When I met Michael Hyatt at his fantastic conference in Colorado last December, I felt like a groupie at a Beatles concert. He’s just that good.
Having mentors is one of the quickest ways to get up to speed quickly and in 2014 Forbes put him at number 5 in their list of the top 10 online marketing experts to follow.
Michael Hyatt has over 500k visitors and 538k subscribers to his blog. He pours his knowledge of how he got there into Platform University, which I just joined. In this post I will share some of my first takeaways and thoughts on his digital marketing platform.
Michael shares a quick start guide video as the fourth step in the “getting started series” to using Platform University, which has a nice snapshot of his system. Here is the essential overview of Internet marketing tactics from Platform University and this video but also from his best-selling book Platform:
4 steps to blogging and building a repeatable digital marketing platform
Step 1. Branding
Branding is everything and the foundation of your platform. Without a proper brand set up you will struggle with the details. He suggests that you define the following as action steps:
- Who you are
- Where your audience is
- What you have to offer them
Your logo, color palette, fonts and tagline are very important but you need to dig deeper than that.
- Write down who your audience is
Michael’s audience is as follows:
- Mostly men (63%)
- Ages 31 to 50
- Have a college degree (79%)
- Household income of $70,000 (59%)
- Determine the felt need of your audience
Example: “To leverage their leadership and maximize their impact”
- Create a brand slogan
Example: “Helping leaders leverage influence”
- Get a professional logo
Having a hokey or cheesy logo is going to immediately turn people off and so it’s worth investing to do this properly. There are plenty of ways to get this done reasonably these days such as 99 designs.
Step 2. Build a home base as a key part of your digital marketing strategy
It’s critical to have your own piece of digital real estate such as a blog, video blog or podcast that can’t be taken away from you.
- Set up a WordPress site
- Install a premium theme
- Set a consistent writing schedule because consistency is more important than quantity. Consistency builds trust and trust leads to influence, which then leads to sales.
- Create reader focused content and headlines. Write from the reader’s perspective. An example is “The beginners guide to creating goals”. Also make sure to make your content scan and skim friendly with bullet points and short paragraphs.
All of these things help you build your home base.
Step 3. Embassies / set up social media to drive traffic to your blog
Make sure to use the social platforms that your audience uses. Start with just one or two.
- Identify where your audience gathers
- Fill out the profiles with a good photo of you not your logo
- Add social icons to your website and blog content
Step 4. Outposts / social media monitoring
Monitor places where you don’t have a presence but where people are talking about you and/or your brand.
Great tools for this are Google Alerts, Talk Walker and/or BuzzSumo alerts. More advanced tools include Hootsuite and Radian6.
This helps you respond to positive and negative mentions of you and/or your company. Remember, in the EAT acronym that Google uses to judge websites, they are looking at your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Therefore, reputation management cannot be ignored.
Platform University features
I am now re-inspired by Michael Hyatt’s work and look forward to the following features of Platform University:
- Master classes with expert interviews of national level experts
- Backstage pass videos where you go behind-the-scenes of how Michael runs his organization
- Member makeovers where individual members get publicly reviewed in detail in terms of their platform
- Forums where you can connect with other members and ask questions from Michael’s team
- Webinars
- Live question-and-answer calls
They recommend that you schedule a specific time to use the system, at least 45 to 60 minutes a week. Most of the videos are less than an hour. You can also download podcast to listen to in your car or while you are working out.
At the yearly Platform Conference, members get additional benefits as well.
Also check out some of my other posts reviewing his conference and various sessions:
Platform conference review and creating a blog with Michael Hyatt
Email Marketing Tips and Tricks from Michael Hyatt
In Conclusion
There are very few people at Michael’s level of building a blog and a platform which makes his programs unique. This is the kind of content that I come back to numerous times because there are so many action steps that need to be digested and implemented. The paid version of Michael’s work in Platform University makes growing your authority much faster.
What’s really exciting is when you not only start to see your traffic grow but the media starts calling you regularly out of the blue – just happened to me again yesterday – and customers sign up after all of the pre-sales is done by them reading your blog. Sure beats cold calling.
