Empire Avenue has always been an excellent tool for monitoring your social media buzz and online activity, and networking with more people. While the gamification of social media and influence scores will continue to be discussed and debated, services like Empire Avenue or Klout, if used correctly, can be extremely valuable to businesses.

Of even greater value though is a powerful tool within Empire Avenue called Missions.

Added last year, missions are activities that Empire Avenue users can set up where other users are asked to do something and receive in-game currency (eaves) as a reward. Using missions, you can jump-start your social media activity, and I’m going to tell you how.

Creating Empire Avenue Missions

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that you already have an Empire Avenue account and some eaves to spend. I will also review some great options for missions in a moment, but let us also assume that you’ve decided to ask users to visit and share your latest blog post to their own social networks.

Log into EA (http://www.empireavenue.com) and click on the Missions tab. Your first view will be other missions that members have created. I do recommend checking these regularly as they are a source of more eaves for you, ideas for other missions, and an important part of the game. You can also click on Dashboard to see any previous missions you’ve created, but click on Create Mission for now.

The Create Mission form is comprised of Title, Mission Type, Detailed Description, Reward, Requirements and Promote.

As suggested in the field, your Title needs to be compelling. I recommend including what you want them to do along with what you’re going to give them. More on that in a moment.

For Mission Type, your choices are Visit a URL or YouTubeLikes / Subscriptions.

For most missions you will be sending members to another URL, but the YouTube options are nice. When you provide a link to your YouTube video or channel, Empire Avenue will display it within the site and require that they watch the video or subscribe to your channel before collecting the reward.

In the Description field, you can go into greater detail about your mission and what you want them to do for you.

The Requirements section is nice because you can limit who is eligible to do your mission. For most social media missions, you’re likely going to want Anybody to do them, but you can choose Shareholders or Not, Minimum shares owned, community membership or even Country.

Currently, the only Reward that you can offer is Eaves. You will determine how many eaves to pay out, and how many payouts you wish to give. This will determine your mission budget. Offering 10 rewards of 5000 eaves each will set a mission reward budget of 50,000. Empire Avenue will charge a fee equal to your reward budget so your total mission cost in this example would be 100,000.

Finally, there’s a Promotion section where you can decide whether or not you wish to send a message to your shareholders to let them know about the mission. Anyone can view available missions in the Missions area, but notifying shareholders is a great way to get eyes on your mission quickly. It does, however, come at a cost of additional eaves for each shareholder, and the rate goes up the more often you send such messages.

Once you have made your choices, click on Save & Preview and you will see what your mission looks like. You can make sure everything is spelled correctly, that you have the right reward values, and even test your link.

Empire Avenue Mission Best Practices

Before we get into some specific ideas for missions, there are few tips and recommendations I want to share with you.

Be clear and concise in your title what your mission task is and include the reward value.
Try to keep your description brief and to the point.
Include some information about where you’re sending them, what the link is about, particularly if it is a controversial subject.
Include the link within the description as well as the link field.
If you have other missions that haven’t been completed yet, include a link to those missions within the description.
Be specific with your mission task. Instead of simply asking someone to check out your latest blog post, ask them to make a comment or share it.
Make sure that your reward matches the request. The more time you want someone to invest, the more you’re going to have to offer. Also, the more you offer, the faster the mission will get completed, so if it’s something you need done quickly, be prepared to offer a premium.
Remind people to Like the mission. It is an in-game activity and such actions are counted by EA.
Use Shareholder Messages sparingly, since they can get so expensive. It’s actually cheaper to increase the value of your rewards a little bit and entice more people viewing the general missions thread.

Empire Avenue Mission Ideas

Now, what are some of the most effective missions? You will see a lot of ideas as you peruse everyone else’s missions. If your stock price is struggling you can pay others to invest in you, improving your share value and encouraging even more people to invest in you. That’s great for in-game success, but I like to use Empire Avenue to jump start social media buzz.

Each time I post a new blog entry or article, I share it to my social networks. But it sometimes takes time for my own followers to get online and notice something new from me, so I use Empire Avenue to spread the word.

If you’re posting to multiple networks, first pick the one you want to target. Generally, this should be the network where you expect to have the most impact with this specific post, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or Google+. Then, grab the URL for that specific post and use that as the mission URL. The mission task must be to share or ReTweet the post. If it’s a tweet, you will get a lot of Favorites as well as new followers if they haven’t followed you before. If it is a Facebook or Google+ post, I always mention that Likes/+1’s and Comments are welcome.

I do not recommend trying such a mission with LinkedIndue it’s poor viral nature. Individual status updates just aren’t seen by that many other people.

If you post frequently, you can do one of these missions for each post and switch networks occasionally to achieve a mix of audience. Or, if you post just once a week or so, you might run several missions for the same post.

You must try different missions with different blog posts to see what works best for you and your audience. Personally, I have found that Twitter works best for news-related stories. Not every blog you write and mission you run will get the same results, which is why you need to test different missions, as well as utilize other blog traffic and promotion tools like Triberr.

