Thanks for opening this lesson up for a good read. In Lesson 2, we started working on improving the way we post updates on social media to our followers.

We basically showed you how we did it and made you implement the best tactics yourself. See? This is the best thing about this course: you get to implement from us just the stuff that works, and you don’t have to go through everything and mess up like we did until we found this #winning method.

So, let’s begin with Lesson 3 and show you the benchmark box for this lesson, to get your appetite started.

This box shows you that by implementing the tactics from Lesson 2 and the ones from this here Lesson 3 you should start getting to 70 readers / blog article. Much further on the road to 300 readers, right?

Great! Let’s unlock this new step of your journey.

Social Media: More than just Followers. Meet the Hashtags

You see a lot of people on twitter, facebook and google posting updates like: “i found a new working method for my online business. #winning”

What happens next?

Well, the followers of that person who posted the update (let’s call that person Jean) see the post and they can feel happy for Jean, because she found a winning moment in the process of building an online business.

Normally, only they would learn about her winning moment. Maybe she gets lucky and a close friend or a close follower RTs (retweets that) along to his / her own audience. Now, Jean’s post could eventually be seen by more people.

All good. But that’d be the end of story for Jean’s message if she would have written her tweet like “i found a new working method for my online business. Winning”.

She didn’t, now did she? She was inspired enough to write #Winning, instead of winning.

What does this mean?

It means that anyone who’s using twitter (keep in mind: this is also available for facebook and google ) through the twitter website, the twitter mobile apps, tweetdeck or other softwares for viewing twitter feeds can see her message appear on the #winning hashtag. Think of it as an IRC channel (IRC anyone? anybody still remembers it? No? oh, well..)

People search twitter for interesting new things that are written about subjects they like. So, there are people searching on twitter to read the posts that are written on #winning.

Screenshots time:

In the upper right corner of twitter, I’m placing the #winning hashtag

Now, let’s see what appears on our end when we search for the #winning hashtag

Awesome. That’s what it looks like. Now, Jean’s post could be right there in the feed and any twitter user (out of the many millions out there) could virtually see her update.

Yes, much visibility right there! Now imagine this: you can make those people click on your link and go to your blog to read your latest article.

How you can #hack audiences by using Hashtags:

This part is important to understand, if you want the methods I teach you today to actually work.

What do I mean by: hacking audiences?

I mean: using different methods of getting the attention of audiences that you spent ALMOST NO time building up yourself.

It’s about reaching a “pool” from which many “drink” AND placing your own special drink there. By doing this, many new people can start sipping the great knowledge you have in store for them.

In Jean’s case, she simply made her message seen across one hashtag, but she got no real result out of doing that.

You’ll see in the next few lines how to start getting value (and a lot of readers) by using hashtags the right way.

Sometimes, hashtags can be even better for you than just having lots of followers.

In some of our advanced lessons for this course that helps you get 300 readers for each blog article, we’ll show you how to build up your authority on hashtags, so that twitter will offer you even better distribution for the content you place on different hashtags.

It all starts with Hashtag Research

Now you know why hashtags are important. You’ll need to start posting on hashtags if you want real social media traffic to your site. If you target the wrong hashtags, you will get NOTHING out of it and you can kiss the 70 readers / article milestone of this lesson goodbye.

Trying to be realistic with you here. The good news is: I’m going to teach you exactly how to do hashtag research in order to identify ALL the hashtags you can use from now on to promote your blog articles.

How to think about Hashtags if you really want this to work?

Think of them as TOPICS that you tackle with your blog.

Examples: seo, wordpress, startups, entrepreneurship, spirituality, connected car, ibeacon technology, scrum, etc.

Those are the topics that you might be writing about on your blog. You could also buy articles from agencies about those topics. Remember: Udemy built some pretty impressive traffic that way. (here’s the link to SlideShare)

1) Transform a topic into a hashtag:

Take “SEO”. You will post tweets that promote your article on the #seo hashtag.

Pretty simple, right?

2) Now, brainstorm a list of topics that you cover with your blog posts.

Do it right now, so that we can move on to the next steps presented in this lesson.

This is what you will get to by the end of this lesson:

That’s hashtag research done right.

This lesson is also all-action as is most of this course that you’re taking right now. I’m giving you access to a Google Docs file, that you can use as an example for your own research. You’ll only have viewing rights, but you can copy its content to your own google docs spreadsheet.

3) Open up the spreadsheet

Use this link to open up the spreadsheet

Click that. Start viewing the file I created for you.

4) Copy the content to your own spreadsheet

You can do this either in a new Google Docs file or in an Excel file.

5) Look at the YELLOW COLUMN

It holds some tips that will help you get familliar with this document much faster.

6) Place on Line 3 the Hashtag ideas that you brainstormed at STEP 2 of this lesson

Come on. Do that, so we can move on and get you closer to those new readers for your blog.

I’m doing this at the same time.

My own topics (hashtags) are:

#startups | #crowdfunding | #startupconference | #StartupEvents | #tech

You can see them in the table:

Yup, that’s what I plan to write about on our blog and it’s also what we started writing about. Okay, got it?

Now complete your own table with your own hashtags. You need to complete on that line that I marked with red in the screenshot above.

Awesome!

7) Start Using TagBoard.com

Believe me, we’ve tried tons of different ways of getting to the best possible hashtags on which to promote our posts. The tagboard method works best. And guess what? Tagboard is a free tool. Woo-Hoo!

Hashtag research will be easy by using this tool.

Search for the first topic (hashtag) that you placed earlier on in your file.

For me, it’s #startups

So I Place #startups on that front page and I hit <Enter>

Boom! I hit that Enter and now I get this:

Brilliant! We’re getting there.

8) Now you see a lot of messages being displayed for your initial hashtag. Scan this board for all the other hashtags that appear

Wow! This is some real knowledge I’m dropping here. Most people use this tool for reading messages. You’re getting a lot of hashtag research value out of this.

Your purpose right now is to scan ALL of those messages for new hashtags that you can place in your own hashtag research file.

So, I started with #startups. All the hashtags that appear there will need to be placed in my spreadsheet under the #startups column, because I found that people who post on #startups also post on the other ones as well, so it’s basically the same kind of desired audience that I will get to my own blog posts.

Read the paragraph above again, to make sure you understand why this is all vital for your social media strategy of getting 300 readers.

In the screenshot above, I show you that I identified a new hashtag. (#SanFrancisco). It seems like people who’re into #startups might also be into #SanFrancisco (well, it’s Sillicon Valley, so it makes sense.)

I’m going to place it in my file now:

Awesome, now complete that column with all the other hashtags that you find.

All-Action! Continue with the Hashtag Research until you have a lot of lines completed in your spreadsheet

The key to success is perseverance. Don’t give up until you know all the possible hashtags that you could use for your strategy.

You can see that I started completing it with new lines under that column. Do this on your own for all the columns that you have there. If the hashtags are really good, get more of them into the top line (where you placed the hashtags you brainstormed at point 2)

Bonus TIP:

Some of the hashtags that you will place into the file might be irrelevant or worthless. You can mark those with BLACK color (like I did) or simply delete them from your file.

Look at the example spreadsheet I gave you to understand all of this better.

In the advanced lessons that will soon follow, you’ll learn more about all this.

What to do next?

– Complete your file

– Start posting messages on social media that promote your blog posts on the hashtags you just found.

– Check your inbox for the next exciting lessons you’ll get from us.