Transcripts
1. Welcome to thie Bluesky marketing course: Welcome to this
course on promoting your business with BluSky. My name is Alex Kendinik and
I'll be your instructor. In this video, I'll
tell you a little bit about what to expect
from the course, a little bit about
my background, and we'll start right away. Well, this course is meant
to be simple because I recognize that BlueSky
is relatively new. Most people haven't used it yet. So there will be a section
of how to get started, and then we'll talk about how to promote your content
or business on BluSky in common
good practice ways. Of course, my background is that I have 20 years of
marketing experience. Ranging from SEO to all kinds
of social media websites, and I've been a long
time instructor with many, many best sellers. And so what I'll do in
this course is make it easy for you to
understand the platform, the ways to use it, how to get the most out of it. And probably what you want the most is how do you
get promotion, real promotion, real
traffic out of it, because sometimes
it can be easy, difficult to promote
your business on social media because
many people say, promote on social media, then we go and promote and
it's crickets. So I'll show you how to use best practices to put you
in the best position. And the course is made to
be simple should get in, get out relatively quickly, and gain the skills to begin
applying your marketing to BluSky within the same day
or relatively soon after. So welcome to the
course. Let's begin.
2. Creating Your Bluesky Account: With this video,
let's begin using BluSky and just
creating our account. This is me just on Bluesky The
URL is a little bit funny. You would expect ablusky.com, but it's busky dot APP. So just be aware of that.
Don't go toblsky.com. If you go there, it's a
totally different website. So busy dot app. And even though
I'm not logged in, I already have a feed. So let's just create
an account together. So I'm going to
click Sign up enter my email password and birth
date, pretty standard. Click Next. User handle. Of course, it's up to
just to be consistent, I'm my last name on most social media accounts or at least some
variation of it. So I'll enter my last name
as my handle and go next. Human, yes, that's true. Then they give me
a little puzzle. There, next, I pass the
puzzle. Congratulations to me. And they prompt you
to give your profile a face to get a photo,
and, of course, I will. And this is going
to be just for me. I'm going to promote my
hobby, which is music. So I'm going to go and
find my music image. And we'll click Continue, and I'm going to select music. Next, and we'll click Let's go, and our account is set up. And you'll notice I'm not
really following anyone yet, but I'm already having a feed. And my feed, this is random, but kind of maybe adult
content, you'd say. Not the most pleasant of things. So you quickly want to start building up who you're
actually following. And instead of Discover, you see on the top
here, there's Discover. Discover is their algorithm
just suggesting stuff to you. Most of the time, what
people want is to create their own feeds
and their own interests. And discover would
have been good because I told them
my interest is music, but for some reason, they're showing me animals
and politics and violence. So we're going to
go to following. And in the next videos, let's work on building up who we follow and build up the
rest of our account, essentially, things
you do on day one. But in this video, we have successfully created
our own account. Hopefully, you've done
the same for yourself. Congratulations to both of us. And in the next
video, let's move on.
3. Filling Out Your Bluesky Profile: Before we can begin marketing, there are many things
we have to first do, and one of those is
to brand our account. So under profile, you'll see this option to edit your profile
because you see here, I don't have a background image, and I don't have a
little blurb about me. So when you click
on Edit Profile, you get to add all of that. So if you want to
upload a file that will give you a
great background, something music related. I'll just kind of search
for music images on my computer and see
what's good here. Maybe that's kind of cool. And you always want to
see how it comes out. Looks pretty reasonable. And then the display
name, of course, my name is Alex Ken Diniko, that's how I want
to be displayed. You have also a
keyword, like music. That's kind of interesting. Sometimes you'll get
discovered by music. People search by name or
browse by name and they're browsing music because you have a name music in your background. That's sometimes a little hack in certain social media sites. It doesn't work tremendously
well, but a little bit. And then your description,
which is really important. In my case, it
would be something like this singer songwriter, writing poetic music inspired by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Then you want to add a
link to promote something. For example, I might
add my YouTube channel. Here's the link to
my YouTube channel, and I might want to add a few keywords like writing
poetic original music, or in a different spot, I might want to go
with new music. Listen to all my new music. See how I kind of have
a little hack and I put little keywords here, like music, new music. What I'm writing
still makes sense. But I'm just trying to add a little bit of
keywords so I have music. I can also add poetry, writing poetry and
poetic original music inspired by Bob Dylan. So I got some keywords here. It's important to add
some keywords here. This aids your discoverability. And whenever people do find you, this is where they go to see is your content and what you're all about
interesting for them. So it's really good
to first of all, make it informative,
descriptive, but if you can have a few
keywords, that's also great. And for consistency,
I'll just uppercase music here and click
on Safe Changes. And suddenly, I have a better feel for my
profile. It's well branded. It has a little blurb, and if people do find me, they can click on my YouTube
channel and find my music. Or if you're promoting
your business, you can post your
business website and they can find you there. So this is generally a step you do before you do any kind of marketing because you want to make your profile
interesting, otherwise, your marketing
efforts will fall flat. So definitely do this before you start being very
active on BluSky.
