5 Simple Email Opt-In Strategies

EMAIL is the secret weapon of many successful businesses and internet entrepreneurs.  While social media marketing has received a great deal of (deserved) attention for elevating brand identity; it isn’t as powerful as the email when it comes to driving people to take action. 

Capturing email addresses and creating an audience of email readers will take you and your business to the next level.  Let’s take a look at why email is so important and the best recipe for building a better audience for your email marketing efforts.

First, Why Email is SO Important

Here’s why: people still guard their email inboxes.  They will not give their addresses to just anyone.  Because of this, they are much more likely to read and engage with the emails that they do get.  In addition, your email is not competing with games, funny memes, or a friend’s new baby.  It’s just your message laid out there for a ready and willing group of subscribers who are actually interested in what you have to say.

By the numbers…

Email has shown to blow other online marketing methods out of the water when it comes to ROI. Litmus reported $40 ROI for every $1 spent on email marketing, while keyword ads only return $17 per dollar, and banner ads a small $2 per dollar. Let’s also talk conversion rates. Email has been reported to offer a 4.16% conversion rate, whereas search results offer 2.64%, and social media converts at less than 1%.  So now that you have an understanding of the reasons to invest in email marketing, here is how to grow your email list.

The Best Strategy

The following ways are tried-and-tested ways to get the coveted email addresses of your potential customers. As we said, people keep their emails more guarded, so you will need to offer incentives and position your request strategically.

1. Prioritize Your Opt-In Form

First, your opt-in form should be a priority when it comes to the design of your site. These little forms allow you access to the golden list which converts higher than any other channel and offers the highest ROI for goodness sakes, make it the first thing visitors see! Here is an example from the 7 for all Mankind website, a company that sells high-end jeans.

Three seconds after arriving at their site, pop! Up comes the email opt-in with a 10% off incentive and a promise of exclusive offers, updates, competitions, and in-store events. Not only that, they help to segment their customers by gathering gender information. Take notes marketers, they’ve got it right. But, how about the customers that aren’t sold right off the bat and don’t opt in?

2. Ask for Subscriptions on the Bottom of Every Page

In order to get the most subscribers from your website or blog, you need to make an offer to subscribe at the bottom of each page. Now, each of these offers should not be like the rest. You want to customize call-to-actions according to the content on the page. For example, if you have a page explaining actionable steps a customer can take to achieve a goal, you might add an opt-in like the one below at the bottom of the page.

Make opting in easy and make the offers relevant to the situation your visitor is in.

3. Site Registration

Of course, one of the easiest way to collect email addresses is when a visitor registers for your website. Juniper reported 77% of marketers report site registration to be effective for building a large, quality email list. Similar to how Facebook requires a registration to sign up, or eBay when you are trying to make a purchase, your site should register users with their email addresses too. In the site registration form, or e-commerce forms for that matter, you want to provide an opt-in option for visitors to receive continuous emails. Be sure to incentivize your opt-in so visitors are more likely to agree.  Here’s an example of this tactic on H&M’s website.

Note how they incentivize their offer by saying “exclusive offers”. Who wouldn’t want exclusive offers, right!? They also collect information to segment their audience, as the 7 for all Mankind opt-in did above, including fields for gender, location, and even an interest in kids wear.

4. Use Social Media

Next up is social media. Social media is a great tool to reach far and wide and attract new customers. It is also a place to build your email list. Opt-in forms can be placed on your social media sites to call followers to action. Here is an example of what that looks like on Facebook from Salesforce’s Facebook page.

When you click on that “Sign up” button, you are taken to this page to complete the email opt-in. Adding email opt-in buttons on your social media profiles can help you move your audience from social media down the buying funnel to a place where they will click through and convert.

Social media is also great for running contests. You can offer a prize and require signing up with email in order to qualify to win. Here’s a great blog about 10 social media contests that generated a total of 10,000 emails for the respective companies.

5. Create a Free Course or Other Downloadable Content

Last but not least, a free course is a great way to engage your audience and earn their email address. What can you teach? Well, what industry are you in? What is your expertise? What do your customers want from you? You can share some of your coveted expertise on a topic people commonly ask about in your industry. Courses can be in written, audio, or video form. Here is an example from a page on Neil Patel’s Quicksprout website.

On this blog, which targets an audience who is having trouble converting SEO traffic, he has the side banner offering his free course (valued at $300) on increasing traffic. It is free in exchange for a simple email address. Note how the blog and course have the same target audience and the course reinforces the blog. This is a great way to get more email subscribers.

Another note is that these offers don’t have to be limited to courses, you can offer an infographic (as shown below), a downloadable whitepaper or PDF, a report, etc. in exchange for the email address.

If you give visitors a reason to give you their email address, and something in exchange, they are less likely to hesitate.

