kasiagospos

A Sneak Peek Behind The Scene of Leaders in Heels – interview by Anna Kochetkova

Two weeks ago I was interviewed by Anna Kochetkova, Senior Social Media & Account Manager at Yours Socially and founder at Content Queen.  She asked me lots of interesting questions about how I run Leaders in Heels therefore thought it would be useful to bring it here in case you want to know!

The article was originally published on Content Queen.


A Sneak Peek Behind The Scene of Leaders in Heels with Kasia Gospos.

Leaders in Heels is an online hub for professional women and entrepreneurs which publishes in 4 categories including Business, Career, Lifestyle and Technology. They deliver one article per category per week, infusing their readers lives with amazing content.

Their social media networks receive over 60,000 monthly views and there are plenty of hot discussions on the pages of the Leaders in Heels online magazine. Leaders in Heels have over 30 regular writing contributors, who come from all shapes and sizes of businesses.

Weve been watching Leaders in Heels for a number of years now, finally approaching Kasia Gospos (Leaders in Heels founder) for a chat. We would like to learn and share with you, how a full-time accounting and financial analysis expert managed to create this inspiring, innovative and professional, women-orientated community, having it all: life, work and passion.  

Once upon a time, a passionate female event manager decided that she had had enough of robotic and repeated eventsorganisation and was ready to pursue a creative way out of her corporate ‘misery. Her rational brain didn’t allow her to quit her job without finding another sustainable source of living (income).

She started to wander the Internet in the search of a solution, bumping into online courses for nurses and lawyers, designers and personal trainers. None of the above felt right, there were expensive or required learning curve called ‘exams. As the time moved on, she started to question her initial decision to chase her dream and become someone she felt she was destined to be. Luckily, her negative thoughts got interrupted by Facebook. She went online to browse her social media feeds, drowning her despair in other peoples images and videos of cats and kids. Finally, something caught her eye and she froze for a moment. She found herself reading away, page after page, till she finally landed on the Leaders in Heels page, ‘regular contributors guideline. Something clicked in her mind. And, of course, she lived happily ever after…

Jokes aside, the tired event manager found her way out of the corporate ‘misery’ by becoming a writer with one of the reputable brands online. How does it work?

Well, at Leaders in Heels (trust me you can create your own very successful space as well), once a tired event manager or an accountant or a local business owner decides to write for a reputable brand, they contact Leaders in Heels, learn about their processes, get approved by their team and get to business.

So let’s have a look into what happens behind the Leaders in Heels scenes. Kasia reveals how her magazine functions and continues gaining support and interest. Although Leaders in Heelsis an online magazine, nothing stops you from setting up one too; even if it is not an actual magazine, but a blog or your newsletter.  No matter the format, you are still able to generate growing interest that drives more traffic to your business.

Getting Started

Once a new contributor is approved, they will be sent a welcome email, along with the writing guidelines, to make sure everyone is following the brand’s voice. When a new writer is ready to go, Leaders in Heels upgrade their official account (in WordPress) enabling them to submit their work directly on the website. Whenever a new draft is saved for a review, an automatic (remember, the queen of automation) email is dispatched to the allocated editor who will have the final sneak peek, edit and finally publish the article.

Automation in Action

One of the cool things about Leaders in Heels is the automation of well-functioning systems. Kasia is the queen of automation. Let’s dive into it to understand it a little better…

Amazing Leaders in Heels automation processes will email the author once the article is out, so they can proudly share it on their social media, helping another lost soul find their way to their passion.

An automated process like this saves an enormous amount of time, also allowing easy communication between editors and contributors. No need for your middle man. This can be incredibly precious, especially when you are just starting out and tend to fulfil many jobs in your business or project, including WordPress designer, topics producer, writer, editor, publisher, etc, etc.

Quality Content

Maintaining quality content is one of the most important things about being a successful blog or a magazine, which Leaders in Heels undoubtedly is.

For the Leaders in Heels community, the quality control comes from the editors who receive and publish final written pieces. The categories to write within are set in stone. However, topics are often discussed between an editor and a contributor who work together on finding most relevant topics for the Community’s readers.

