How to Ruthlessly Cut Worthless Words from Your Sales Copy

When you’re writing sales copy for your business, showing a little personality is a good thing.

It’s also a good idea to use natural language whenever possible, so people know you’re a real person who is genuinely interested in helping your prospects and customers.

I write conversationally when I write copy, and so do a lot of other folks I trust and admire.

However, there are limits to how far you should take that advice.

Are you taking a risk when you use slang?

Unless you have proof that your audience uses slang — and wants to see it in sales copy — you should avoid using it in your persuasive emails, sales pages, and other types of “selling” collateral.

And when I say “slang,” I’m also including alternative spellings, slang abbreviations, and hyperbole.

I know there’s a high probability I sound like an old grandmother shouting at kids to stay off her lawn — but lately I’m seeing this trend more and more frequently in sales copywriting. And I suspect it’s radically decreasing conversions.

Types of slang to avoid in copy

Want to see some examples? These are all words and phrases I’ve recently noticed on sales pages and in emails that were designed to sell me something:

• BOOM!
• Pleez (or worse yet, pleeeeeeeeez)
• OMG
• FREAKING ROCKED
• LOL

Chances are, you’ve got your own list of words that annoy you when you see them in professional writing. My list could go on for a while, but I’ve chosen some of my biggest pet peeves. I wince every time I see those words in an email from a business.

Why you want to avoid them

There’s a compelling reason to avoid slang and abbreviations like the ones on the list above: they often don’t add value to your copy — and can actually distract your prospects.

When your prospective buyers read your sales page and decide whether or not your product is a good fit for them, you don’t want to distract them for a single moment. You want every line of your copy to flow seamlessly into the next, without interruption.

If you sprinkle your sales page with slang and nonsense words, there’s a good chance you’re going to interrupt that flow.

Keep prospects focused on the action you want them to take

You might innocently include “OMG” in your copy in attempt to sound conversational, but prospects could be distracted by that choice and think, “Wait, why does he say ‘OMG’ in the middle of this paragraph?”

If you’re trying to reach people who aren’t native English speakers (or who come from older generations), they might also ask, “What does ‘OMG’ mean?”

At best, the “OMG” is only a temporary distraction that slows down prospects’ decision-making processes as they read. At worst, the slang and misspelled words will turn off readers so much that they abandon your sales page forever — and you’ve just lost them as customers.

Slang words and abbreviations that belong in text messages also don’t add any value to your copy. As sales copywriters, we must choose every word carefully. Every word and phrase on the page needs to pull its weight — slang and overused exclamations like “OMG” just don’t cut it.

Think I’m wrong?

Perhaps in certain circumstances you’re correct — there are exceptions to this rule, of course.

If you performed extensive research and know for certain your prospects use this type of language — and want to see it in sales copy that promotes your product or service — you might be able to get away with using it.

You should test out these words and phrases to see if including them increases your conversion rate.
If they don’t, I recommend cutting them. Even if your prospect tolerates these words and phrases, they’re probably not contributing anything to your copy.

Get more copywriting tips

If you’re looking for more tips on how to make your copy tighter, more readable, and more persuasive, check out Copyblogger’s free ebook Copywriting 101: How to Craft Compelling Copy.
The 90-page ebook is packed full of helpful advice, including more thoughts on audience research and using your prospect’s preferred language.

Do certain words irritate you when you see them in professional copywriting? Or are there any you’re guilty of using (or overusing) yourself? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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What Is an Email Conversion?

 The success of a business boils down to whether customers buy what you’re selling. In marketing terms: whether they’re converting. And since email marketing programs exist to support the business, email conversions are a critical metric for most programs.

However, in part because email programs have many secondary goals that are unique from the business’s goals, the definition of a conversion has become more than a little hazy, creating misalignments at some brands. To bring some focus to this issue, we asked five experts two simple questions:

WHAT IS A CONVERSION? IS AN EMAIL CONVERSION DIFFERENT FROM CONVERSIONS IN OTHER CHANNELS?