There you have it, the best recipe for building your email marketing audience comes down to strategically placed opt in’s with incentivized messaging. As shown in these examples, you need to be funneling visitors toward your email list from many angles. The main takeaways to remember are:

• Opt-ins Should be Highly Visible
• Opt-ins Should be Frequent
• Opt-ins Should be Relevant
• Incentives! Incentives! Incentives!

Best of luck on building your golden list!

Source

Here’s How to Find the Right Mix and Fine-Tune Your Offer

Have you ever wondered if your strange collection of skills and interests could be woven together to build a profitable business?

If you have, you’ll love today’s Hero’s Journey article.

Lauren Pawell is a rare breed: she has a background in development and marketing. That’s a combination you don’t see every day!

Some people might have encouraged Lauren to choose one field or the other. But she persisted and has built a business that artfully combines her many passions.

Lauren’s story is this month’s Hero’s Journey feature. We’re tapping the collective wisdom of our community members to bring you reports from the front lines of the content marketing world. See all the Hero’s Journey posts here.

Read on as Lauren shares what she’s learned over the years and how you can use her hard-earned wisdom in your own business.

Building a one-stop revenue-building shop

Lauren Pawell: What sets Bixa Media apart is my background in both development and marketing. This allows me to sit at the intersection of business, technology and design.

We help entrepreneurs turn their WordPress and Shopify websites into revenue-generating powerhouses. We do that through a mixture of website design and development, content marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and online reputation management.

Not only can we write killer copy, but we can also evaluate your technology options, decide which is best for your needs, and build everything for you, while keeping your business objectives at the forefront of the process.

I find our clients really value having a partner who can help them from A to Z.

Perhaps more importantly, we’re able to tell our clients where not to waste their dollars and effort, and where to focus their resources.

Even if this doesn’t always match what a client had in mind, our honest feedback resonates with business owners.

We offer two types of services:

• 1:1 online marketing services: For medium-sized businesses who are looking to outsource their online marketing, we offer a variety of services designed to amplify their online exposure and generate more customers.
• DIY programs: For small businesses or solopreneurs who don’t yet have the resources to outsource their marketing, we offer educational marketing programs through Websites That Generate.

My business is primarily online, although I do plenty of networking offline — I find they go hand-in-hand. The offline contact tends to tip the scale in our favor, especially when it comes to securing large contracts.

Putting the brakes on spinning wheels

Lauren Pawell: I started my business for two reasons.

First and foremost, after working in marketing overseas for a few years, I saw so many small-to-medium-sized businesses with a wealth of online opportunity at their fingertips. But they just didn’t have the right guidance.

As a result, they were spinning their wheels in so many different directions with little-to-no impact.

I wanted to help them pick that low-hanging digital fruit, so that they could continue to grow their businesses and entrepreneurial dreams.

So, in 2011, I moved back to the United States, booked my first client at a friend’s birthday party (notice that offline touchpoint!), and haven’t looked back since.

The best part of that story? Our first client still works with us today and has gone from a one-man business to a 20+ person company. Now that is why I started Bixa!

I don’t share the second reason with many people, but I feel it will resonate with the Copyblogger audience.

In 2011, I had been through one-too-many bad bosses and was tired of not being in charge of my own destiny, from both a personal and career standpoint. That freedom I craved drove me to start my own company.

My driving motivation is to help other entrepreneurial spirits achieve the same freedom I have.

Conversion experiments that paid off

Lauren Pawell: Converting cold traffic into qualified leads is a finicky beast, especially when it comes to selling online education.

It’s not hard to understand why — cold traffic doesn’t immediately pull out their wallets. It took quite a bit of trial and error to dial in our lead-nurturing process, but we did it.

A few highlights:

We use Facebook ads as our hook

A new email subscriber generated from a Facebook ad was not likely to immediately jump up and buy our program. However, when we started to establish trust and demonstrate our authority through a few different mediums, we were far more successful.

Here’s what we do:

First, we run the new subscriber through a long welcome series over email. We send them 7 emails over 20 days, all of which include a lot of copy. It helps us weed out unqualified leads.

While in many approaches we did not want a lot of unsubscribes, in this case, we welcome them. It allows us to filter out anyone who doesn’t immediately love us.

After this, we direct the subscriber to our private Facebook community

There we share weekly educational content over video and give 1:1 feedback, similar to what they would experience in our course. This also helps establish us as a trusted and authoritative figure.

Then, we deliver free educational webinars on specific topics

This helps the subscriber better understand their problem and the solution they need to transform their situation.

Finally, we open our doors periodically

Last, but not least, we sell our program through email during specific times of the year, and are available on live chat to answer any questions the prospects have. (This, again, is similar to our course experience).

Some may say we give away too much for free, but I find this really helps us find great students. Plus, it allows our Facebook ad spend to generate far more ROI.

