Shama Hyder

Shama Hyder is the founder and CEO of Zen Media who works with clients around the world on content marketing and more. She’s also a bestselling author of Zen of Social Media Marketing and Momentum.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Shama’s success

Cross-pollinating and distributing content widely

Result if you follow the steps in Shama’s session

Increase traffic & conversions

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So momentum, you know, it’s funny, I wrote my first book, the Zen of Social Media Marketing, in very early days of social media, when there really weren’t any books even on the topic, and ended up going into its fourth edition. And it’s done really well, use it to teach social media and college classes. So it’s just, it’s been amazing to see that journey.

What’s funny though is, when you write a book like that, the first question everybody asks you is, when is your next book? And for most people, don’t write one right after successful first book, because, you know, you kind of ride that train.

But for me, it wasn’t so much about writing a book for the sake of writing it. It was more about creating something for market demand, right? I’m an entrepreneur first at heart.

And so I look at things like market demand and what I was looking at, what kind of what’s out there, what needs to be said. I didn’t really see anything until fast forward like four or five years later.

And they see this huge shift where I don’t think it’s so much about the specifics, right in the sense that it’s no longer about the platforms. Like how do I set up a Twitter account? And what’s Facebook good for?

Not that we don’t have these questions or that the audience may not, but this is more we’ve gone from a place of like, what, you know, why is social media important to me to okay, I get it. This is a whole new ecosystem. How do I make this world works for me?

And so when you’re asking that question, my answer to that question was momentum. So that’s my second book. And it’s out in paperback now. And in the book, I really talked a lot about sort of these principles that you need, that are sort of the framework for an ever changing world landscape.

The thing that we’re noticing, of course, more than anything, is that there’s always new platforms. So the number one question, I often get is, what’s the next platform? What is the next hot thing?

And my answer is, it’s not so much about what’s the next hot thing is, it is that we’re always evolving, things are changing, but then these certain principles that will never go out of fashion or they will change. And one of those principles is content marketing, right? And this idea of how do you provide value.

So the principles there can be applied to that, like one of the principles in the book that I talked about is agility to analytics. And very simply, that means looking at your data.

So earlier, I mentioned that we don’t, so much of our content goes unshared, and seeing or doesn’t have that visibility, how do you give it that visibility?

And the key thing about content and giving it that visibility, is making sure that you’re looking at your data, looking at what’s done well, and doing more of that. It’s amazing how many people don’t do just that simple thing.

Like here’s some really low hanging tactical fruit for small businesses out there. If you have a website and you are looking at your Google Analytics, one of the basic things you should be looking at, which posts get the most traffic, even on your blog.

So you may just look at how much traffic your blog gets. But if you dig just a layer deep and say, which posts get the most traffic, just by updating some of those posts, you can get more traffic and conversions. right?

For example, on our blog, in Zen Media, you can go check it out, we have so many. We have so many blog posts, we’ve been blogging since you know, 2005, 2006. So, but we always look at the content and say, okay, which posts do people love?

And like one of our most popular posts, so random, I would have never guessed it in a million years, is something like six business review sites, you know, top business review sites, would people listen to that page, often it ranks well. So we periodically gone in and updated it to make sure the content is fresh and relevant.

So this is a really good example of content marketing, where we’re not necessarily creating brand new content over and over, we’re looking at what’s already of interest, and how to make sure that’s relevant and fresh.