4. How To Follow People You Follow On Twitter: If you're just building
up your blue sky profile, you want to follow some people. One of the first options people usually use whenever
they're starting a new social network is they
take people who they already follow elsewhere and follow them on the new social network, and that's what I'm going
to show you how to do here. There is a Chrome web store app. Basically, you just search for Sky follower bridge on Google, and it will just take you
here, kind of like I did here, Twitter follower bridge or sky follower bridge,
whatever, click that, and you will just
have to add it to Chrome add extension, you
can delete this later. Then it says it's
been added to Chrome. And you can check pretty
easily if it's installed. You can click on the
three dots on Chrome, my extensions and themes, and as you see here,
it's installed. What you want to do is
go to your Twitter, but also on your profile, people who you're following. From here, you will
click on the extensions, that little puzzle piece here, then sky follow or bridge, then enter your
handle and password for BluSky and then you'll
click on Find BlueSky Users, it will scan some
people for you. And after a few minutes, it says, view the
80 detected users. You can go through them, and you can easily choose to
click on BlueSky. Like there's a hockey reporter
that I like, and so on. You can go through
different people that you like, and so on. You can just go through this
list and choose who you like and populate your own
follower account. That's pretty much it. Once you're done with
this, you can remove this extension
from your browser. You would do it like this. You would go to extensions, click on that little puzzle, manage extensions, and you
would click on remove it. So Sky follower bridge, remove, remove. That's
pretty much it. So that's an easy way
to find people who you already follow on
Twitter or X to BluSky. And in the next
video, let's explore a more interesting part
of BluSky which is to find people that are new for me to follow there that
I don't already follow. So let's do that
in the next video.
5. Marketing To Do On Day One On Bluesky : You first begin your account, you get a call to action here, like ten Post and
follow seven account. And what you can
do is just go to different lists of people
and click on Discover here. And you can search,
let's say under Music or Leonard
Cohen in my case. I like him. So for example, this person is posting poetry. Actually, I love
that kind of stuff, so I'm going to follow them and just ten people who are
posting interesting things, like if this person is
posting Leonard Cohen quotes, I'm already into it, so follow a lot of poetry. Good. Then this person who says Haluah by Leonard Cohen is one of the greatest
songs ever written. Of course, I follow that person. Also, many people
whom you follow, they will get a
notification that you follow them and they
may follow you back. So there's a lot of
interesting people here follow Leonard Cohen stuff. I really love that.
Basically, I'm finding stuff that
I really like. And I'll skip you the details. I'm going to just like a lot of these posts because
that's what I have to do. So I'll just skip
to the point after I've met the thresholds
they asked me to meet. Then you probably want
to promote something or just so that your
account isn't there. Like if you click on your
profile, and you see, like right now, I
have nothing right There's a new account
we're creating together. You want to post something. And so because I'm going to post about music and
read about music, this is just going to be
music related for me. I'm going to post a
song that I wrote, so I'm just going to
get a link for it. So because I followed a few people who
like Leonard Cohen, I'm going to post something
about Leonard Cohen. I happen to have
created a cover song of Leonard Cohen, so
I'll post it here. And let's see if you have essentially
nobody following you, at this point, I
have one follower. I don't even know who
they are, really. I clicked on their profile, but I didn't recognize so
let's just create a post. So a relatively standard way to create a post is to
have a good headline, then the link to whatever you're posting and then hashtags. Hash tags are easy here, like Leonard Cohen, and
the song name is Hub Fire. So we're going to use Hub Fire. And the hash tags work
essentially just like they do anywhere else on social media, like
Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, it's pretty
much standard hash tags, and maybe, like, singer songwriter and maybe poetry because he's very poetic. And then I'm going to
write. Hopefully, you would write catchy
titles for you. Usually you kind of
want to stick with around two hash tags because when you have
a lot of hash tags, it gets a little spammy looking. So it's a decision here
on second thought, maybe I'll get rid of singer
songwriter, maybe not. Just because it's my first post, I don't want to be too spammy, so I'll stay with three.