When we didn’t follow this solution and jumped straight from Facebook ads to a webinar to a sales email, our conversion rates weren’t great. Now, they are stellar.

So, if you feel like you are wasting dollars on Facebook ad spend, consider the rest of your funnel. Now that we know what works, it’s far easier to justify scaling up our marketing spend.

Venturing into online education (one validated step at a time)

Lauren Pawell: In Q2 of this year, I decided to test the idea of online education programs.

I wanted to be less reliant on 1:1 client work, which can be unpredictable. And I wanted to help all the entrepreneurs we were turning away due to a full calendar on our end, and limited resources on their end.

To validate the idea, we began being incredibly transparent about our marketing tactics.

We educated our audience through a number of mediums, notably: email, online webinars, and a private Facebook community.

I believed that through great educational content, we could:

• Empower solopreneurs, allowing them to achieve quick wins in their businesses
• Determine whether there was a demand for our DIY programs

This effort has been quite successful. We recently presold an educational course (before it was created) that our audience was begging for.

By validating an idea through free content first, we were then able to dedicate the resources to creating paid educational programs. A course takes a lot of front-loaded work, especially content creation. The last thing I wanted to do was create a program no one wanted.

As an added benefit of this education-first approach, when 1:1 prospects come through the door, they are already sold on working with us. Because they already understand the “why” behind our recommendations, the selling is 90 percent done by the time we write a proposal.

The Rainmaker Digital products Lauren uses

Lauren Pawell: We use quite a few Rainmaker Digital products, including:

• Rainmaker Platform to power our online courses and membership programs at Websites That Generate
• Genesis Framework + StudioPress themes to power clients’ websites
• Copyblogger Authority and Digital Commerce Institute to continue learning and engaging with the community

I also happen to be a new Copyblogger Certified Content Marketer. And I’m attending the upcoming Digital Commerce Summit in Denver.

So, needless to say, I’m a Rainmaker Digital diehard!

Refining and scaling up for the future

Lauren Pawell: In the final quarter of 2016, we’ll focus on refining our sales funnels and scaling up our DIY programs.

Our educational courses at Websites That Generate haven’t been marketed on our website, or really even promoted outside of email. That’s because I wanted to run a few groups of people through our programs to ensure we really dialed them in.

Now that we’ve gotten the process down, we’re ready to scale up. The first step in that process requires some adjustments to our sales funnel. Then, we can scale up our lead generation through Facebook ads.

An unsolicited piece of advice

Lauren Pawell: If, like me, you’re considering creating an educational program to complement your 1:1 services, I highly recommend the Rainmaker Platform.

All of the technology was so easy to set up, allowing us to focus most of our effort on the course creation and marketing.

When it comes to selling a course and serving your students, the less you have to worry about the technology, the better.

Find Lauren Pawell online …

• Bixa Media
• Websites That Generate

Thanks to Lauren for appearing in our Hero’s Journey series.

Do you have questions for her? Ask them in the comments.


Source

A Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking for Content Marketing

Search online and you will see articles about growth hacking everywhere. The only problem is many times growth hacking seems an abstract concept that only big companies can use.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Any company or website can use growth hacking to grow. Do you know why?
Because growth hacking is a mindset, not just a bunch of tactics used to improve your conversion rate.
If you are wondering what this mindset is all about and how to use it, fear not.
Since 93% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing as their main acquisition channel, in this post, you will learn how the growth hacking mindset works and how to use it for your content marketing strategy.

Think like a growth hacker

Let’s start by taking this out of the picture: growth hacking isn’t “something” you do, rather it’s a mindset and a process you implement to a set of tactics to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, if you want to be a growth hacker, you need to think like one.
What is growth hacking all about? I could give you all sorts of explanations and definitions, but the fact is growth hacking is all about getting results.
Instead of wasting your time thinking things through and looking at the “right way” of doing things like any conventional marketer would do, you “hack” your way through until you get the results you want.
Growth hackers, however, aren’t disorganized when it comes to “hacking” their way through results. Growth hackers think like scientists:

• They start by creating a hypothesis around a tactic and goal.
• They design a test around that hypothesis.
• They run the test.
• They get the results.
• If the test fails, they learn and try again with a different set of hypothesis.
• If it works, they keep the winning version.

Whatever the result, every time a growth hacker tests a hypothesis he or she learns something that gets them closer to reality.
The key of a growth hacker mindset, the one that separates them from a “regular” marketer, is they use inductive reasoning. Let me explain.
Most marketers use deductive reasoning when testing a marketing tactic. That is:

• They come up with a theory of how things work, which can be based on “marketing rules”, facts, or technical definitions.
• They create a hypothesis around those ideas.
• They run the test and learn based on the results.