Plan Ahead

Our finest advice would be to come up with an extended list of potential topics for almost a year in advance. If you are a magazine, you will be publishing frequently, thus, you’d want to map up your topics fairly far into the future. However, if you are running your business or community blog and prefer to slow down a little, we’d recommend you map up at least a month or two in advance. Why the heck so much work?

There are 3 main reasons for you to really try and spend enough time writing down as many topics as you can think of. Would you like a challenge? Go for 100!

  1. Writing topics down for your future blogs will help you unfold many incredible ideas. Moreover, if you keep them written, you won’t forget them in a few hours or weeks or months. Keep your topics notepad close by – often people you meet inspire you to create your best articles. Always write ideas down as they come.
  2. Once you have a good number of articles on a piece of paper, turn your eye to the Internet and start Googling the titles you came up with. Have a good browse to see what’s hot, what’s controversial, done before, never been written about, etc. Researching your topics online will help you tweak them so that your future blogs become much more desirable.
  3. Her Majesty Automation simply helps you get more done in a shorter period of time. If you have your blog topics ready, you can email them to your writers, eliminating time spent on helping them decide on the blog posts or article. Always welcome writers’ ideas as well.

Social Media Following

I grew my business organically, which I dont recommend, its very conservative. If you want to grow a business, I encourage you to spend money on marketing” – Kasia Gospos

Leaders in Heels have over 8,000 Facebook likes and 16,000 Twitter followers. Why did they grow such an amazing community online?

Leaders in Heels tweet a lot. Full stop. Their twitter updates come out nearly every 10 minutes.

Schedule, Schedule, Schedule!

Once a new article is published, Leaders in Heels community & social media manager; Yolanda Floro, schedules the tweets for the next day, week, month, 3 months, etc. Yes, as we mentioned before, they plan ahead. We also recommend you do it too. When scheduling, tag authors, people who were interviewed, use general and popular hashtags and, of course, think of catchy 140 characters.

Don’t Forget to Tag

Tagging, in fact, is an effective Twitter strategy. “When we publish an article and tweet it into the wild, Yolanda publishes it with the twitter handle of the contributor. When the contributor receives a notification on Twitter of being tagged, they usually re-tweet it”, says Kasia. If you tweet your blogs regularly mentioning (or tagging) other people and igniting conversations as a result, you are up for a growth-on-steroids.

Content is Key

Networking and connecting with their articles’ subjects, community supporters and participants have given Leaders in Heels a healthy boost.

However, as a publisher, Leaders in Heels is all about content. And so we asked if there is golden goose content we need to know about.

On the topic, it doesnt really matter; it depends what you want to be known for. If you want to be known for business women and write about business women, then you need to write about business women and use that key term frequently, says Kasia, which is something we’d like you to think about carefully.

Focus-Pocus

Once you have decided to start publishing, whether it is an industry magazine or a blog page, you’d want to write for the sake of growing your business, expertise and authorship. If you are writing about everything and anything you are diluting yourself in the murky water of nothingness. Kasia kindly reminds us that focus is key and it can help your content be more awesome.

The best articles are the articles which are really well-researched, long and very comprehensive, because people will read it when they are actually interested in what you have to say. Obviously the structure of an article is also important – when you have lots and lots of content and no sub-headings then people get bored, tired and leave, says Kasia, which makes a lot of sense once you think of your own reading behaviour. Go ahead, have a read around. Well, if you’ve stuck around for that long that you are reading this sentence, you are a very interested reader indeed.  And this is who we are writing for.

A few Final Words…

Enough of the content marketing talk! What’s next?

The future of Leaders in Heels is a bright one, with great new events coming up! Kasia is looking to collaborate more with other businesses and women online communities.

There will also be an expanding product range online, so keep your eyes on the prize and check their website regularly. Coming soon is a new book about automation (we have donated our part to it as well and cannot wait to grab a copy), which will include more information about how to automate your processes online which is a great asset for any business!