How to Build Community with @AliceKrueser on this week's #BizHeroes

Communities are awesome and essential for every business. But how do you get started building one?

This week on #BizHeroes Small Business owner and publisher Alice Krueser shares her tips on how she has built a thriving community for art enthusiasts, collectors and artists across multiple platforms.

Date: Tuesday, February 25
Time: 11am PST, 1pm CST, 20h CET

Topics for this week's TweetChat:

Q1. What comes first when starting a new business: community building or finding customers?
Q2. What if a Small business owner doesn’t have a blog?
Q3. What role can curated content play in growing a community?
Q4. Does a “one type of content” approach across platforms work?
Q5. What drives engagement on Facebook?
Q6. Is word of mouth marketing as important for small businesses as it is for known brand

Join @MadgaATQ and @AliceKrueser and share your best practices, tips and advice on building community. 

How to Create Buyer Personas with #BizHeroes @JeremiahJWright & @JessikaPhillips

Have you ever heard the term 'buyer personas' and wondered what those are and why you should care about them?

Join us at the next #BizHeroes TweetChat and find out!

This week Jeremiah Wright and Jessika Phillips, from the internet marketing agency NOWMarketing Group will join us as guest hosts on #BizHeroes, Tuesday, February 18th to talk about why personas are essential for targeting the right people to purchase your service or product and how to get started creating them. 

We were excited to learn that Paper.li is one of their favorite inbound marketing tactics. In fact, NOWMarketing publishes and manages more than 30 Paper.lis for their clients (tailored to buyer personas!) and dominate the curated topic of "Assisted Living Communities".

They've even created an ebook based on their experience with Paper.li. It's full of best practices, useful tips and good, all around helpful information. Definitely worth checking out.

Here are the details for the upcoming chat: 

Date: Tuesday, Feb 18th, 20h CET, 2PM EST

Topic: How to Creating Buyer Personas for your Business

BizHeroes: Jessika Phillips and Jeremiah Wright, NOWMarketing Group

Topic Questions:

1. What are Buyer Personas & Why should you care about them?

2. How are Personas different than Target Markets?

3. What is an Inbound Marketing Funnel?

4. How do you get started creating Buyer Personas?

5. What value do they bring to your marketing efforts?

6. How can you use Paper.li to reach Personas?

Lastly, be sure to check out this video on buyer personas and if you aren't already following @JeremiahJWright, @JessikaPhillips and @NOWMG, it's time! See you Tuesday!

Who's your Business Hero? Join us Tuesdays for #BizHeroes and meet ours!

Our community is as diverse as the papers on the newsstand and home to some of the most knowledgeable and helpful people on the internet. And we'd like to introduce you to them!

Join us Tuesday night at 20:00 Central European Time (1pm CST) for our new #BizHeroes Chat and meet the publishers, and business heroes, across all niches of the Paper.li community.

The chat is an opportunity to learn new strategies, tactics and tips from a broad range of topic experts in the Paper.li community who are as knowledgeable and passionate about their interests as they are about lending their expertise to help others.

It's also a one more great opportunity for us to promote the people we love most: our publishers!

Next chat: February 11th, 20:00 CET, 1pm CST
Bizhero: Mack Collier
Topic: Fans vs. Influencers

Topic questions: 

1 -When should a brand work with their fans?  What are the benefits?
2- When does it make sense to work with influencers?
3 - How do you choose if it's better to work with fans or influencers?

A word about Mack:

Mack is an author, #blogchat founder, publisher of the BlogChat Weekly and a selfless sharer of knowledge, wisdom and wit across social channels today.

Last year Mack introduced his book, Think Like a Rock Star to help people and companies build social and marketing strategies that will turn customers into fans. The book offers something to everybody regardless of company size or budget, and is even playing a role in shaping an ambassador program here at Paper.li.

You can find great pre-reading for tomorrow night's chat here on Mack's blog. If you don't have Mack on your radar yet, be sure to follow him at @MackCollier.

Both Magda and I look forward to meeting and greeting you tomorrow night at #BizHeroes. See you then!

How to manually add content to your Paper.li

Have you tried using the Publish-it bookmarklet to manually add content to your Paper.li recently?

This is a great feature and it has been around for awhile. In fact, we launched it back in 2011 and I was recently surprised to see it was one of the more frequently searched terms on our support forum the past couple of weeks.

So I thought it was time for a short "what, why and how" on using the Publish-it bookmarklet.


What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet is a javascript bookmark that you store on your favorites or bookmarks bar that allows you to easily save content to a service. In our case, the Publish-it bookmarklet helps you add a favorite article, image or video to your paper.

Why should you use it? We do our best to fetch and deliver the content you've asked us to daily, but it's possible that we miss a piece that you think is relevant to your community along the way.