That thinking process isn’t bad per se, it’s just inefficient when you are a small startup and you need to get results fast. If you pick the wrong hypothesis, you may lose a lot of time implementing a tactic and trying to grow a channel that has no potential.
As a growth hacker, you don’t have the privilege of time or resources. You need to deliver results fast. That’s why you need to use inductive reasoning. That means when you want to test a new tactic, you would:

• Make observations on what pieces of content people share and link to.
• Find patterns within those successful pieces of content (e.g. “the articles that got the most shares have lots of screenshots”).
• Tie a probability of success to those patterns (e.g. “using screenshots in our articles have a higher likelihood of getting shares”).
• Create a theory behind those patterns (e.g. “our users like articles with screenshots”).
• Create a test to see if those patterns provide the results you observed before.

Before moving on, let me say this process isn’t as scientific as the ones real scientists use in the biotech industry and the like. Rather, it’s a highly simplified version of this thought process that you need to use.
Instead of wasting your time to find theories to back your ideas, you flip the coin and focus on what works and how you can replicate those results.
As you can see, this methodology is much leaner and iterative than the theory-based one most marketers use. You make observations, test hypothesis, and find new insights that give you an edge over your competitors.
To sum up, as a content marketing growth hacker, your job will be to:

• Find successful campaigns from your own company or your competitors.
• Find patterns of success within those campaigns that have a high likelihood of causing that success.
• Come up with a different set of hypothesis based on the patterns previously found.
• Create tests around these hypothesis to validate or refute them.
• Get results, which will help you learn what works and what doesn’t.

If growth hackers focus on results, then how do you use this same mindset for your content marketing campaigns? According to a Content Marketing Institute study, only 42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing. This means there’s a big gap between what content marketers want and what they achieve.
That may have to do with the fact most B2B content marketers use 13 tactics to achieve their results. That dilutes their efforts in a way that makes content marketing fall short of its potential.
Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at Hubspot, referred to this problem when he wrote:

A lot of teams take a shotgun approach to growth by trying a little bit of everything, but never a lot of one thing. It is harder to focus than it is to try everything. As a result they end up just scratching the surface rather than digging a layer deeper to find what really works. There are two things to remember. One, most successful companies get the majority of their scale from a single channel. Two, there are only a few ways to scale.

In other words, you should focus on making content marketing work. In order to do that, you need to have a clear idea on how content marketing can help you grow. Otherwise, you may fall in the 58% of content marketers that say they aren’t effective at doing it.
In the simplest terms, content marketing can help you fulfill three goals:

• Attract traffic.
• Generate leads.
• Nurture those leads into customers.

All the content you create within your strategy must be focused on achieving those goals. As the Metallica song goes, nothing else matters.
How do you attract traffic these days? By creating content that’s share-worthy and link-worthy.
How do you generate leads? By giving people something they want badly enough so they are willing to give you their email address. With the absurd amount of content out there, that’s something that gets harder each day that goes by.
How do you nurture leads into becoming customers? By creating a full-funnel content strategy that gives them the information they need when they need it the most.
But how do you create content that’s shared and link-worthy? How do you find what people want? And how do you find what content people need at each stage of their buying process?
In the next section of this post, I will show you three hacks you can implement today to achieve two of the three goals for your content marketing strategy.

Hack #1: How to get more traffic with reverse engineering

Your content marketing strategy can be focused on many types of traffic, including referral, social, or email. But according to Andrew Chen, one of the few that can be scaled is organic traffic. If your website has enough domain authority, you can expect to get thousands, if not millions, of visitors per month thanks to the traffic brought by search engines.
In order to get organic traffic, both your website and your content need to be optimized for search engines, especially Google, which in the United States has a market share of 63.8%.
As a former SEO consultant, optimizing a website is as simple as doing two things right:

• Optimize your most important pages for one main keyword with moderate to high traffic levels.
• Attract inbound links to your most important pages and to your homepage.

SEO doesn’t get any harder than that. How you can optimize your pages and get inbound links is the big question.
The first part of that equation, the on-site optimization, deserves a separate article. That’s why I will focus on the second one: inbound links.
Inbound links still are one of the most important factors of Google’s ranking algorithm. You need to attract as many high-quality links to your pages through the use of link building tactics to rank them for your given keywords.
There are many link building techniques you can use. The best one, however, is creating great content. Yes, I know “great content” can be a thrilling set of words these days. After all, 76% of B2B marketers blog. Yet, as you may already know, most of them don’t get any results. That’s why you need to create content that makes people want to link to it and share it.
To create high-quality content, you could use the typical deductive reasoning most marketers use, which consists of:

• Coming up with an idea.
• Create it.
• Promote it hoping people will care.