Good middle ground. And we're going to post. Here, we have our first post. Of course, you don't want your account to have just one post. Want to make a number of posts. So even if it's your first
day, on your first day, make a number of posts so people can engage
because you see, look, my one follower, if
I click on them, they have just one
thing that they posted, and it looks like
they posted and quit or I don't know
what their plan is. So it's not like a really
interesting account with just one post. So in your case,
fill up your account with things you
like in your niche. I might make another post here. I'm going to post a link to
a love song that I wrote. Same kind of format,
love song, hashtags, poetic music, and I kind of
change up the hashtags a little bit so that I can appear in different hashtag searches. I'll show you that in a second. And the song reference
Michelangelo, the painter, not
the Ninja Turtle. So I'm going to use Michelangelo in the
hash tags because, you know, it's a big hash tag, and we'll post that as well. Now I could post
a lot of things, but what I want to do is
also interact with people. So one thing I really like is another cover of Leonard
Coins Hu By Fire. And there's actually many covers here that I like from YouTube, so I can just go and take links and post other
people's work. Share, copy, and I can say
something like my favorite, post a new my favorite. Notice again with each post, notice again that
with each post, I take an opportunity to
target a new hash tag, which will increase
my discoverability. Like here, the new hash tag
is Leonard Cohen cover. So I'll post that. And
if you're curious, am I going to get discovery
through this hash tag? So let's actually look
at Leonard Cohen. If I search here, I'm not
one of the top people, but maybe in the
latest h. You see, my posts are here. So if you want to
choose a good hashtag, and the great thing about
it is that if you post these posts on Twitter the
same way I just did now, these posts are going
to go down in the feed so quickly because Twitter
is just so much bigger. Here, you get a chance to
dominate your hashtags. So one hashtag I
might use is music, big, big hashtag. Let's
do that together. So take this song
Guardians of Souls, and it's kind of about
poets and poetry, and it's an ode to people
like Leonard Cohen. And so, we'll say new
post, we'll post the link, and we'll choose hashtags like
big hashtags like poetry, poets, singer,
songwriter, and music. And we might even say new music. Okay? It's a little
heavy on the hash tags, but I'm just trying
to make a point that because this social media
site is relatively new, we can do things that wouldn't really be realistic on Twitter. So we'll make a title. I don't know if this is
a really great title, but we're just posting here. New song dedicated
to the poets and musicians who inspire
us. There's the link. There's the hashtags post. And you can post a lot
of content early on, just to get your
discoverability going, just to give yourself
a chance here. But you also don't want to
just post your content. It's not interesting for others to follow
somebody who just says, Look at me, me, me, me, me. You want to interact in life, as well as on social media. To be interesting, you
have to be interested. So try to find people in your
same feed, like, let's say, Leonard Cohen, people who use that hash tag and see who's talking about
it, this person, Hannah. So I already follow
her. So I might say, Oh, I love this book, too,
or something like that. This is a book about
Leonard Cohen. I might actually read tweet
it because it's so cool. A book about Leonard Cohen. He's one of the
foremost poets and singer songwriters of the
last century really amazing. And maybe I'll do
a quote post like, Hannah, thank you for working
on such important work. I genuinely mean that. So I'll interact with her.
Hopefully, she'll follow me. Hopefully, she'll see that
I have my posts about the Leonard Cohen song that I did a cover of the
one that I liked, and hopefully she'll
follow me back. And maybe if she writes to me, some of her followers
might see that and so on. You know, typical behavior
as you would have on Twitter or essentially other social
media sites, but also here. But also, you just
get more noticed. That's the thing is
that on Twitter, a lot of noise just
because it's so big. And here, we can take
the opportunity of that. It's a little bit more of a curated community,
fewer marketers. And so as a marketer, you have to be
tasteful, of course, but you have more of a
chance to stand out. And so all these
things are what you should do on your first day, first hour on BlueSky, just to curate your own feed
to make it interesting. And as a marketer, of course,
get yourself noticed.