Seth Godin was quoted as saying: We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage. Seth certainly gets it … probably had it down before anyone else. What you may be asking? The concept of what it takes for content marketing success, of course. Secrets? Probably not. But certainly essential for success.

Content marketing tactics such as blog posts, feature articles, optimized website copy, white papers, social media content, and press releases move consumers along a specific path. Content marketing generates awareness of your brand, product or service; inspires consumers to engage and consider you; converts them into leads and sales, and creates advocates. Lots to gain, yes?

Discover how content marketing exposes consumers to your brand, engages potential customers, and converts them into leads and sales. The following are our recommendations for ensuring the success of an online content marketing strategy that even small businesses can successfully implement today:

Influence marketing

There is nothing more valuable than contact with people who already have popular website. Do not try to ask them to promote you, better option is to some ego-bait stuff (like interview) with them then ask them for guest blog.

Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration. Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking on influence marketing.

In-depth articles

Forget about writing average blog posts. Instead of this write some 10X stuff – 10X Content is the Future.

Combine techniques

It is a mix of skills you already know but from your perspective. For example, I used to check the volume of keywords trough Google PPC and Bing PPC program then make a new content map strategy.

SEO strategy plan … competitors

Tools designed for spying on your competitors cover just 50% of this job. Check every post, comment and article your competitors push. This way you can measure what strategy could be fruitful for your business.

SEO strategy example … content

Not just SEO’d and unique but also useful. Your content should be shared and liked. Your goal here is to be noticed and mentioned and receive as much attention as possible.

Promotion

No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any benefit from it unless you promote it. Hard. Remember 99% of perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Content comes first

A website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO, a website with bad content will not survive with or without SEO, a website with good content can become even better with SEO!

So, what is considered good content?

Original Content (articles, text, images, videos, presentations, infographics, comments, etc.) – No copies or re-writes of existing articles

Content published on your website first – Even if it’s your own content, if you have already published it on another website then it’s not good for your site.

Content that includes text as well – Try to have text to accompany your non-text content. For example, if you post videos on your website try to add a text description as well. If you add images try to describe in words what the image is all about.

Content that is well researched – Users don’t want to read quickly prepared posts and neither does search engines. If you are writing about a certain topic or answering a question make sure that what you write is justified and covers both sites of a story. Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.

Posting frequency – 2 things are important when it comes to posting frequency.

The first is to have fresh content on your website and second to establish a publishing strategy and stick to it.

Keyword research

– is the main driver of successful SEO. In order to improve your search engine ranking, you’ll need to first analyze keywords that are relevant to your industry.

Sound link building

– it’s simple: High-quality link building produces greater results.

Creating quality content

– Don’t let poor content affect your site’s search engine rank. It’s vital that you offer engaging and useful information to keep your visitors coming back.

When you go about implementing SEO strategies –and in order to guarantee a favorable search engine ranking–try following these methods to improve your spot in SERPs.

Content-marketing strategy

Every website should have a content strategy focused on your top keywords. When you create content such as blog posts, videos, whitepapers, research reports, and webinars, it gives people something to link to. In addition, the content you create can rank by itself in the search engines.

For example, if you write a blog post on “How to Pick an SEO Company,” there is a possibility it will rank for some of the keywords you use in the title and in the body post, especially if the post gets linked to from other websites or shared a lot on social media. It also helps if your website as a whole already has significant-high-quality links.

This results in high domain authority, which translates into better rankings for all of your content. In addition, regular content creation shows Google that your website is alive and active. By sending this fresh content signal to Google on a continual basis, it will result in better rankings for your website as a whole.

SEO strategy plan … generate quality backlinks

Having an influencer and content marketing strategy will help you develop backlinks to your website, but it is also important to actively be seeking ways to get people to link to you. Some of the best ways to do this are to write for a large publication, do industry interviews and recommend your powerful content to people who matter.

In addition, you can also use tools like Majestic SEO to see who is linking to your competitors. Once you identify the links to your competitor’s sites, you can analyze these links, learn how they got them and implement a similar strategy for your website. For example, did they donate to a charity causing the charity to link to their site? You can do the same thing.

Be mobile-friendly

In 2015, there was a major Google update known as Mobilegeddon. This meant that if you did not have a mobile version of your website by April 21, 2015, you lost a significant amount of your rankings in the mobile version of the Google search listings.

So your website needs to be mobile-ready. There are three types of accepted options for a mobile site in Google’s eyes: responsive design, being set up on a mobile subdomain or use dynamic serving. Google also now ranks websites higher that apply SEO for their apps. So if you have an app, make sure you are taking the time to implement application SEO.

The bottom line

Since as much as 90% of what we learned in a life-time always come to us via visual cues, we should constantly enhance our perceptual sensitivity to the environment, according to information scientists.

So, more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was right when he said, use all our senses, especially our sense of sight. Our power of observation and imagination depends on it. Productive thoughts often have their origins in the combinatorial play and dynamics of sensory inputs from environmental cues.

In my view, our thinking cap is often governed by how far we can stretch our power of vision and imagination.

**Digital Spark Marketing’s Firestorm Blog**

Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.