Arkli: Finally, a Social Media Manager I Can Get Behind
A few weeks ago, I was approached by Mike Potter of Arkli. He wanted to get me on the phone to show me the latest and greatest in social media campaign managers. I nearly blew him off. I get a TON of requests to review and look at web tools and most of them end up being a tool that will not provide value to my day-to-day life.
Mike and I scheduled a time to chat and he started showing me Arkli in action via webinar. It was probably the fifth or sixth minute in that I wanted to just tell him, “Stop talking. Where do I sign up?!” I begged Mike to let me be the one to share the tool with the world because seriously, you’re all going to thank me later… and I love mint chocolate anything and my shoe size is a 7.5! Just saying.
Arkli is a tool that lets you manage your social media campaigns. I know, I know. You’ve seen and heard it all when it comes to managing social media right? Wrong. SO wrong.
What Arkli Does
Arkli lets you import all of your social media accounts, your blogs, your e-mail marketing program (they have a short list right now but it does include MailChimp*! Win!), your YouTube account and your Google Analytics into the interface. Once all of your accounts are in the system and setup, you now have the ultimate power tool in your hands.
Arkli connects seamlessly to WordPress to allow you to craft a blog post. Then, with the click of a button, you can turn your blog post into a Tweet using whichever account you want. Then, with the click of another button, you can turn it into a Facebook update. Then, you can retweet yourself from a different account (yes, with the click of a button) and you can have it all tracked in their nifty built-in statistics tracker.
Not only that, the tool has ways to manipulate current websites for your full advantage. For example, let’s say that you want to have a blog post hit your blog next Wednesday but there is a YouTube video that you want to embed in the post too. Well, you can use Arkli to upload your video to YouTube BUT it won’t appear on YouTube until the time and date specified. It’s automagical.
In the past, bloggers would have to schedule their post in WordPress, setup some Tweets and Facebook status updates in Hootsuite, upload their video to YouTube but make sure it is set to private, set a reminder for the day the blog post is due to make YouTube video public, edit the WordPress post to have the proper YouTube embed code and hope you remember to do it before the post goes live.
Who Would Benefit from Arkli
This tool is going to benefit anyone that uses social media and blogging. Having the ability to preschedule your blogs in the same location that you generate your Tweets and Facebook status updates is a huge time saver.
Here is my short list of who will benefit from this:
- Bloggers (when you get asked to review a product/service, being able to setup the entire campaign and share it with your sponsor is a professional way to present yourself)
- Social media users (allows you to provide more value, more often with less time and money spent)
- Business owners (setup product / service promotions via Arkli)
- Affiliate managers (imagine setting up your entire event/product promotion in Arkli and then sharing that with your affiliates so that they can setup their own promotional pieces off of content you’ve already built?!)
- Joint venture partners (finally you’ll have one place to create content and share it with a succinct message)
A Peek Inside
I am pretty convinced that the description above is not going to be enough… you won’t be able to see the full awesomeness of the tool without seeing the inside. So, I’m going to show you how easy it will make your life in the following screenshots. These screens were taken as I was writing and scheduling this blog post and associated media.
Following screenshot shows the social media campaign interface once you’ve added a blog post to it.
The next screenshot shows the Twitter / Facebook additions.
As you can see, it is super simple to create social media updates from your existing content. In fact, I copy and paste from my blog post to create the updates so that I do not lose the integrity of my message. In the Tweet (above screenshot) section, you can see that I have a retweet option as well which means my other social media accounts can get in on the action too. Thus multiplying my reach.
As you build your campaign, your reach figures increase at the bottom of the screen.
This is a great way for you to see just how many people will be reached with your own outreach. This doesn’t take into consideration the number of people you have reading your blog but it does include all numbers from your social media accounts.
The Advanced Functions
Arkli also has some advanced functionality that I am really enjoying.