6. Leveraging Hashtags On Bluesky: In this video, let's dive
deeper into how you can get discovered on BlueSky by
leveraging hash tags. So you'll see here feeds hash tags or you can also
search by hash tags. So let's say I search for music, and you don't want any language, of course, you want the
language as you speak. So I'll choose English. And what you'll see
is under music, you'll have top and latest. Top, there's things that are sticking around for like a day, two days, posts that have
a lot of engagement. As you can see here,
comments, retweets, likes. Now, the latest will be things
that just go kind of down, you know, 16 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 minutes, and things in the latest, they kind of go down the
list pretty quickly. So in the beginning, if you want to be on top of a hash tag, what you can do is
post often with that hash tag or just build up an audience over time so you
can actually get engagement. And when you get real
engagement on your posts, you'll start getting to stay here longer on
top of your hash tag. And that's, of course, how you're going to
get discovered by new accounts more without
really doing outside marketing. Like a lot of people
have a podcast and they go to my BlueSky page, but what if you don't people don't if you don't is your
sort of secret weapon. You can do it through search
or also in the feeds. When people search for things and they search for
music, same thing. People can find top posts. You see here's a funny
post about music. It has a lot of engagement. Again, when you
start working up and getting a lot of engagement
for your content, you'll have a greater chance
of ticking around here. But even in that latest tab, you still have a
chance to appear here. Of course, things also
go down pretty quickly, but at least you can get
a little bit noticed. And as you keep posting
about this topic, hopefully you'll also start
coming up here under people. Of course, it's not easy
for a big topic like music, but for smaller niches,
it's totally doable. And for smaller niche,
let's say you don't want to dominate all music because
all music is too much. But let's say poetic music, in my case, it's just
a smaller niche. In poetic music,
there's very little. So the top post was
like five days ago and the engagement isn't as
much that you need to get. So at first when you're new, you want to target two
and three word queries and terms and hashtags. And then as your
account builds up, you want to start targeting
bigger hashtags and keywords like music is the
biggest keyword in music and the biggest
hash tag in music. But that's something you
work up to over time. If you post about
that on day one, of course, you're not going
to get much visibility. But you will get
visibility for your posts that target longer tail hash
tags and keywords that are, you know, two words,
three word terms where there is less competition, but people can
still discover you. Just don't make up random ones, make up ones that are popular. How do you know which
ones are popular? You can actually go to Twitter
or just look up on Google, popular hashtags in music. Here's an example.
I'll go to Google. And actually, we'll
just tell you, here's a lot of
popular hashtags, and you can see what
makes sense for you. You can experiment with trying them on BluSky and see some of them will have a following and help you with
discoverability. Some will be not so effective, but you just try, try, try. But there's no shortage, and it's easy to find
them because you can see, I click on the first
one, and here you go, music, hip hop rap. So basically, a lot of ideas, and you don't have
to take these ideas, you can kind of roll
with these ideas. You can see, Okay, hip hop. But what if you are rock? Okay, then your hash
tag will be rock. But what about rock musician
or combinations of these? Whatever actually is relevant
for what you're doing. So there's no shortage of
potentially good hash tags. You just have to experiment
and play around with them and use your best judgment about when it's too
early to attack a hash tag because maybe you don't have enough
of a following. And as you grow your following, you'll want to start targeting more and more popular hash tags. And this is one way that
you can grow on BlueSky without outside promotion or an already existing following.
7. Posting Formula: In this video, I'm going to
give you a little bit of a formula for how to
tweet and what kind of content to tweet so
that you can have a strategy to follow
for tweeting. And I'm going to
give you the formula for every 20 tweets. For different businesses,
you'll have to adjust it. So don't take this
word for word, but take it as a rough guideline and adjust it for
your situation. So, for example, two to five
tweets out of 20, I'd say, you have to have your
own helpful content you create, maybe your own YouTube video, some
kind of a tutorial, maybe a blog post, something new made
because a big part of Twitter is setting you to be branded or your business to be branded
as a thought leader, and influencer in your niche. So you need to be putting out really helpful
content and promoting it. In addition, I know you
want to sell on Twitter. So only 12, two things out
of 20 should be salesy. Otherwise, it
becomes too salesy, and it turns people off. Less is sometimes
more on Twitter. Don't be too aggressive because you want to
get people first engaged and then sell to them,
not the other way around. If you try to do it
the other way around are just going to
get turned off. So make sure you
keep people engaged, keep them interested,
and only then sell. I recommend underselling. Next, I recommend to
move away from promoting your own content and products and promote helpful content
by other influencers. For example, if you found
a good article online, maybe some tutorial that
another person made, post that tutorial because
it's impossible for you to be the only creator of
quality content in your niche. In fact, your Twitter account
will be much better if you add your content and amazing
content by other influencer and the total sum of your content quality will be
incredibly higher and people will be more likely
to follow you because they'll see that you're
tweeting amazing things. In addition to posting other helpful content by other
influences from elsewhere, you should also be retweeting
content from Twitter. I recommend that almost from day one, follow
a lot of the influencers in your niche so that you
see a lot of their content, you learn from
them, first of all, but also you can retweet them, and they'll see that