As a growth hacker, you can do better. Instead of spraying and praying, you can deduce that the content that’s likely to perform best is the one that has already performed well before.
In other words, if a piece of content got a lot of shares and inbound links, it means people find that article (and the topic it covers) interesting. If you recreated that article, you could easily get the same results the original one got. You could also change the content type and create an infographic, ebook, video, or podcast based on the topic idea of the successful article you found.
In order to find the content that has performed well in your industry, you need to reverse engineer your competitors. To do that, you need to define some features of what makes a piece of content successful. There are many attributes you can select, from a number of comments to social shares to inbound links. The last two, however, are the most important ones.
In 2015, Shareaholic found that social media is the largest driver of all referral traffic. As of December 2014, 31.24% of all referral traffic came from social media. That means your social shares can help you bring more referral traffic to your site.
What’s more, according to BuzzSumo, longer content can help get the most shares, with 3000-10000 word pieces getting the most average shares (8859 total average shares).



On the other hand, inbound links are one of the largest drivers of organic traffic. A joint-study made by Brian Dean and Eric Van Buskirk found that “the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor”.



The best tools that can help you reverse engineer your competitors are BuzzSumo and Ahrefs. The former is a competitor intelligence tool that will help you find what articles got the most shares on five different social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Google Plus. The latter is an SEO tool that can help you find keywords, analyze your competitor’s backlinks, among other things.
Let’s say you work for a non-profit that focuses on providing shelter to stray dogs and cats in the United States. Your goal is to bring awareness to your cause. In order to achieve that goal, you would need to create share and link-worthy content that drives traffic to your site.
The first thing you would need to do is head to BuzzSumo and input some keywords related to your organization’s cause. In this case, I used the keyword “animal shelter”:



The top articles shared related to that topic were about the emotional news: cops adopting stray dogs, an animal shelter that celebrates having adopted all their animals, and so on. They are all histories that are surprising, sweet, and most importantly, emotional.
There may be a pattern of success here: people like reading stories that provide good news and bring a smile to their faces. People want emotional stories.
This may not mean emotional stories will necessary give you more traffic, but at the least, there may be a correlation between both variables. This is a good enough pattern for you to come up with a hypothesis and a test.
You could repeat that process with keywords like “stray dogs”, “abandoned cats”, and other related ones to make sure you see the same pattern. I would recommend you to analyze at least 10 articles in your industry and see what people like sharing. From there, keep looking for patterns and define what specific attributes could be driving those shares.
After you are done with BuzzSumo, repeat the same process with Ahrefs. Instead of using keywords, like the ones you used in BuzzSumo, you want to take the articles you analyzed and see how many backlinks each one got. Since a link requires a larger investment than a share, we can assume that an article that gets many inbound links is highly valuable in its industry.
First, go to Ahrefs and put one of the most shared links in the search box:



Then you will see the list of results, with the total number of backlinks, the number of domains pointing to the page, how much organic traffic that page gets, and much more.

There’s no right or wrong set of results you are looking for. Rather, you are looking to get a feel for the article and compare that with the other results.
In this case, the article got over 350 backlinks, which is a high amount of links for a page like that. This means the article is popular in its industry. You would need to repeat that for the other 5-10 results for the keyword “animal shelter” and the other related keywords to see if the other ones are better or worse. Then, based on what you find, you can decide which articles are the most successful both share and link-wise.
Once you are done with the social and links analysis, you will have a good idea of:

• What topics people like in your industry.
• What attributes those articles had that made people want to share and link to them.
• What attributes your articles need to have to, at the least, match the quality of those articles.

You can’t just recreate what worked before and hope that will work again, however. You need to bring value to the table. Once you find a topic idea that has worked in the past, you will make it better and promote it to the same people that shared the original one. That way, you are guaranteed an audience who will likely want to hear from you and will link to your piece of content.
If an article used a happy emotional story, like the examples shown before, you know you will have to feature stories in your articles. But you could also add some statistics to back your idea better, so the contrast between the happy story and the reality impact your readers even more. You could also show pictures of the subjects being featured in the story.
Peep Laja, the conversion expert and founder of ConversionXL, got 100k visitors in his first year thanks to finding a gap, using research-backed data, and optimizing for shares and links. In other words, he followed a similar number of steps as the one I’ve just shown you and he got those incredible results.
In his own words:

The secret of success is doing something that others are not willing to do for a long, long time.

Once you have finished developing your article, you will need to grab the list of people that shared and linked to the other articles and reach out to them.
In the case of a share, you can send that person a direct message or email. I prefer the latter, which despite being more time-consuming, can be more effective and personal.
Reaching out to people who shared an article, however, can be hit-or-miss. Many people share articles automatically, without even reading them, so the likelihood of them remembering the article you refer to, and the fact they even care makes this outreach a bit less effective.
Outreaching to people who linked to a similar article, on the other hand, can be much better. Not to mention the fact that finding a blog’s manager email is much easier than the previous case. In most cases, you will find the email right on the site itself, on the Contact page.
In the case that you can’t find the manager’s email, you will have to do the following. Grab the site’s URL and paste it in Hunter.io.