The bookmarklet is a great way to fill in any content holes you find and is a convenient way to add content on the fly when you come across it.

Here are three ways the bookmarklet can help you:

• Curate a paper from "just about" scratch. Perhaps you want a finely tuned paper with not a lot of content. You may add just one source to lightly populate your paper and use the bookmarklet to add in the rest. I speak to numerous consultants who use this approach. They add only their blog's RSS as a feed and curate in the other handful articles they want to share with their community. 

• Keep your weekly looking like a daily. Many publishers want the ease of a weekly with the "freshness" of a daily and with the smallest amount of time possible spent on grooming. The bookmarklet is perfect for this. It allows the addition of new content to a paper during the week without refetching the base content. 

• Collaboration. The bookmarklet is a time saver for teams, departments, event organizers or anyone working together on a Paper.li. Any collaborator on a paper can install the bookmark in their favorites and add content on the fly.  Distributing workload frees up a little more time for everyone. Additionally group curation can lend to a nice (or eclectic!) blend of content on a paper. That's fun!

We just improved the bookmarklet  with new functionality. Now it's possible to categorize the piece of content you've selected before you add it to a paper. This is exremeley helpful in reducing the time spent on editing and re-categorizing content if you don't like the topic we've assigned to it.

How to install it: here's a short 90 second video on how to get going with the bookmarklet. In truth the installation is done in about 5 seconds. We took 90 because we enjoy chatting.  

Give it a try and leave a comment below. Let me know what you think and if you find it helpful.

A simpler way to edit: drag-and-drop!

Last month we sent out a short survey to find out more about what you like about Paper.li, how the service is working for you and where we can improve.

Your responses were great and we're still sifting through the 4000+ that came back -- thank you! And thanks for your patience while we get back to everyone who left an email address.

In short, the number one thing that users love about Paper.li is that the service helps you save a lot of time in monitoring blogs , RSS and alerts by bringing the content you are looking for to one place.

You also like that we deliver your content on your behalf via email to your subscribers, help you strengthen your ties with your community and, in general, help you do so much for so little money: free to $9 a month fits most budgets.

When it came to features though, there was one place that we weren't doing you any favors or saving you time: editing your content. You made it clear we that we were making it a lot more work than it needed to be and we weren't giving you enough control of the content on your papers. Ouch!

We listened and reworked what wasn't working for you!

Today we launched a new and revamped editing process, making it quicker and easier for you to delete articles, photos and video, blacklist sites and sources and reposition your content. Here's what's new for you -

Drag and drop: 

Now you can rearrange the content posts within the current topic section on the front page, or move them to an entirely different topic section by drag-and-drop. Photos and videos can easily be reorganized within their section as well.

This enhancement gives you complete control over content placement, ensuring that the content you determine key for your community is where you want it! and easy for your viewers to find.

Content reassignment:

If you prefer to edit and curate content specifically from Topic pages or the See All Articles page, you can do that too.

We've added a nifty drop down menu making it easy for you to reassign your content to a new topic section and automatically moving your favorite content to the front page.
The Publish-it bookmarklet will be adapted shortly to reflect Topic Sections, allowing you to curate the content directly to the Topic Section you specify. 

One-click delete and blacklisting: 

We've decreased the time you will spend on page editing by removing the drop down menu and implementing a lighting fast one-click delete and blacklisting functionality.

This enhancement, as slight as it is, is one of my favorites because it is a huge time saver. Anyone who grooms papers daily will probably agree that this small tweak alone is the biggest gift of all.

We've listed all of the specifics in this post. Leave a comment below and let us know how the improvements are working for you. Feel free to share what you feel is still missing and what can be improved further.

Before I go, a quick holiday reminder! If you haven't taken us up on our "Elf Branding" special offer this month, do it! It's a fa-la-la-fantastic deal!

-Kelly

Upgrade to Pro and we'll help you customize!

December is here and 2014 is just around the corner! That means a lot of shopping, socializing and planning to 'get things done' before the New Year arrives.

We know that sometimes getting things done is easier said than actually 'done'...so we've devised a plan to help!

Upgrade to Pro this December and we'll help you brand your paper!

Custom adverts, banners or custom CSS... it's up to you. Simply tell us what you need, and we'll lend you a branding elf to get the job done.

To get started, send an email to elf(at)paper.li with

• your Paper.li url
• a website or blog for branding reference
• and two ways (below) that we can help you

For standard Pro papers (on the Paper.li domain) we can

    a. create a new banner image
    b. create background and thumbnail cover
    c. creating custom ad inserts (advertising your business, social platforms...)

For Pro papers on custom domains, we can help you by
 
    a. create a custom banner, cover thumbnail and favicon
    b. implementing custom social follow/share buttons
    c. creating a custom header
    d. creating a custom footer

Not sure how to set up a custom domain? We've put together this quick-start Go Daddy guide for you.