you retweeted them. And then that will be amazing because you can also
get on their good side, which will open the door to
have you interact with them. And when you interact
with other influencers, that puts you on their level, even though you're
starting out and they're more established
in the sense, they'll be more open to maybe retweeting you sometime
because you retweeted them. Or maybe they have
a YouTube channel, a Podcast, something else. Maybe they'll interview, it's just a relationship
building thing. So it's going to
show that you're open to other people's content. You're not just me me me, and also it's going to help you create these relationships
in your industry, which is going to
help you long term. Here are some more options. About one out of 20, maybe even less should be
like a business update. Like for example, you can say, we just updated our website or we changed our email
address, things like that. And then one would
be like housekeeping which maybe would be
something like follow us also on Instagram or YouTube or something else. So just
little things like that. Don't overdo it with
those because those are not particularly
exciting tweets, so just keep it very sparse. And what you can also do is
post inspirational content. And I recommend only two
to three out of 20 because sometimes too much inspirational content is a little fluff. A lot of people love inspirational
content, like quotes, but a lot of people
think it's cheesy, and so you don't want
to be too much on it. And that's approximately
the formula. So if you see yourself posting a little bit too much
promotional stuff, make a mental note and just pay a little more attention to
promoting other people, talking to other influencers, and see what other
people are doing, maybe that's a sign that you're not reading enough
of your industry news, read up on your industry news, find something amazing
and new, post that and maybe find something
inspirational, maybe something that
inspires you post that. And this mix will be
a really healthy mix. And to make your profile
even that much more human, do like, one or two
personal tweets. Share something about your
day, about your life, about your work, maybe
your happy moments, maybe your little
accomplishments, maybe something you treating yourself to maybe
your struggles, something that
makes you human and not just somebody promoting
a business and product. So that altogether creates a
really helpful Twitter account that gets your clients, gets you followers, gets you business
relationships, growth. It shows you that
you're human side as well, and it's inspirational. So there's a lot of
things going on here. So I recommend this formula. It's really strong formula with a lot of flexibility
built into it. For example, if you don't create a lot
of your own content, then keep it to one or two or three of your
own pieces of content. But if you're a content machine and you produce content a lot, of course, you want to do like five or maybe even six pieces of your own content because you have a lot of stuff to share. And if you're an avid reader, you have more articles to share. But if you're not an avid reader of other industry magazines, then you would have
less to share. So adjust it to your
own browsing styles, to your own business needs, and altogether, this would be a fantastic formula for
you to follow on Twitter.
8. Avoiding Groupthink: In this video, let's
discuss a little bit of philosophy that's relevant to using social media websites. You see, when we have the
option of who to follow, People tend to follow people who agree with them already or
reinforce their point of view, which creates a sort
of a group thing. You just follow people who have the same opinions and so
this opinion is reinforced. It creates a very subjective
one sided environment. This is true anywhere. You can follow people
anywhere online. But on BlueSky, this is
exacerbated because it's well known that many people
who've exited Twitter, now X, exited because of the political
climate and because Elon Musk and certain
viewpoint he has, and people just want
to get away from that. And BluSky has been a great
safe haven for those people. We're not saying one way or
the other way is better. We're just stating the fact. But you see what
I'm saying is that while BluSky is great
for many things, what we want to be mindful of
the danger of group think, because there are certain
opinions that are going to get promoted on BluSky. Mind you, there are
certain opinions that are also going
to get promoted on Twitter because things
are getting more polarized. My role here is to
be objective as possible and in the theme
of staying objective. What I want to offer
you is the idea that we never want to
fall into group think, even though it feels good. So what I want to offer you
is the idea that to have the most objectivity and accuracy in real life before
social media ever existed, but also on social media, even though it's painful, you want to listen to
both sides of the story. And actually, having these
both social networks is the great balance
that's needed, because if you want to get
one side of the opinion, you go to one place, other side of the opinion, you go
to the other place. And that will help
you synthesize opinions and form your own
more informed opinion. Great. As opposed to just
staying in group think, liking what people are saying, but not being exposed to the full breadth and width of the ideas that are possible. So that's the philosophy
here is that you want to be careful of not
falling into group think. Even though it feels better,
it does feel better. We're all guilty of it at
some point or another, but it's kind of like each
philosophical vegetables. You want to get opposing
viewpoints, synthesize them, be informed, and form
your own decisions that are based on different
kinds of information. That's the philosophy of it, because the alternative
is really dangerous to fall into because when we are just having one sided opinions, more and more and more
and only one sided, we start sliding towards
extremism of that side, whichever side it is. And, of course, we
want to protect ourselves and have a
balanced viewpoint. That's really what
I'm offering here. I just food for thought. You don't have to do
this. This is optional. But in terms of mental health, uh, when using social
media websites, this is one of the great
talking points when it comes to mental health of using social media is not
falling into group think, but using social media
as a great tool to get many different perspectives and forming your own
informed opinion.
Alex Genadinik