The first one that I love is the ability to share campaigns. What does that mean? Well, let’s say you are writing a blog post like this one. A review of a product / service or maybe even an interview or perhaps a podcast. Whenever your post is involving other people, you can share the campaign with them ahead of time and if they have an Arkli account (even at the free level!) they can, from your campaign, schedule their own retweets and tweets.
The second thing I am loving is the statistics that I can see and review per campaign. If I am doing a blog post and I want to see the reach, clicks, etc. Arkli will compile that for me. Not only will I be able to see the statistics within the program, I’ll also get an e-mail at the end of the campaign which summarizes how well it did.
What’s Missing
Now, it wouldn’t be a fair review if I didn’t point out a few things that are on my wish list for Arkli. However, Mike has been super receptive to hearing these ideas and has promised to add in the suggestions that will add true value for multiple users.
- A calendar of scheduled items — there is the main campaign calendar which shows you the overview of what is going to post when but when you are inside, editing a campaign, there isn’t a way to see this easily. For now though, opening your campaign calendar in a separate tab works for me.
- A way to upload photos within the blog editor — right now I am uploading photos via my own blog in a separate tab and then just using the add full image URL function for images. They did have the functionality to upload an image present but it’s disappeared again so I can’t wait for that to come back.
- An indexed list of past, present and future campaigns — I’d love a simple list, off the calendar grid, that showed the list of past, present and future campaigns so I could easily click through to edit them. In fact, it’d be awesome if the list showed the campaigns, had an edit button next to it and beside that a stats button for easy access to the stats.
To Close
Arkli is a tool that I am going to be recommending to ALL of our clients immediately. In fact, I don’t want to work on anyone’s social media campaigns unless they are using this tool. It is seriously that awesome.
If you have any questions about Arkli, its functionality or how I use it, please leave them as a comment. I’d be more than happy to answer them!
Oh, now is the time that you run, not walk, over to Arkli’s website and sign up (at least get your free account going so you can play with it!) If you like it, love it or are indifferent, comment that too! Would love to be able to pass more feedback on to Mike and the team at Arkli.
Follow Mike Potter (guy behind Arkli) here.
* I have used an affiliate link here. If you prefer not to click through my affiliate link, simply Google the tool referenced. Your karma score may go down a wee bit but in the grand scheme of things, we can still be friends. Promise.
Read MoreFotolia.com Review
Stock photos are a necessity for all bloggers. In this post, I will review Fotolia.com — a royalty-free stock photo site for bloggers.
About Fotolia.com
Fotolia is a website that features hundreds and hundreds of royalty-free stock photos that are perfect for bloggers, website designers and other users of the Internet. The website offers subscription-based services or the ability to purchase individual images on an as-needed basis.
My Experience Using Fotolia
I use a lot of stock photo websites for our various creative projects. Often, for blog posts, I resort to free stock photo sites because I don’t necessarily want to purchase a photo for use in a blog post. So, for me to get great value out of the site, I’d need to find income-generating projects to use the photos with (ie: e-books, info-products, etc.)
When I was using the site, I had a subscription service which meant I could download up to 5 images per day. The subscription may not be the best way to go though because if you forget to login and download your images each day, the cost per photo goes way up. I prefer the idea of the pay-as-you-go / credit system so that you don’t lose your credits if you don’t login and download the images each day.
The other issue with a subscription-based service is that I sort of felt forced to choose images and didn’t always have something in mind to use them for. I found myself getting buy now buttons and other generic, webby images so that I could use them on any project.
Fotolia does have an awesome selection of photos and I didn’t find myself searching very hard for what I needed. Their search function is simple and effective and the photos are tagged very well. That makes finding photos for your blogs very easy and very quick.
The sign-up process is straightforward and easy to navigate — even for the non-techhie. Using the account is also straightforward — choose the image you want, add it to your cart and download the image. The nice thing about the download process is that you can download individual images or, if you have chosen many, you can download a zip file.
How Fotolia.com Stacks Up
Seeing as there are a multitude of stock photo sites on the Internet, I wanted to do a little comparison between the sites to see how Fotolia.com stacks up against the competition.