Everyone had a fairly similar definition of a conversion (which we’ve highlighted in their responses below). However, as they expanded on that, things got blurry quickly. Interestingly, everyone agrees that there are a couple of different kinds of conversions—but they don’t agree on what those two kinds are or what to call them. The possibilities include:

micro-conversions and macro-conversions
email conversions and website conversions
direct conversions and indirect conversions
conversions and conversions to sale

Our experts make great points about why each of these distinctions is important.

ALEX BIRKETT, GROWTH MARKETER AT CONVERSIONXL, SAYS:

A conversion can be many things—it’s simply “the completion of a desired action.” That said, there are two general types of conversions: micro-conversions (opens, CTR) and macro-conversions (end-goal conversions like sales and signups). In general, I think many marketers are optimizing for the wrong type of conversions (micro-conversions) because it’s easier and you can see bigger uplifts.

So for example, if you send a bunch of people an email promising them free beer and pizza, you’ll probably get a sky high open rate and quite a lot of clicks. But then when they hit your landing page and find out you only sell socks, be prepared for a massive bounce rate—and lots of burned trust resulting in an eroded brand reputation. That’s why landing page optimization is such a large part of email marketing—if you maintain message match and keep the conversion scent through the funnel, the results are generally better at every stage.

Don’t get me wrong, measure micro-conversions. They can provide tons of insights. But play the long game and optimize for the macro-conversions. In other words, keep your eye on the sales, not the clicks.

STEVE LINNEY, FOUNDER OF EMRKTNG, SAYS:

A conversion is simply an action taking place on your landing page—or any other area of your website—that triggers an outcome you want to track. You define what the conversion is you are looking to measure, such as a new subscriber or a purchase.

For me, conversions don’t take place within the email, but on the website. However, website conversion rate is only one part of the story and you need to make sure that all parts of your email marketing funnel are rocking:

• Targeting your audience | measurement: send number
• Subject line | measurement: open rate
• Quality of message and offering | measurement: click-through rate
• Potential customers on your website | measurement: visitor numbers
• Visitors don’t like what they see and leave | measurement: bounce rate
• Visitors do what you want them to | measurement: conversion rate

A/B testing, refining, and tweaking should be always be happening to ensure you have the best user experience and offering you can possibly give. Keep in mind that testing is never ending as there is always something you can improve to ensure you give the customer the experience they are looking for and you stay ahead of the competition.

ERIN KING, SR. EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER AT LITMUS, SAYS:

Marketers often wrestle with determining the value of conversions if they’re not tied to sales, which can lead to the thinking that if a campaign isn’t making money directly and immediately, it’s a failure. The thing about conversions, for any channel, is that they don’t always have to happen immediately, and they don’t always have to follow a straight line.

Basically, an email conversion can be defined as when a subscriber takes the path you point them toward in your message. For example, if your email promotes an event, a click through to the registration page is progress, but a completed registration is a conversion. If you’re sending a monthly newsletter with links to your blog content, the conversion can be measured by how many of the featured posts are read, or how long your subscribers spend on the blog post-click.

Some emails lend themselves to direct conversions (I promote a product, you buy it). But there’s also value in “indirect” conversions, where your email inspires some other interaction with your site or product.

For example, say I send an email promoting a report download. My subscriber opens the email—and then does nothing. But my email reminds them that there’s other content on my blog that they want to check out. Later on, they visit and read some posts, see a promotion for a weekly email they’re interested in, and decide to sign up for it. Is this conversion the one that the original email intended? No, but the email was still the catalyst that started the subscriber down the path to signing up for a new email list, so it’s an indirect conversion.

APRIL MULLEN, SR. MARKETING STRATEGIST AT SELLIGENT, SAYS:

Very simply, an email conversion is when a desired action takes place as a result of a customer receiving an email from your brand. Many marketers, though, consider an email conversion taking place when email is attributed as the source after a customer makes a purchase or some other action such as registering for a webinar or signing up for a contest. That view is fairly myopic, though. Email is so much more than the final conversion event. It has a critical hand in the revenue-driving process by moving your customers down the funnel toward the website through a series of micro-conversions.

What’s a micro-conversion, you ask? They are all the smaller, desired actions that your customers go through to reach the end goal you had in mind for the campaign. Everything from delivered, opened, clicked, etc. should be considered as conversion events or micro-conversions that all have a hand in a campaign’s success.

