:45:37","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:45:37","slug":"when-did-everyone-decide-to-pay-themselves-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/when-did-everyone-decide-to-pay-themselves-last\/","title":{"rendered":"When Did Everyone Decide To Pay Themselves Last?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent post here on the fact that\u00a0blogs\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0social media\u00a0generated a good bit of discussion. I was thinking about that thread today and wanted to build on the discussion with something else I\u2019ve seen equally as frequently.<\/p>\n

That almost every company decides to pay themselves on the web\u00a0last<\/em>. And other networks\/people\/media\u00a0first<\/em>. Most companies function like this, but it is backwards \u2013 you should be paying yourself first.<\/p>\n

Paying yourself first is not a new idea and comes from the finance category. But\u00a0a post\u00a0by Jeremiah Owyang in 2007 made me start to view it in a marketing light. In brief, the concept (as I like to interpret it) means\u00a0relentlessly focusing\u00a0priorities\u00a0on the items\u00a0that provide long-term value and completing the rest after,\u00a0if there is time<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So what does this mean?<\/p>\n

If your social media marketing team starts their day with Facebook, Twitter or some type of platform that is not self-hosted you are paying yourself last.\u00a0If your organization is savvy enough to understand the notion that\u00a0every company is a media company\u00a0your own brand of media is\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0priority.<\/p>\n

And you can\u2019t expect to become a media company your entire industry references and looks to for leadership unless you make that the priority ahead of other activities.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a coup on your marketing<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a long-term user of social channels (as in, as long as\u00a0Tamar)\u00a0you have watched the landscape evolve over the years. But what you\u2019ve also seen is a shift in how companies market themselves \u2013 focusing less on their own channels and more on other people\u2019s platforms. Perhaps it\u2019s due to sensationalist media stories shouting big numbers, marketers who care more about being trendy than\u00a0getting results, or even those who would prefer an easy answer than the reality of what is required for\u00a0digital marketing\u00a0success.<\/p>\n

The problem is \u2013 it\u2019s not\u00a0or<\/em>\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0and<\/em>. For example, some of the forums I frequented in the late 90\u2019s and early years of 2000 are still as active as ever. Sure, users there are also probably on Facebook now too. Before that many might have been on MySpace. Some have blogs, some Tweet. Everyone uses search engines and email. This is actually one of the things I like most about the internet: that\u00a0it\u2019s messy. The only sure\u00a0way to have predictably\u00a0increasing returns\u00a0in such an enviornment is to go platform agnostic and pay yourself first there.<\/p>\n

Why pay yourself first?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Content is an asset<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anything<\/em>\u00a0you publish to the web: a press release, an article, an infographic, a video or a response to a question on LinkedIn or Quora is an asset. I still don\u2019t think most companies really get this and are paying themselves last (if ever) with content. Content attracts links, provides a reason for people to return to your site and is probably the best path to scale high quality, organic traffic.<\/p>\n

How do your pay yourself first? I\u2019m not saying don\u2019t use social networking sites and other social platforms that aren\u2019t yours. What I am advising is to\u00a0re-prioritize. Your\u00a0owned<\/em>\u00a0channels come first \u2013 start your day here, it\u2019s as simple as that. I already fleshed out the\u00a0reasons\u00a0for this. While that post was specific to blogging, it doesn\u2019t matter if it is a blog or just a resource section on your company site. You can\u2019t expect to scale organic traffic without a consistent stream of new assets to share with a community.<\/p>\n

Do you pay yourself first with content?\u00a037 Signals\u00a0does. Their content\u00a0is read\u00a090,000 times\u00a0per day<\/em>. Certainly their content played a large role in helping them\u00a0eclipse\u00a07-figures of users who are using their products.<\/p>\n

Links and social signal are equity (and hard to attain!)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Users and media organically thread the web. It\u2019s how we find interesting things and provides signal to the search engines. Facebook\u2019s \u201clike,\u201d while an interesting signal,\u00a0would not replace\u00a0the web\u2019s link graph because a link is platform agnostic. And the internet, viewed holistically is greater than Facebook or any\u00a0one<\/em>\u00a0network. Signals can happen in tandem \u2013 i.e. a successful piece of content attracts likes, Tweets, Stumbles and links. And that\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2013 the point is that if your company pays\u00a0themselves\u00a0first with content and commits to that long term, owned assets built will naturally accrue link and social equity of all varieties. If you don\u2019t pay yourself first you\u2019ll never built a community who will function as your word of mouth marketers and consistently attract links. Basically the signal you are building on the web about your brand will be distributed unevenly (not strategic) vs. building momentum at a hub.<\/p>\n

A platform agnostic community is far more strategic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yielding your presence to the stream\u00a0is silly. I\u2019ll keep saying this: focus\u00a0opt in at the source\u00a0and let users choose how they wish to get your updates. Offer\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0channels that your visitors might be interested in, including email (email is essential to your mix \u2013 adoption rate is basically everyone). Then use syndication to create efficiencies and set expectation in channels you don\u2019t plan to manage this is just a feed for content. If your content is that good, people will still opt in. If your content sucks \u2013 well, that\u2019s a different issue.<\/p>\n

Platform agnostic is powerful. I conducted\u00a0an experiment\u00a0for no other reason than to prove this: I changed a few buttons as part a site template to tag to a different Twitter channel and was able to grow it organically without doing a single other thing \u2013 100% passive tactic. Why? Simply put, a platform agnostic community is a marketing funnel for your company. In a totally different way that the big public networks.<\/p>\n

Why? User behavior for one (hey, I\u2019m on this company\u2019s blog \u2013 wow, these guys really get it, wait \u2013 they have solutions for this too?). In the big public networks we have been somewhat conditioned to follow conversations and content vs. purchase-oriented messages (except for the odd discounts\/exclusives). Even still, people generally don\u2019t like to be have hard sells in their mix while communicating with friends. And yet I can have a strong call to action as part of my site template and make tons of conversions because it\u2019s expected there. See the difference?<\/p>\n

One more reason I\u2019ll mention is simple: signal to noise ratio in platforms you don\u2019t control is usually poor, and content there decays quickly \u2013 frequently ending up in archive purgatory, never to be read again. Yet content created on your own site or blog has value forever, given infinite life by search engines and getting shared well into the future by users. Are you the one always pointing at other people\u2019s content but never have any of your own? You\u2019re probably also paying yourself last.<\/p>\n

Wrapping up<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paying yourself first shouldn\u2019t be thought of as a selfish act, actually just the opposite. When you do pay yourself first your community, your brand and the web as a whole benefits. The web\u2019s ecosystem naturally rewards companies that have\u00a0unique, useful and updated\u00a0content external of networks where there is limited archiving and content is difficult to find later on. The\u00a0open web is not going away, and to focus here your brand is actually positioned as\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0savvy than competitors who just use social outposts but not a hub. Users want something to share and in a world increasing saturated with micro content (the appetizer) we\u2019re constantly left craving more depth (the real meal). Providing this is extremely generous but done correctly, the returns come back to you in spades.<\/p>\n

Lots of people seem to be chasing \u201cbig ideas\u201d or \u201cthe next thing\u201d but that\u2019s silly. Anyone who does this doesn\u2019t\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0understand the web. Everything you need is already here (and\u00a0has already been\u00a0for years) you just need to execute on it and make the decision to pay yourself first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent post here on the fact that\u00a0blogs\u00a0are\u00a0social media\u00a0generated a good bit of discussion. I was thinking about that thread … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz","category-digital-marketing-and-pr","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":481,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions\/481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}