There's no extra charge for our elf work this month. It's all included in our  9$ Pro package. If you haven't gone Pro, now is the time!

If you have any questions, just Tweet us @smallrivers using the #paperlielf tag and we'll come back to you!

Happy Holidays!

Create Custom Promo-Tweets, Promote on Facebook and Linkedin

This week I'm really excited to announce the launch of two great features to help you increase engagement and reach new audiences: customized Promo-Tweets and auto-posting to Facebook and Linkedin.

As the Twitter community grows, so does the competition. Over the past months you have told us that getting your message heard across Twitter is becoming more difficult by the day. You asked for control over your Promo-Tweet messaging as well as more options for promotion.

Create custom messaging:

Now you can tailor your message to best fit your niche. You know best what makes your community tick, and click. Add a #tag, modify your mentions and customize your text. Read more about getting started with this new feature here.

Don't want to change a thing? No problem. The "daily is out" is set as the default tweet. Changing it is up to you!

Automatically promote on Linkedin and Facebook: 

We've added auto-posting to Facebook and Linkedin. Create a custom post and share your paper url, or just the featured article, automatically, with each new edition.

Branding tip! Add a thumbnail cover image to represent your paper when shared.

Paper thumbnails increase clicks. When your paper is shared across social platforms you can share your branding along with it. Create graphic or upload your and replace the Paper.li standard "P" with each share.

If you choose to share an article from your paper, we'll post the article image instead of the cover image.

Leave us a comment below, or Tweet us @SmallRivers and let us know what you think once you've tried them out. We look forward to hearing from you.

Tuesday Tip! Join us Tuesday for #Blogchat Europe

The week has only just begun but I am already looking ahead...so, this this week's Tuesday tip is: join me and @Smallrivers for #blogchat Europe on Tuesday, October 8!

Whether your company has 2 or 2000 employees, blogging ranks as one of the most widely trusted and sure-fire way to build authority, grow relationships and generate new business leads. But how? Well, that's what #blogchat is all about!

Mack Collier's #blogchat is a Twitter power-house Tweetchat dedicated to helping YOU get the most out of blogging.

Whether you are a small business owner or a marketer working for a large mega-company, Mack and the #blogchat community provide great insight and help answer your blogging questions.

Because the North American version of #Blogchat is tough for us Europeans to make (it takes place at 3am, CET) Mack offers a European friendly version at 20h, every second Tuesday of the month.

Don't miss out! Pencil in the last three European #blogchats of 2013 into your calendar now:

Tuesday, October 8 - Blog Plug-ins that increase business networking and productivity
Tuesday, November 12 - tba (aka: something really cool)
Tuesday, December 10 - tba (aka: something really cool)

20h CET, 1pm Central.

Just because this chat is called '#Blogchat Europe' it doesn't mean it is for Europeans only. This just means it is held at a time that the European, North American, South American, African and Middle Eastern continents can manage. How cool is that? (Sorry Australasia, we'll have to work on that)

You'll find me there @kdhungford and don't worry about language barriers or making mistakes. We learn a lot and even more important -- we have fun! (And, we score cameo's in blog posts like this one from Tom Martin on Social Media Examiner!)

New! Download your Paper.li subscriber list

It's been an exciting couple of weeks here at Paper.li. Two weeks ago we announced fresh funding and since then we've been working fast to implement more of the features you've been asking for.

This week I have the pleasure of announcing that we have just rolled out a new Pro feature that you have been waiting for: Email Subscriber Export

If you're a Pro publisher, your email subscriber list is ready and just waiting for you to download it!

To get started

• Go to your dashboard -> Stats tab -> Export Emails

We're working on some additional marketing and promotion features that you've requested...stay tuned!

Private Paper.lis and Twitter favorites as a source

We're starting off the week with a couple of new bells and whistles. Here's what's new for you!

Pro feature: "Private" papers

If you have a paper that you don't want anyone to see, you can now completely exclude it from being discovered on the newsstand or via search engines by taking it "Private" and making it stealth!

This is a great feature if you:

• are in the process of branding and fine-tuning your Pro paper, but it isn't finished quite yet
• use Paper.li for monitoring market trends and the competition, and would like to keep it under the radar
• create content for a team and only want them to have access to it
• have an event Paper.li and only want it visible before, during and after an event

To get started go to your Settings tab -> Publishing Options

Twitter favorites as a source

This is a handy new source that allows you to add content gems that you come across during the day to your next edition without needing to modify your sources.

To get started go to your Content tab -> Accounts -> and click on your Twitter account. You'll see a favorites option appear.

Have a question? Leave a comment or Tweet us @smallrivers.

Happy publishing!