In fact, if we really consider where the sale/registration/contest entry takes place, which is on a website, then email’s ultimate conversion event is really a click that passes a customer on to the website. I believe email’s ultimate goal is to sell a click because email isn’t actually the place where the final conversion event takes place (that is, unless you are one of those exceptionally innovative brands that has figured out a good experience to sell right from email without driving customers to your website).

The next time you see an email campaign that has incredible click-throughs, but low conversions, don’t blame email. Unless it over-promised something that the website couldn’t deliver, the email did its job.

JOHN CALDWELL, PRESIDENT OF RED PILL EMAIL, SAYS:

Broadly speaking, conversion means any desired, measurable action taken by prospects and/or customers, irrespective of channel. That was the definition of conversion in pre-internet direct marketing. It’s the broad definition of conversion in email, as well.

A conversion doesn’t always involve money changing hands. A conversion can be filling out a form or downloading a report. This is especially true with high-consideration, high-ticket, long-sales-cycle purchases, such as the business-to-business prospecting that marketing-services providers typically engage in. However, for some organizations, conversion always means a sale. Those are called conversions to sale.

Whether or not conversions involve immediate sales, it is important to measure the value of those conversions on a rolling monthly and quarterly basis. Measure the number of sales that result from the period’s conversions and divide the number of sales by the number of conversions to get the conversion-to-sale percentage.

But remember, any of these desired actions cannot be considered conversions unless they’re a result of some action taken by the organization. You want to be able to accurately gauge your marketing efforts without artificially inflating them with serendipitous leads and sales.

THE RISK OF CONVERSION INFLATION

Our experts make great points and the distinctions they make are valuable ones. But at the same time, it’s easy to see how confusion can arise and conversion inflation can occur.

The risk is that email marketing programs become out of alignment with business goals and objectives so that you may have a “successful” email program that doesn’t contribute to the success of the business. While the conversions associated with a campaign or email can vary from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the conversions that business leaders talk about and care about exist primarily at the bottom of the funnel.

The easiest way to avoid fuzzy metrics, definition creep, and false equivalencies is to keep track of campaign goals and metrics, but then also translate those results so they match up with the business’s goals and metrics. Keeping your email-centric metrics separate and distinct from your business-centric metrics will ensure that your email marketing will be a success in the eyes of your business’s leaders.

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Affinity Content: The Key to Growing Your Community

This article is part of our series on the 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs. Make sure to get your special free bonus at the end of the article.

Due to its potential to generate large amounts of traffic, but result in low conversion rates, bare-bones Attraction content is kind of like saying, “Let’s throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”
It’s the spaghetti that sticks around that matters. (No, I’m not suggesting your readers are spaghetti. That’s where the analogy breaks down.)
But for those readers who do stick around, Affinity content is the content that keeps them sticking around. It gets them to like you. Even love you.
When you attract ideal visitors to your site, they hopefully click around and find Affinity articles that further endear them to you.
So, what is Affinity content? Here’s a definition:

Affinity content is content that attracts people who have the same values and beliefs as you. This content shares your beliefs, so people with similar beliefs feel like they belong in your community.

Read on to discover the value of Affinity content and how it works with Attraction content and Authority content.

Why you need to create Affinity content

Attraction content gets you attention, and Authority content builds your reputation.
But what distinguishes you from your competition? Why would a prospect choose you over them?
Well, it comes down to basic human psychology — what we call the know, like, and trust factor. It’s true that “liking” and “trusting” are subjective, but a lot of our decision-making is grounded in those fuzzy feelings.

In the end, we’re going to go with the person who makes us feel better. We feel better when we feel as if we share a mutual bond or similar worldview.

A company that has attracted an audience with value-added content — but is buttoned-up and remote — will have trouble competing with a person who produces the same content and who you feel a bond with because they seem to understand the way you view the world.
It’s about putting yourself in their shoes. Walking their paths — relating. That’s how you increase affinity.
But you will actually have to state what you believe in. You will need conviction. About something.

