It may not be the “chicken or the egg” conundrum (I have documented proof it’s the chicken!) but in the wide world of web marketing, the question of “What comes first, the budget or the strategy?” is about as brain twisting as it gets.
I think most businesses tend to operate on the idea that you build the strategy and then decide if it fits your budget. Unfortunately, that idea lasts about as long as a new sitcom airing on NBC. But nobody wants to be the guy who holds out his hand with a wad of cash and says, “How much for that?”
In truth, the budget/strategy determination is very similar to a circular reference in a spreadsheet. That’s when the price of Item Z is determined by adding Items X and Y, where the cost of Item Y is determined, in part by the price of Item Z.
Confused?
Now you realize why this has so many marketers and businesses pondering how best to proceed with their web marketing campaigns. If you start with the budget, you run the risk of not having the right strategy. Yet if you start with the strategy, the cost may not fit your budget. So, where to begin?
Well, let’s start by looking at each of the two options, and then a more ideal situation.
When the Web Marketing Strategy Comes Before the Budget
As I noted above, I think this is where most companies begin. And it makes sense. Many businesses looking into web marketing for the first time probably have no idea how much it costs, so the first order of business is to get some sort of baseline on the costs.
However, that in itself is dangerous because the cost is almost entirely dependent on the strategy that the quoting company puts together. You can get “SEO” from as little as a few hundred dollars on up to several thousand dollars per month.
Imagine someone visiting us today from the 1800’s. They are really interested in trading in their horse and buggy for one of those newfangled automobiles. Not knowing much of anything, if they gallop from car lot to car lot, they’ll find prices are all over the place. Used cars, new cars, luxury cars, race cars, utility vehicles, commercial trucks, etc., etc. Heck, even the same car can have two different stickers on it depending on the year or their features.
So what’s our time traveler to do? He has to compare the differences between the vehicles. That’s easy for us because we have some built-in knowledge of how much certain vehicles are worth. We understand that a used Porsche will often cost more than a brand new Camry. In fact, we expect that due to knowledge we already have.
But our time traveler doesn’t come equipped with that knowledge, so he needs to be educated on what makes a Porsche different from a Camry. He needs to understand the nuances of why different vehicles have different prices even when they have similar features, or are simply sold from a different location.
As the business leader looking to invest in web marketing, you’re just like our time traveler. Or at least someone like you, who’s interested in web marketing for their business. Comparing on price alone gives you absolutely no indication of the value of what you’re getting. You need more information—a lot more—in order to be able to begin to assess the value of one proposal to another.
The budget for investing in web marketing must, then be determined by the strategy.
When Web Marketing Budget Comes Before the Strategy
Ultimately, even with companies that seek to consider the strategy first, the final decision comes down to the cost of services. After all, there is only so much room in the budget to invest in marketing. We all have budgets to stick to and powers above holding us to them.
But, as I said above, nobody wants to tip their hand, spilling the beans about how much they have to spend before they know what they will get for it. The fear is that as soon as you tell the web marketing company your budget, the “cost” will end up being eerily similar. You worry that what would have cost $1,000 now costs $1,500 because that’s what fit the budget.
If you have ever bought a car, this is often the approach of the salesperson. They want you to tell them how much you can afford each month, and then they’ll magically produce a payment model to fit. They get you focused on the monthly payments rather than the price of the car. So long as it meets your monthly budget, they’ll try to sell you anything. Who cares if you end up paying for the car for 15 years!
The problem is, without a budget, the SEO company has no idea of how aggressive it can or should be in its efforts. The web marketer might want to spend 15 hours per month investing in a social media campaign, but for the more budget restrictive, five is a decent place to start. Or they may want to focus on keyword optimization of your content while fixing critical site issues, but they may be able to make decent progress doing one over the other if you can’t afford both. If you have hundreds of pages that are in need of optimization, trying to optimize them all within the first 12 months might be way outside of reason. But tackling them at a rate of four per week, or one per week or even a couple per month will make a drastic change in your monthly web marketing costs.
You see where this is going. A specific web marketing plan can be completed in one year, three years, five years or longer, all just depending on how much you can afford to pay.
The strategy for the web marketing campaign must, then be determined by the budget.