Before doing anything else, you have to have the blog’s manager name at hand. If you don’t know it, take the time to find it. In most cases, it won’t take you more than 5 minutes checking the About Us and Contact pages. Once you have it, add it in the search box that says “Find Someone..”.



In this case, the confidence level is not large enough, so go to Email Checker, and add that email into the search box.


Now we have the email, we need to send an email letting the blog manager know about the new article. The following email template can help you do that:
Hi NAME,
I just stumbled upon your post at SITE and it caught my attention the fact you linked to this amazing guide on TOPIC.
I recently wrote a more in-depth article on the same topic you might find interesting.
Here’s the link: LINK.
Would love to know your opinion on that article. And if you’ll find it useful, please consider linking to it from that post of yours, or perhaps mentioning it in your future writing.
Cheers,
Ivan
This process can take some time to execute in its entirety, but if done properly, can help you land high-quality inbound links for your content. And this will help you increase your organic traffic.

Hack #2: How to get more social shares

Despite not driving as much traffic as organic search, having a social presence can help you bring consistent traffic that complements the organic one.
But how do you get more social traffic? Having a social sharing plugin installed and a well-functioning Facebook and Twitter presence is a good start, but it won’t be enough. That is too deductive. “People share content if they are given the chance”. Nice theory. But will that alone make people share your content? Not really.
People don’t share content because it’s easy to do so. If that was true, you could put random “Like” buttons around your content and people would share your content. There’s a different reason why people share anything, and it’s not related to any plugin.
Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, explains there are six psychological attributes behind viral content:

• Social currency: Sharable information that makes us look good holds social currency.
• Triggers: By Berger’s definition, a “trigger” is something that is easy to remember about a product or idea, helping to ensure it stays top of mind.
• Emotion: If a piece of content touches one of our core emotions, like sadness or mercy, we share.
• Public: If something is public, it can be shared.
• Practical Value: People share what’s useful and relevant.
• Stories: People are inherent storytellers, and all great brands also learn to tell stories. Information travels under the guise of idle chatter.

There’s no denying that if you want to get more social shares for your content, it needs to have as many of these six attributes as possible. The more it has, the more likely it will become “viral”.
However, this article isn’t about theory. Remember, this article is about doing what works. There are two main ways you can make your content more viral-worthy.
Have you ever read an article and found a small box that featured a quote from that article and a link that said: “Click to Tweet”? That’s exactly what you need to use.
The “Click to Tweet” is a simple plugin you can add to your content which can help you increase the social currency of the reader, give them a trigger for them to share while helping them make it public and giving practical value to their friends, all at the same time. Also, you make it easier for them to share right in the article itself.



The key to a successful “Click to Tweet” isn’t just adding a random or promotional quote, like “This article is awesome! Check it out: URL” What social currency would the reader get if he or she shared that? Rather, what you need to do is add a soundbite, something memorable, short, and a bit mysterious that will help you give as much value as possible while making people want to know more.
For example, a good “Click to Tweet” for this article would be one that said: “Marketers think deductively, growth hackers think inductively”. It gives a lot of value while being a bit mysterious, which will make the reader’s followers want to click to read more.
There are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to add a “Click to Tweet” to your content, my favorite being the one developed by CoSchedule.
The second hack to get more social shares is even simpler than the previous one. It’s so simple that I will go ahead and tell you right away: when creating content, use images. I’m not talking about stock photos. I’m not talking about random photos of nature either. I’m talking about custom-made graphics and images that give your content more context, more relevancy, and a more pleasurable reading experience.
Why images? you may be wondering. To start, 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business. Not only that, but images can help your readers remember your content better while getting more retweets and likes. In other words, it’s a win-win for both parties.
The easiest kind of image you should use is screenshots. They give a lot of context and help visualize what you explain. Some other custom images you could create for your content are:

• Quotes from the article
• Summary of an idea or concept
• Graphical representation of an idea

Make sure to get a designer to help you create these images, and in the case you can’t or don’t have one, use a tool like Canva.

Hack #3: How to get leads with high-conversion lead magnets

Throughout this article, you have learned about how to attract traffic with SEO and social media. Content marketing isn’t just about traffic, however. As you learned at the beginning of this article, content marketing can also help you attract leads and convert them into customers.
The question then becomes, how do you convert your visitors into leads? There are many ways you can convince a lead to become a customer, but there’s only one effective way to convert a visitor into a lead: lead magnets.
Lead magnets are pieces of content that you offer to your visitors in exchange for their emails. Once you do that, you can begin to “nurture” them until they become customers. Some examples of lead magnets are:

• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Checklists
• Templates
• Reports

DebtHelper, a non-profit credit counseling company, offers a “Free Budget Spreadsheet” to their readers. This is perfect for their audience, as they are in need of help regarding their expenditures. Giving something relevant and useful to them is likely to make them convert at a higher rate.



