If SpaceX founder Elon Musk is Iron Man in real life, social media strategist (and blogger, speaker, author of Blogging the Smart Way book, and content marketing influencer too!) Jeff Bullas is without a doubt Batman personified.

Unlike Superman who hails from another planet or Spiderman who got bitten by a radioactive arachnid, Batman gained his superhero status through sheer hard work and intense desire to fight crime in Gotham City. For Jeff, it was all about his passion to learn the ropes of digital marketing, persevering until he got nearly 5 million blog views a year, and sticking to what he does best -- blogging and content marketing. For Batman, it was staying loyal to Gotham City’s as its watchful protector.

The Makings of a Digital Marketing Superhero

With a blog audience of nearly 5 million annual page views from more than 200 countries, Jeff Bullas is ranked #1 in the Top 100 Content Marketing Influencer in 2015 by Onalytica. He has also been consistently in the Top 100 Social Media Influencers list of Forbes since 2013, currently ranked at 7th place this year.

With a background in teaching high school students, Jeff also dabbled with business development in the Internet industry when it kicked off in the mid-90s. Six years ago though, Jeff found himself unemployed and was about to close his business. To make matters worse, he had $50,000 in credit card debt and was in the throes of marital separation.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Jeff over at Content Champion about what prompted him to start his blog in March 2009:

“I had a bit of time so I started reading a lot online and I read David Meerman’s book The New Rules of Marketing PR and then I read Tim Ferriss’ lifestyle book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which talked about how to create a life online, or business and life and a lifestyle.

Then I read a HubSpot blog, it was, that said if you’ve got an inkling of what you want to blog about, just start, so I did. Just started writing about social media. I had no grand plan, spent all of $10 on a domain name, and that was it really. Set up a WordPress.com blog and started writing. It was just from a, I suppose, a fascination and a curiosity driven by online research and reading. I love reading.”.

Jeff got his first big break after blogging for six months when he was nominated by his readers in the Social Media Examiner Top 10 Social Media Blogs.

And the rest, they say, was history.

Jeff’s Tools and Tricks of the Trade

These days, Jeff is not only producing great content on his blog inspiring millions of readers. He is also sought by both large and startup companies for his Batman-like capabilities in optimizing digital marketing strategies. Below are several tools and tricks of the trade by Jeff that digital marketers and social media strategists can learn from.

On the art and science of content

In an interview with The Pivot host Todd Wheatland at Content Marketing World Sydney, Jeff described the art and science of creating content. The art, he said, has to do with writing itself , from headlines to word usage. The science of creating content, on the other hand, involves the promotion and distribution of your content via social medial channels.

“I’m intrigued by both the art and the science of crafting content because it’s not only the content creation, it’s the optimizing of the search engines, and the marketing and promotion of that content, and getting it to flow across the web. That all intrigues me. It’s a blend of art and science, and I’m continuing to learn because I am still very curious.” - Jeff Bullas, January 2015

On audience engagement

“People forget this all the time. They create content but then don’t hustle it. You can create a nice blog post or a useful white paper but there’s hardly any engagement. You’ve got to make it discoverable. You’ve got to do your part in bringing it to the attention of people who will benefit from it.” - Leading Thought Blog, June 2015

On driving audience curiosity via epic headlines

“I work very hard on creating a headline, then I also work very hard on making sure the intro will tempt them to read the rest of it. When I send out an email in my email broadcast to my opt-in list, I don’t give them the whole article, I only give them the intro with a hyperlink to read the rest on the blog.

I don’t reveal the answers in that email. It’s basically a teaser to say … They got to click on the headline first, then they’ve got to read the intro, and then they’re going to say, “I’m fascinated. What is going to be revealed here?”

You’ve got to drive that curiosity and that’s really, really important. I’ve seen a lot of people actually send out a whole blog post just in email. Then they got no reason to click through your website to get them online where they actually can engage with you further. That’s really, really important. Those tactics are vital to actually drive traffic to your blog so you actually can engage with them even more closely.” - Content Champion Interview, June 2015

On adding value to your customers’ life

“Most of your marketing funnel should be involved in education. That’s where content also comes into play–adding value that doesn’t talk about your products and services. Until you’ve added that value, you don’t have the right to ask for the order or the sale.” - Leading Thought Blog, June 2015

Marketers need to realize that a strong trend is emerging called continuous marketing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run “campaigns”. The reality is that being found online requires constant SEO activity and content creation, publishing and marketing. - The Influencer Series interview, March 2014

On why LinkedIn is the next platform to watch in digital marketing

I’ve been playing with LinkedIn, especially with its new publishing platform it announced in February, and I think it’s become more social and open and content-centric, which actually suits my strategy. LinkedIn’s something that I’m going to pursue and I think a lot more people will, especially in the B2B space.

For example, I published a blog post for Monday this week on LinkedIn’s new publishing platform and I’ve been playing with that the last month or two, month and a half. It really resonated so it became the second top post on LinkedIn globally for the day.

It got 165,000 views. Most of those were in the first 24 hours. I had over 700 comments currently and it drove record traffic to my blog for two days. I think we’re going to see some really interesting stuff being done with LinkedIn over the next 12 months as well. That’s a big move. - Content Champion Interview, June 2015

On how online branding takes time

“The reality is that many people create three blog posts, do a few tweets and when nothing happens, they give up. Building an online digital brand takes time. You’ve got to persist at it. You need to create content on a regular basis that will gradually rank higher and higher on search engines. But that takes months and years of focused effort . - Leading Thought Blog, June 2015

So that is how Jeff Bullas went from zero to hero in digital and social media marketing! Which gems of digital marketing wisdom above resonate the most to you? Do you have other digital marketing superheroes that you regularly follow and read? We’d love to hear about them too!

About the Author

 

About Kyjean Tomboc

Kyjean likes to think of herself as an online content machine but her love for all things feline makes her human after all! She writes mainly about health, science, social media, and online content marketing. If she’s not writing, she’s either scaling mountains or taming tardigrades. Follow her tardigrade taming attempts at Twitter - @autodidactikai