Letting Goals Determine the Web Marketing Strategy and the Budget
Comparing strategies and budgets from one SEO provider to another can get tricky. One strategy might focus more heavily on organic SEO while another might tilt toward social media marketing. The costs between the two might be roughly the same but will have very different outcomes.
On top of that, two strategies might include both fixing site architecture issues and social media marketing but each to vastly different degrees. One SEO will value one over the other, yet their proposals will look remarkably similar with “fixing site issues” and “social media marketing” as included services. What you might not see is a list of issues that need to be fixed (unknown until the time is spent to uncover them) and how many hours of social media marketing is needed (depending on how involved you are).
This creates a problem in that even if you want to scale up from what was originally proposed, the proposal might look exactly the same except for the price tag. What changed? Mostly just the total amount of time the SEO team will be involved.
So what’s the solution? Making sure both your strategy and budget are determined by your goals.
Ultimately, goals come first. What do you want to achieve? If you’re looking for branding, social media strategy might be the place to start. If you want to improve conversion rates, you might want to focus on conversion optimization. If you’re finding that your site lacks in search engine traffic, dig into some keyword research and optimization.
If you don’t know what your goals are, your SEO is left just trying to throw anything and everything at you and hope it fits your budget. There is nothing wrong with going with the Rolls Royce of web marketing plans where everything is included, but that likely won’t fit your budget.
Instead, set your goals and determine which goals are a priority over the others. Let your web marketing team put together that Rolls Royce plan but then use your goal priorities to scale it back to 1) what is most important, and 2) within a budget you can afford.
Sometimes it’s good to get a little of everything, but only if you are in no hurry to achieve your goals. Either way, based on your budget, some goals will have to wait or be slower in coming. If you have to scale back budget-wise, focus on one or two goals at a time and turn up the aggressive meter until you’ve got both a strategy and a budget that fits your needs.
What’s more important, is having a strategy designed to fit your goals and expectations. If you don’t know your goals, any strategy is just a shot in the dark. Instead, start with your goals and adjust them to fit so you have a strategy you can afford.
Do you agree? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Stoney deGeyter In-post Photo #1: IgorSaveliev/Pixabay.com In-post Photo #2: HeatherPaque/Pixabay.com In-post Photo #3: DS-Foto/Pixabay.com
If you’re in the world of SEO, copywriting, or inbound marketing, it’s likely that you’ve already heard about Google’s release of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in November 2015.
Designed to help Google’s own site evaluators master their jobs and wade through Google’s complex ranking system, these search guidelines are 160 pages of pure SEO goodness. But what do they say, exactly?
One of the most important takeaways from the guidelines as a whole is the need for expert writers to add a true level of authority to the content. Someone who, as Google says, has real-life experience in what they’re writing or talking about. Hence, a big need for expert writers and authors to produce content in an industry they already know.
Let’s discuss this and what you need to know.
The 101 on Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
Despite all of their genius, ingenuity, and innovation, Google is a notoriously opaque organization and it has always been difficult at best (and impossible at worst) to understand their ranking algorithm.
While Google released a compressed version of the guidelines back in 2013, people wanted to know more. Recently, The SEM Post got ahold of a leaked copy and provided their own analysis on it. Google responded by releasing the guidelines in full in November of 2015, in this blog post, and the full 160-page PDF of Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in its massive entirety.
While the guidelines don’t simply tell marketers how to win at Google, they do provide a huge amount of information about what exactly Google evaluators are looking for, what makes a high-quality page, and how content should be written. It’s the last part we are especially interested in.
The Need for Expert Writers, According to Google’s Search Guidelines
It’s no secret that Google has always loved original, useful, and well-written in-depth content. Many of Google’s recent algorithm updates have been designed to reward high-quality pages that feature clear, concise, professional writing and to down-rank pages that feature duplicate, scraped, or careless content.
What is interesting about Google’s new guidelines, however, is that they place a huge emphasis on the need for expert writers, especially on pages that Google views as being very important. While it’s clear that Google has always valued quality content, it seems as if they’re now placing an increased focus on things like authority, as well.
E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness Page Standard
E-A-T is Google’s acronym for what exactly makes up a high-quality page. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, authority, trustworthiness” and it sums up exactly what Google is looking for in high-quality pages.
According to Section 4.3 of Part 1 of the guidelines, “High-quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic.”
