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Chapter 5: How to Create Great Stories That People Will Want to Follow

Now you know why Snapchat is important, how to use it as a marketer/en-trepreneur and how to find your way around and access the advanced fea-tures.

Now all that is left is to create a channel and to make sure that it’s great. This is important a) because you will be showing off your footage in order to attract followers in the first place and b) because you need to actually re-tain those followers once you’ve got them!

So how do you do this?

Making High Quality Snaps

One very important starting point is to make high quality snaps. It’s gener-ally best here to focus on videos more than photos, as you can say a lot more with videos and they look a lot better when you stitch them together into longer stories.

In order to make good videos then, you’re going to need a good quality cameraphone. And one of the very best places to start here is with the Note 5 (which may have been supplanted by the Note 6 by the time you read this). Why? Because not only to Samsung Galaxy phones have some of the very best cameras on the market – capable of up to 4K – but the Note also comes with the pen that will allow you to add detailed annotations and drawings that will really put your videos a step above.

You then need to think a little about your videography. Yes – even for something like Snapchat it pays to have something resembling a plan when you start rather than just blindly snapping everything you can. To that end, think about factors such as lighting. Where is the light coming from and where should you stand in relation to it? Having lighting coming from the side is ideal as it will cast shadows across your face in the right way. Avoid having light directly behind you which will create glare.

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SEO

Before you start spending money on adverts, SEO might be a better first port of call. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and is essentially the process of optimizing a website and link strategy so that your store is easy to find on Google when people search for it.

To do this, you will often begin by identifying a search term (key phrase) such as ‘buy hats online’. Only you won’t want to choose ‘buy hats online’ because that will very competitive and very difficult to rank for. This is why it’s such a good idea to have a particular target audience and a particular type of product. Remember how we discussed selling brightly colored shirts? Well ‘brightly colored shirts’ is likely a keyphrase that people look for but which isn’t quite as competitive.

To start ranking for this term, you need to ensure you have a well optimized website (meaning it’s fast, mobile friendly and easy to navigate) and that you include the keywords you’ve selected in your descriptions and on your blog occasionally. Aim for around 1% density, so for every 100 words, you can include the keyphrase once. It’s also useful to include it in headers and in meta descriptions and then to try and build as many links as possible on relevant websites (that might mean getting a fashion blog to link to you for example). You might be able to do this by providing them with free content, which is called ‘guest posting’.

Content Marketing

Speaking of content, content marketing is also a fantastic tool you can use. This basically means you’re running a blog and the aim is to get people to subscribe and to look for your site when they want information relevant to your industry. So if you sell gardening tools, you should have an authoritative blog on gardening that peoples subscribe to.

In doing this, you’ll now have an audience that trusts your recommendations and that listens to what you say. You can now recommend them your own products and even provide them with special offers.

Email marketing goes hand in hand with content marketing. Try to build the trust of your audience to the point where they’re happy to hand over their contact details – then subtly sell your products to them.

Building an audience for your blog is of course the tricky part but you can do this by running a social media account and by using SEO.

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Renewals System

Recurring income is one of the best parts of running a membership website, and something that many other types of online businesses lack.

Just remember, while first time subscribers certainly breathe life into a membership website, renewals keep it alive.

Make sure to consistently remain active within your community and to do your best to provide high quality, exclusive material to your subscriber base on a regular basis.

Feature An Affiliate Program

You will also want to incorporate an affiliate program into your membership website, so that both visitors and subscribers are able to generate commissions from every referred sale they make.

When structuring your affiliate program, focus on offering a very appealing commission percentage; in order to recruit active affiliates who will help you jumpstart your marketing campaigns.

Different companies pay different percentages and amounts for leads and sales. The differences paid for a sale can range from 75% down to 1% depending on the company and the product.

What you decide to pay your affiliates will depend entirely upon what you are selling and to whom you are selling it. A good idea would be to check what other companies selling a product comparable to yours is paying their affiliates.

However, how much you pay your Affiliates really depends on how much your product/service costs, its profit margin, how much you're willing to give up and what action you want to take place.

When running an affiliate program, you will want to make sure that your current membership script or software is able to effectively track all sales and leads, as well as provide detailed information to affiliates (including overall earnings, stats, payment dates, etc).

You could also actively join affiliate programs that are focused on your niche market yourself, and incorporate your affiliate links into a “Recommended Websites” page, so that you are able to maximize earnings by promoting third party products and related websites.

For example, if you run a membership based website focusing on golf training, you could feature affiliate products that include golf gear, advanced lessons, physical books and even video tutorials.