An Interview With Andrew McCauley
Naturally, I was dying to get the lowdown on who Andrew is and what he does – and how he developed this superb Twitter technique, so I set up an interview and received some excellent responses.
Andrew McCauley
Here’s what Andrew had to say:
Q. Could you give us the backstory of your experience and what led to the creation of Autopilot Your Business?
My backstory is that I come from 17 years in the hospitality industry, where I managed large hotels and bars in Australia.
I really loved the marketing aspect of that role, as you quickly knew whether your marketing was working when you saw nobody in your bar, restaurant or nightclub.
When I left that industry in 2006 I began my own business consulting firm. One of my first clients saw some people using this new tool called Facebook for their business and marketing, and asked me how they were doing it.
So that began my foray into social media marketing….and as more and more platforms popped up, so did my list of things to learn.
In 2010, I co-founded Autopilot Your Business and we concentrated on social media marketing from the beginning, and soon branched out to become a full scale digital media agency – creating, distributing and marketing clients’ online presences.
At the same time as doing this for clients, we also created our own properties, with a weekly podcast that has been running for three years, an online magazine aimed at educating entrepreneurs about online marketing – and our very own online TV show, where we interview successful business leaders about their business philosophy.
Q. You’re using an innovative Twitter strategy to create content you know will be epic plus get lots of social shares and traffic, why did you start doing this and how does it work?
Twitter has been a fantastic tool for us to find out what works, what people like and what gets shared, so we use Twitter a lot.
First off, we find out the best articles that people resonate with and then we go about writing an original article that plusses that shared article.
To find popular, highly shareable content ideas I type relevant keywords into BuzzSumo to get automatic results, or sometimes, I will come across them via sites like Scoop.it or Alltop. With those sites, I will manually check the shares on those if I need to.
Once we have created the new post, we go back to Twitter and paste in the URL of the original shared article in the search box of Twitter, and the results give us every person that has mentioned that article in a tweet.
From there, we reach out to these people through email or the contact forms on their websites and acknowledge they have shared something similar to our post previously – and would they be interested in sharing a newer and better post with their followers… its a little bit of work, but the results have been amazing.
Q. How do you go about creating the epic content that forms the central part of this system – is it simply beating the previously shared post?
We have been witnessing the power of content marketing for a while now and everything we were seeing told us that long articles and posts were getting much better traction as far as amount of visitors and length of time on site. Overall, the quality of visitors was so much better.
So we find posts that are relevant to our audience, that have been shared and liked a lot – and we go about making a better post. To do this we may add more detailed descriptions, screen shots, video and graphically appealing images.
We want people to download the post and say..”wow… i need to consume this”.
Q. What sort of results are you seeing from using this strategy, in terms of hard numbers?
Overall, our website traffic has tripled pretty rapidly. What we are also seeing is that the more posts we do, the more traffic keeps increasing, so we are seeing a very healthy continuous upward traffic trend in our analytics.
Our blog posts previously were pretty mediocre as far as traffic goes – but since using this Twitter strategy we’ve seen at least an eight-fold increase in our traffic to blog posts alone.
Q. Can other business owners emulate this technique, and if so are there any pitfalls to avoid?
This technique certainly can be emulated and the pitfalls would be to try to automate it completely.
What I mean by this is that we are reaching out to people on a one-on-one level and as such, this takes a lot of time. But we definitely think the results are worth it.
People overuse automated systems these days and the lack of response that go with these is really not worthwhile. We have created some pretty in depth systems for all this to take place – and that’s the most we will automate this process.
The rest is up to good old one-on-one engagement or building relationships.
Q. Why is Twitter in particular so effective for this type of content led outreach?
Twitter is so powerful because of the quick reach and connection you can get. The fact that Twitter also gives you access to peoples’ websites – where you can connect with them directly – is also a great way to create engagement.
The power of real time search that Twitter has, is also an important aspect in making sure your connections are timely.
Q. Lastly, could you share another advanced content marketing strategy you’re using that gets great results?
One of the other secret weapons that we have been finding amazing is a tool called
Sniply.
We share a lot of other peoples’ content too – and when we share it we do it via Sniply, which lets us add a call to action over the top of the shared page.
This tool alone has seen traffic from sources we had never thought of before. Plus, Sniply is a free tool and so far, it’s been awesome for us.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO GET STARTED WITH THIS STRATEGY,
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