Examples of Affinity content

If you want an example of how this works, study Facebook. Facebook is largely a splintered, contentious, belief-based communication medium. It’s all about people’s beliefs and how they define themselves and find places where they belong, according to their preferences.
For your Affinity content, these shared beliefs can run the gamut. It can be anything from strictly pragmatic to plain silly.
Here are two examples of Affinity content from Copyblogger:

1. Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy. In this post, Sonia Simone advises against building audiences on social media sites you don’t own. She then recommends the opposite: Build on your own property. That’s been a Copyblogger belief since day one.
2. The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words. For many of us, it’s posts like this one that endeared Brian Clark to us. Here was a guy sharing conventional writing advice by dropping a reference to a cult movie, The Princess Bride. By the way, Brian didn’t discover those 27 misused words. He repackaged them with personality and drew in readers who shared a love for the movie.

The risk you take with Affinity content

Here’s the deal:

The price of not standing for something is that you become generic and get ignored.

You have to occasionally speak out for things you believe in.
If you go after everyone, you get no one. And think about this: who really wants to follow someone who doesn’t believe in anything?
I can’t promise you that Affinity content won’t make you some enemies. But for every enemy you make, you’ll attract even more people who will go to war with you.
And keep in mind that Affinity content isn’t always contentious. Sometimes it’s just personal.

Affinity content gets personal

One of my favorite articles on Copyblogger is Brian Clark’s The Snowboard, The Subdural Hematoma, and The Secret of Life.
This is not a tutorial like How to Use the ‘Rule of Three’ to Create Engaging Content. Instead, the snowboard article is a personal story with a moral: live the life you want to live.
It’s a moment when Brian was being completely vulnerable. When you are vulnerable, people see who you are. And they realize you have weaknesses just like them.
That you are normal and approachable.
Another stellar example of Affinity content like Brian’s snowboard article is Jon Morrow’s How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World. It’s an inspirational story that endears you to Jon.

Get comfortable in your own skin

To start creating your own Affinity content, answer worldview questions like:

• Are things ever handed to us? Is luck a part of success? Or is hard work the difference between success and failure?
• Can anyone succeed? How important is formal education?
• Do you view the world as one of abundance and opportunity? Or do you see the world as one of scarcity and competition? Or both?
• Is life a game? A war? An adventure? A cocktail party? A chess match? Meaningless?
• What truly matters in life? Is taking action pointless? Should we have it all? Or is that selfish?
• What virtues mean the most to you? Independence? Intelligence? Compassion? Duty?
• Are you practical or romantic? Are you a lover of literature? A lover of pop culture? Perhaps both? Do you love ideas? Do you love people?
• How do you view death? Is it something to be feared or embraced? Why?

Answering those questions will take some time. But you may find that hitting publish once you have written an affinity-style article is even more difficult.
We worry what people will think about us after we publish. When our truth is out there.
Here’s what you need to know: share as little or as much as you feel comfortable with.
If you look at Brian’s body of work, you’ll notice he doesn’t get personal very often. However, he’s very open about who he is, what he thinks, and what he likes.
In other words, he’s comfortable in his own skin.

Be who you are in pixels as you are in person. Open up, laugh, and don’t take yourself too seriously.

Quick case study: The Year of Falling Apart

I’ll close with a brief story.
Long ago, when I was frequently publishing on my personal website, I became tired of writing about web content. Basically, I needed to blow off some steam because I had exhausted myself after producing a long run of articles about writing. Sharing a good personal story was exactly what I needed.
The problem was, it didn’t fit within the category “web writing.” I was certain to lose readers. It was way beyond the blog’s focus — but I published the personal story anyway and it ended up becoming one of the most popular articles on the site: The Year of Falling Apart.
By giving myself permission to publish Affinity content, I also gave birth to a passel of ideas on web writing. It was a win-win.

Get your free ebook: 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs

Build a content strategy based on the four content types in this series! Get your free ebook, 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs.


Click to get the free ebook

Over to you …

So, content marketer, are you ready to get comfortable in your own skin? Are you ready to share your beliefs? To let people know who you are? Are you ready to create some really good Affinity content?
Let us know in the comments.
Also let us know your favorite piece of Affinity content. It could be here on Copyblogger or on another site. It could even be something you wrote.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

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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.