Let’s first look at pricing…
- Fotolia is $249/month for 750 downloads
- iStockPhoto is $363/month for 900 downloads
- Shutterstock is $249/month for 750 downloads
- Big Stock only sells via credit packs and is much more pricey than all listed options
- Dreamstime is $238/month for 758 downloads
- Fotolia gives a commission from 25% to 63% for content sold via single-image download and from $0.30 for content sold via subscription download
- iStock pays contributors a base royalty rate of 15% for each file downloaded. If you are an Exclusive contributor you can earn up to 45%
- Shutterstock’s contributor guidelines are: it’s free to contribute and you’ll earn $0.25 to $28.00 per image download.
- At Big Stock: For Pay As You Go purchases we pay you 30% of the US dollar price every time a customer downloads one of your images (up to $29.70 for an extended license). For purchases made using credits we pay $0.50 USD for each credit spent. You can request a payout when your earnings reach $30.
- At Dreamstime the referral is as follows: for each transaction, the photographer receives a 30-50 percent fee. Exclusive images receive an additional 10 percent bonus, while exclusive photographers enjoy a 60 percent fee and an additional bonus of $0.20 for each approved submission.
Travel Free on Virgin America and Win a Samsonite Luggage Set
Want to fly to your next business meeting for free?
I’ve teamed up with YFS Magazine for the inaugural 2011 Make Your Startup Fly with Virgin America and Samsonite Giveaway.
One (1) savvy small business owner has the chance to win two (2) roundtrip flights to any Virgin America destination and one (1) stylish Samsonite luggage set.
I don’t know about you but getting to fly for free on Virgin seems like enough of a contest… throw in some bags and I’m in like Flynn!
Every entrepreneur and small business owner that enters our contest will also receive instant access to eight (8) exclusive gifts from leading small business brands.
It gets better! Once you sign up for Virgin America’s free corporate rewards program, you’ll also gain private access to a special gift from me to you.
What are you waiting for? Enter to win today.
Read MoreYoung Entrepreneur? Why You Want to Listen to Pete Cashmore’s Advice
When I stumbled across an article about Pete Cashmore on Business on Main, I realized that he had quite a bit of solid advice for a young entrepreneur.
Before I get to that advice, let me first introduce Pete to you… you know, in case you’ve been living under some giant boulder of a rock. 
This intro is taken from the Business on Main interview with Pete himself:
Pete Cashmore carries a quiet sense of urgency wherever he goes, despite his easygoing demeanor. As founder of the influential technology blog Mashable, the 25-year-old has been labeled everything from a tech wunderkind to one of the U.K.’s “Britons of the Year” in 2010. But the accolades do not impress him. Cashmore sees success as an ever-moving target, which drives his compulsion to be “on top of everything all the time.”
Growing up in the rural village of Aberdeen, Scotland, the self-described geek was a sickly child who befriended the Internet as a bedside companion. Missing too much high school to graduate with his peers, he earned his diploma two years later — an early example, he says, of his tendency to be “ridiculously persistent.”
Intrigued by the Web and its democratizing power, Cashmore opted out of college and launched Mashable at 19. He started the blog in an effort to decipher technology for a mainstream audience in 2005. Today the 44-employee company, with offices in New York and San Francisco, draws more than 12.5 million unique visitors to its site every month.
During the interview, Pete gives great advice:
Tip for young ‘treps: There’s an advantage to having a certain degree of naivete about the challenges and the way things were before, so you can build something in a completely different way.
It was this particular piece of advice that most resonated with me.
One of the things that people say the most often to me is: “Erin, you seem so fearless! You just put stuff out to the world and you don’t seem held back” and I can see how Pete’s reflection on a young entrepreneur’s naivete is in alignment with that perception people have of me. When you don’t know what could potentially trip you up, you aren’t held back by it. When you are young, you also have fewer instances of failure in your life (generally speaking) so you don’t feel held back or defeated by that failure.