The way most content marketers approach lead magnets is, as usual, deductive:

• They define what people like.
• They create the lead magnet.
• They offer it hoping to get them to convert.

If you are lucky or smart, like the people of DebtHelper, you may convert a decent amount of visitors into leads. But you can’t do business hoping to succeed. As a growth hacker, you only play to win.
The way a growth hacker creates a lead magnet is by repeating the same process as in the first hack: you reverse engineer what’s already working. In other words, you find something that people already like, you create a lead magnet, you offer it. Simple, powerful, and effective.
There are two ways you can find high-performance ideas for your lead magnets:

• You can analyze what has worked on your own site and then you create a lead magnet based on what you find.
• You can analyze what has worked for your competitors and then you create a lead magnet based on what you find.

The first way to find lead magnet ideas is the most effective, as you are giving your visitors what they already like. This will also make the content creation process much easier for you because you will need to expand on what you have already developed before. That’s a big time and money-saver.
To get started, go to your Google Analytics account. Once you are in there, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

In there, take a look at all the articles that got the most traffic and lowest bounce rate. You can even see which ones have the highest page value if that’s something you already track. The most popular articles, based on the metrics previously mentioned, are the ones you should consider expanding to create a lead magnet.



The second way mentioned, similar to the one explained in hack #1, will repeat the same process as before. You will have to go to BuzzSumo, add your competitors’ URLs, and analyze their most shared articles. Then you will repeat the process with Ahrefs and see which pieces of content got the most inbound links. From there, you need to analyze and see what topics are the most popular. Take notes, look for patterns, and start creating your lead magnet.
Just like it happened with the images, you should get a professional designer to help you out with your lead magnet creation. The other option is to use Beacon, a tool that can help you create resource pages, checklists, ebooks, and more.

Wrap up

If you have been a marketer all your life, this article may seem a bit odd and counterintuitive. You’ve been thinking deductively all your life, focusing on theory and certainty.
This article showed you there’s another way of thinking about marketing. It’s a way that focuses on reality and uncertainty. You focus on what works. You focus on what your visitors and customers tell you. You double-down on what succeeds and discard the rest.
That’s how growth hackers think. That’s how they act.
Now it’s your turn to take the leap and start thinking like a growth hacker. Even if you still want to respect the theory behind your actions, this new way of thinking will help you grow faster.


Source

How to Build a Social Media Marketing Funnel for Bloggers

Are you using your blog for business?
Wondering how to combine blog posts with social media content to move people through the sales cycle?
In this article, you’ll discover how to use blog posts to create social media content at every stage of your marketing funnel.

#1: Define Your Marketing Goal

Creating a social media marketing funnel is directly tied to your marketing goals. To begin, think of one marketing goal you want to accomplish. Beginning with a single short-term goal is much easier than tackling long-term goals. Also, choose a realistic, measurable goal so you can identify whether you’ve reached it.
Here are a few examples of goals that would make a great starting point for a social media marketing funnel:

• If you’re launching a new online course, aim for a specific number of pre-orders before you launch.
• If you’re opening a restaurant, focus on making a certain number of reservations for your first quarter of business.
• If you want to grow your email subscriber list, concentrate on increasing your rate of new subscribers from 8% per week to 10% per week.

#2: Publish Six Blog Posts to Create a Funnel to Support the Customer Journey

After you identify your goal, you want to ensure you publish content that leads people toward that goal. To do that effectively, your content must cater to people at different stages in the funnel. For each stage, write two blog posts that support your goal at each stage: awareness, trust, and conversion.

Your content should cater to people at different stages in the buying cycle.

Stage 1: Blog Posts That Create Awareness
To create awareness, think about blog posts that would attract new people to your brand and demonstrate what you can offer. Also, if your blog posts give people a quick-fix solution to a problem, you’ll earn enough trust for them to hang around and learn more.
In this first stage of the buying process, these types of blog posts work well:

• Top resources post: Share your best resources with your audience.
• Product and gift guides: Share about and rank products, gifts, and/or services that suit a specific purpose.
• How-to posts: Present a problem and demonstrate a solution (or many solutions) to that problem.
• Question-and-answer posts: Write a post in Q&A format to answer your readers’ burning questions about a product.

For example, Jane Friedman’s website helps writers navigate the publishing world, and this how-to post about how to publish a book explains a topic that would appeal to new authors who aren’t familiar with the process. The detailed post establishes her expertise in her field and offers an easy way to understand the traditional publishing process.

Create content that spreads awareness of your brand and attracts new followers.