At first glance, that may seem a bit vague, but Google goes on to clarify. The guidelines state that, in order for a page to possess those qualities, it needs to feature “expert” content written by “expert” writers:
Complex medical advice should only be given by people or organizations that possess appropriate accreditation. It should, likewise, be written in a professional style and will need to be reviewed, updated, and edited regularly in order to ensure that it remains current and authoritative.
Complex financial advice, tax advice, or legal advice should be written by expert writers and will need to be updated regularly.
Important advice pages that may affect a person’s finances or well-being (this includes investment pages, home remodeling pages, and parenting pages) needs to be written by an “expert” source.
Hobby pages on topics like hockey, horseback riding, or photography, require expert writers.
Pages that don’t feature this level of expertise or pages that cover a dense topic but offer little information will be marked as low-quality by Google’s evaluators. This is also true for pages with low-quality main content or content that is simply distracting or unhelpful.
What Makes an Expert?
Now that you know which pages require an expert writer, you may be wondering exactly what an “expert” is. Google makes it clear that that depends greatly on the topic at hand. Product or restaurant reviews, for example, can be considered “Expert” even if the person writing it isn’t a mystery diner or secret shopper. As long as the reviews are detailed and helpful, Google considers them expert content.
The same is true for forum-type discussions. In this case, Google provides the example of a cancer support community forum at Cancer Compass, where average people provide information about how long their loved ones lived with cancer. While these people are not doctors and are thus not qualified to write “expert” medical content, their firsthand experience (what Google calls “everyday expertise”) with cancer makes them qualified to write such content.
The takeaway? Pages require different levels of expertise. While advice on liver cancer itself needs to be written by an M.D., advice on coping with it in a family situation can absolutely be written by a layperson with firsthand experience.
Y-M-Y-L (Your Money or Your Life) Page Standard
There are some pages that Google places under special scrutiny. These pages are called, “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages. Examples of these pages include:
E-commerce pages that provide a platform for purchases, money transfers, bill pay, etc.
Pages that offer information about investing in stocks and bonds, planning for retirement, purchasing a home, financing college, buying insurance, or filing taxes.
Pages that offer specific information or advice about health conditions, drugs, mental health, and nutrition.
Pages that offer legal information on topics like child support and custody, divorce, becoming a legal citizen, and writing a will.
YMYL pages are subject to special Google scrutiny because low-quality pages can easily negatively impact a Google user’s health, happiness, or finances. For this reason, it is especially important that these pages feature a high level of E-A-T and are written by qualified expert writers. That said, if you’re working on any topic that could have a major impact on users (car safety and repair, for example) it’s worthwhile to hire an expert writer.
Conclusion
While we’ve always known that Google loves high-quality content, it’s obvious that now more than ever, Google values content that is written by authoritative and trustworthy experts.
As we move into the new year, we can expect to see content that possesses these traits be rewarded while low-quality, low-expertise content is down-ranked. While expert writing has always been important, Google’s recently released guidelines make it clear that hiring expert writers is now necessary for a website to earn quality rankings. Webmasters are going to have to invest in a real author who knows their industry—an industry copywriting expert—instead of just the more general SEO copywriter.
Image Credits
Featured Image: ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock.com In-post Photo #1: Alexey Boldin/Shutterstock.com In-post Photos #2 and #3: Image by Express Writers. Used with permission. Screenshot by Julia McCoy. Taken December 2015.
If we were all honest with ourselves: content marketing is done to get conversions.
Content creators tend to spend hours of time and energy making sure their content is compelling, creative and, importantly, read and shared so leads and interested parties can possibly convert.
Given the regular changes of Google’s fine-tuned search engine algorithm, how fickle target audiences can be, and the changing popularity of mobile devices, content marketing can feel like a race to keep up. And let me tell you this: it’s a race that’s not going away soon.
So how are you planning on maximizing your efforts in 2016 and beyond? We’ve put together 10 things to help you keep pace with the content evolution.
10 Content Marketing Tips to Stay Ahead of the Game
1. Take Generation “C” Into Account (The Millennials)
“C” stands for connected. (Cisco defined this well, too.) This is the generation of 18 – 34-year-olds who have become responsible for over $500 billion in internet spending a year. And, in a couple years, they’re going to make up the vast majority of the workforce.