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4 Ways to Marry Your Email Marketing and Website Optimization Strategies

Do you hear that? It’s getting louder. It’s the sound of millions of emails, targeted ads, and personalized web experiences fighting for relevance. Despite the noise, B2B and B2C brands succeed at delivering relevant information to their target audiences. According to Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return-on-investment is $40.56. But there’s a difference between threading the needle and really creating something.

In many cases, data is being used to deliver personalized email campaigns with fantastic results. The Aberdeen Group says that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. With results like these, the motivation to test, segment, and personalize email campaigns will no doubt increase. However, the success of these incremental improvements to email marketing depends largely on the next steps customers take after engaging with your email. Whether you’re sending them to a specific landing page or inviting them to take advantage of a personalized offer on-site, the work doesn’t end in your customer’s inbox.

By looking at how you use data to improve email marketing from the broader perspective of your web or mobile experience, you can multiply the impact of your targeting. And it’s worth it. According to Steelhouse, using correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300%.

Break Down the Barriers

Closing the data loop and breaking down the organizational divisions between email marketing and website optimization is increasingly common. Marketers are adopting this strategy, particularly as facts about open-rates on mobile come to light and digital teams unite forces. But any brand making a significant investment in email marketing will soon be throwing good money after bad without an optimized, personalized mobile experience. Eisenberg Holdings says that companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them. Instead, make your money count twice by investing in a strategy that combines data from email marketing with on-site behavior for a comprehensive approach to optimization.

According to EConsultancy, 64% of companies would like to improve their personalization, 64%, their marketing automation, and 62%, their segmentation. The key is to unify these three key areas for a strategy that will keep your communications relevant and your audience engaged. Here, I’m going to share four ways your website’s optimization strategy can enhance your email marketing efforts, and vice versa! Let’s get started…

1. Use Website Data to Validate Email Segmentation

Segmenting your audience for email marketing is not an uncommon practice. However, the segmentation of your website traffic is often treated as a mutually exclusive effort.

Try This: Use your website data to validate predefined segments for email marketing campaigns with a URL parameter. By doing so, you can find out whether your segments behave how you expected them to with metrics that look at their behavior from first click to exit.

2. Use Email Marketing Attributes to Create a Better On-Site Experience

The data from email and websites can interact in either direction. One leading travel brand worked with Maxymiser, a website and app optimization solution, on an email campaign designed to bring users to the site by converting email prospects with a featured destination that best reflected their preferences (either collected or expressed.) Using Maxymiser’s optimization solution, the brand selected 36 destinations to offer and used each one as a specific variant of the test.

Try This: Segment visitors who came from email and determine which predictive attributes will make their visit the best possible experience. In the above instance, the brand took the attributes generated by an email campaign and used them to test and target on their site—and you can too.

3. Map Email Engagement and CRM

With the right tools, you can map the unique identifier to a CRM file and target specific individualized content to that visitor.

Try This: The data-driven marketer (you!) could place an individualized identifier in the URL of an email campaign. You can also match up an individual from the aforementioned unique URL to segments or visitor groups defined in the CRM file.

4. Test and Target from Email to Landing Page (Mobile or Desktop)

Using your optimization solution, you can test custom content on your predefined email segments by redirecting them from email to a specific landing page.

Try This: Optimize both your emails and landing pages in a single test and combine your analytics for a clear perspective on your user’s behavior. This might be a particularly interesting test to run on a mobile landing page.

In Q1 2014, more email was opened on iPhones (38%) than all desktops combined (34%). You can be sure that these percentages have only increased in the last 12 months. With that being said, if you’re hoping to convert a visitor with email, you have to optimize your mobile landing pages. A website optimization solution like Maxymiser can run the aforementioned desktop landing page test on mobile as well. A unified optimization and email marketing team could easily work together to generate a rich tapestry of insights by segmenting email audiences and testing the optimal experience on desktop or mobile, depending on where the user comes from.

So, don’t just think about the connection between email marketing and optimization; plan for success by aligning your strategy with a multi-channel approach like the one I have described above. On the road to becoming a holistic digital marketing organization, the marriage between email marketing and website optimization is one of the most valuable steps.

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