If people approached business with less “tactics” and “how-to’s”, they might find that they actually come up with better, faster, easier, quicker, more exciting solutions for business. Those people, the ones thinking outside of the box, will create memorable and meaningful experiences for their target audience. The people that do things the “same old way” might be successful but they will never be extraordinary.
There was a lot more that I took away from the interview with Pete but that was definitely a highlight. You can read the entire interview with Pete Cashmore on the Business on Main website here.
—-
My blog is part of an online influencer network for Business on Main. I receive incentives to share my views on a monthly basis.
Read MoreHow to Launch an iPhone / iPad App with HuddleBoard
This is the third post in our series on how to launch an iPhone / iPad app.
This time, we’re interviewing the studio behind HuddleBoard! Make sure to read the interview and check out their site as well as their app!
1. What is the name of the app you’ve launched / re-released and tell us a bit about it?
HuddleBoard is the sports playbook for the tablet era. It allows players, coaches and Strategists to draw and animate game plays for a variety of sports, including soccer, football, hockey, basketball and baseball.
2. How long, from start to finish, did the launch process take?
The initial launch process of Huddleboard took about a two weeks.
3. What was the biggest marketing challenge you faced in launching your app?
The biggest marketing challenge when launching our app was reaching specifically people involved with sports willing to try out new technologies.
4. Looking back, what were a few things that you would do differently in the marketing and release of your app?
The primary thing we would do differently when marketing and releasing our app is to focus more on single sport. Huddleboard would also include more features specific for that sport.
We would have also lowered upon release.
5. What were a few things that you felt worked, in terms of the marketing for your app launch / re-release, just as you had planned?
By addressing user feedback soon after the app launch we were able to add features that users considered as justifying the price. We were also able to satisfy customers who had already bought the app.
6. Did you have reviewers for your app prior to it being launched? If so, how did you go about finding these reviewers?
We did not have reviewers prior to the app’s release.
7. Did you implement any traditional marketing (press kits, press releases, etc.) for your app launch or did you stay strictly online?
We stayed strictly online, the next version of our app will go for a traditional press push.
8. What advice would you give to someone who is looking to market their upcoming iPhone app?
We advise making sure it’s really solid before releasing it. Make sure it does the rounds and put in many users hands before release. With that you can fine tune your marketing messaging to reflect what is most liked about the app.
9. (Just for fun) What is one iPhone app, aside from your own, that you are totally addicted to?
Tiny Wings, its achievement schema is worse than heroin.
Read MorePhoto Recap from #GenYOTT
Last night, in our nation’s capital city of Ottawa, a group of Gen-Y’ers got together to network, socialize and celebrate successes. It was a fun night filled with laughter, biz talk and more importantly, new connections. Suze Muse spoke and Kyle Braatz talked about his charity, Typically Canadian.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the GenYOTT group, it was formed by Jen Butson, Japman Bajaj, Matt Richling and Brian Alkerton. They host events every month at a downtown location and generally from 7-10pm. Funds are raised at the event for a different charity and a speaker is also invited to come and talk for a short while. The hosts do an amazing job each and every time and I’m so grateful that they provide this opportunity to us all.
Here are some photos I snapped throughout the night.
From left to right: Matt Scobel, Erin Blaskie, Jamie Blades, Jen Butson & Stephanie
Matthew Stewart & Erin Blaskie
Thought-Provoking Interviews, Straight to Your Inbox
Erin has interviewed countless experts on countless topics all relating to business ownership. Now, you can subscribe to receive, at no cost, all of these audio interviews! Subscribe below to receive one audio interview, per week, and you'll also receive our newsletter!
Passive Revenue Powerhouse Self-Study Program!
Interested in Multiple Streams of Income?
"How to Become a Passive Revenue Powerhouse: The Online Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating Viable Revenue Streams" is chock full of tips and tactics on how to create multiple streams of income for your business. Whether you are a coach, an author, a speaker, an online retailer or a medical professional (or anything in between!), you will benefit from the wisdom shared within the pages of this e-book.
Learn more and grab your copy here.
As Seen In…
Follow Me!
We Proudly Support…