Stage 2: Your Prospect Wants to Know, Like, and Trust You
At this stage, the word “want” is important. Marketers often assume that loyalty is hard-won. However, when you help people, they naturally want to like and trust you. Your prospect becomes eager to learn more and figure out if you can help. The higher the price tag, the more content you’ll need at this stage.
Here are five blog post types that work well for building trust, likeability, and loyalty:

• Customer case studies: Share a customer’s experience to show readers how your business helped that customer.
• Expert interviews: You might ask an expert to give insight into an issue that’s relevant to your readers.
• Inspirational and motivational stories: Tell a personal story to motivate and inspire your readers.
• Opinion pieces: Persuade readers to consider an alternative point of view by challenging conventional wisdom on an issue.
• Research breakdown: Analyze the takeaways from several current surveys or studies about a trend in your industry. Or summarize an industry report to help your readers understand how the information may affect them.

For instance, One Kings Lane sells furniture, décor, and interior design services. This expert interview about how to become more confident about choosing paint colors will appeal to an audience that’s interested in home décor and help prospects with a common problem.

Expert interviews are one way to help your prospects and build trust.

Stage 3: Your Prospects Are Warm and Ready to Take the Relationship Further
Conversion doesn’t necessarily mean asking for the sale. To illustrate, you might ask the reader to subscribe to your email newsletter so you can nurture the sale via email. However, it’s a myth that blog posts should never contain sales information.

When you’re in business, you’re supposed to ask for the sale. It’s absolutely okay and necessary for you to tell your potential customers how you can help them and why they should buy from you. Focus on attracting and nurturing relationships 80% of the time, but you can focus on conversions with the other 20%.
Here are three types of blog posts that work well for conversions:

• Call the reader to action: Run a challenge that motivates your readers to take action. You can organize a formal challenge where readers must sign up to participate or an informal challenge designed to foster a sense of community.
• Invite the reader to enter a competition/giveaway: Promote a product or service by enticing readers to enter a competition by writing no more than 25 words about a given topic.
• Launch a new product or service: Write a blog post announcing a new product and explain how the product helps your customers.

For example, when Buffer launched a tool that helps users tailor social media posts to various platforms, this blog post not only announced the new feature, but also explained the feature’s value. The post walks readers through all of the details involved in customizing posts, and then explains how the Buffer tool simplifies the process and saves time.

A blog post about a product or service can help you convert warm prospects

into buyers.

#3: Repurpose Published Blog Posts to Create Social Media Marketing Collateral

After your six blog posts are published, break your posts down into smaller chunks you can use on social media. Create graphics, videos, and so on to support each piece of content as you roll it out.
As a model, these six blog posts support the launch of a new blogging app:

• How to create a blog post strategy in 5 minutes or less (how-to)
• Ten tools for creating awesome images for your blog (tool roundup)
• How a business coach made $7K out of this mistake (customer case study)
• Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup (inspirational story)
• Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge (call readers to action by issuing a challenge)
• Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun (product launch)

Because you’ve started with blog posts, you can easily repurpose the content in other formats for use on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels.

RealSimple created an Instagram story based on a blog post about how to choose 

produce; at the end of the story, viewers could swipe up to read the original post.

From content in each example blog post, you can create social media content chunks such as the following:

• How to create a blog post strategy in 5 minutes or less: Native video, SlideShare presentation, infographic, Instagram story broken into five short videos demonstrating each phase of the process
• Ten tools for creating awesome images for your blog: Instagram multiple-image post, short tips to share on Facebook and Twitter
• How a business coach made $7K out of this mistake: Video testimonial, quote graphics, Instagram story broken into segments throughout the day
• Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup: Behind-the-scenes video, inspirational quote graphics
• Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge: Lead generation ad with downloadable document, live video Q&A for each day of the challenge, Facebook group for challenge participants
• Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun: Conversion ad with a call to action to purchase, recorded video that demonstrates the product, infographic that shows the product’s value

You can repurpose just one blog post for several social media platforms.

Notice all of the ways you can repurpose just one blog post. When Dustin Stout offered free downloadable templates based on a blog post, he not only gathered email addresses, but also created a YouTube video that explains how to use the templates.

Creating the Right Amount of Content for Your Prospects
Depending on your product, prospects may take their time to make a purchase, especially if what you’re selling is at a higher price point. In that case, it helps to allow a longer lead time in your marketing campaigns. Your audience’s tolerance for information frequency will determine your lead time.
For instance, a lower-priced product like a book or gadget may require only a one-week lead time and three pieces of content. A higher-priced product like a house or a pool may require a longer lead time and six pieces of content.

Conclusion
When you build a social media marketing funnel that supports a goal, you create more targeted and relevant content on both your blog and social media. Also, you can easily repurpose your blog posts for your social media marketing.
Remember to create content for each stage of the customer journey and adjust how much content you post based on your knowledge of your product and customers.

What do you think? Does your content build a social media marketing funnel? Have you repurposed blog posts to create content for social media? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments.

Source