Key ways to identify them:
They’re always connected
They don’t engage with traditional attempts by businesses to reach them
They trust and rely on friends’ recommendations
They won’t be pushed
They are looking for reasons to read and share
I wrote more about marketing to millennials here.
2. Keep Your Brand Genuine
Both the current and future generation of your target market wants the truth. They want to find out who you are and who they’re doing business with. They want to know who is behind the brand.
3. It’s Time to Get a Cause
Today’s customers aren’t worried about how much something costs – to them, the value of being part of a cause is just as important. Talk about your cause. Be a storyteller.
4. People Need to “Get” Your Content
We know that simplifying your writing is the way to go. But readability means people will “get” your content, no matter what device they use. Content strategy design absolutely has to cater to mobile devices these days. Make sure everything you serve up on the web is mobile optimized.
5. Keep Them Participating
Aim to hold competitions as often as you can. Encourage viewers to “vote” on your new logo or answer surveys to make them feel that their opinion is valued. Start a Twitter chat. Participate in Twitter chats as your brand.
6. Honor Customers
Here’s an idea for this point. Why not have a “customer of the month” feature? You want your tribes to keep connecting for the next story.
7. Visuals are More Effective Than Text
Visitors prefer to “see” what you’re saying as opposed to reading it. Every time you come up with new ideas for content, consider how it can be visually presented– be it infographic, podcast, video, or otherwise. Present that alongside the text (which Google will appreciate and rank). Never omit copy, but add striking visuals to your copy. Check out this gifographic we made (an infographic with moving parts).
8. Plan How You’ll Generate Content Ideas
Keep a file of content ideas at all times. Come up with questions your audience may ask, listen to what they have to say.
9. CTAs Should Garner Email Addresses
Aim to maintain a growing email base. Give your readers loads of opportunities to give you their details. Don’t forget to get creative with those emails – especially the titles so that readers open them – and include share buttons.
10. Neuroscience and Sales Psychology
Did you know 85% of purchasing happens to be emotional while just 15% is logical? Really go into the research that neuroscience gives us regarding which parts of the brain are stimulated by what aspects. Use it in your content marketing strategies.
Putting Your Best Foot Forward with Content Marketing in 2016 (It’s About to Get Ugly)
Thanksgiving has come and gone. New Year’s Day will be over before we know it. But what about B2B marketers? Many a marketer has spent the last few years just chugging along with a marketing program. They have a strategy and have been blogging consistently several times a week. They’ve had pretty good success growing their email list and they’ve even had a good amount of leads converting to sales.
Management is starting to ask when the content marathon is going to pay off. When are they really going to see those leads flowing in?
My answer to that would be: What are you going to do to increase the quality and effort of your content marketing in 2016?
5 Trends Earmarked for 2016: How to be Smart About Content Marketing This New Year
While there is probably more to come that can be added to the list below, let’s take a look at some of the digital marketing trends earmarked for 2016 and how you can save time implementing them in your content marketing strategy.
1. Budgets are Going to Grow, Just Not as Fast as in 2015
Content marketing budgets were expected to grow by 55% in 2015. That’s one of the biggest increases year on year for marketing in a long while.
But there is a downside. With more content than ever being created, the global content marketing audience is becoming fatigued.
These days:
Everybody has a blog
Everyone has a video you can watch
Everybody has case studies or white papers that can be downloaded
Everyone wants you on their email marketing list
The problem is when everyone is doing the same thing, it gets a lot harder to cut through the noise and chaos.
So since it is harder than ever to get through to users, you need to start investing more time, energy, and funds into creating high quality and high volumes of content. And when it comes to that, we often find the results just don’t seem to be where you want them to be, do they?
To that end, B2B content marketers went ahead and invested a lot in content creation this year without seeing the results. That means in 2016 they’re going to see push backs from CFOs and leadership since they’ve not met expectations.
We’re well aware it’s a marathon and not a sprint, but even a marathon has to come to an end and all that content needs to start paying off somehow, doesn’t it?
2. Long-Form Content Will be in Demand
According to several pros, long-form content is seriously gaining traction. Why? Because it thoroughly answers questions.
At the moment there may not be a lot of writers out there who are generating posts with word counts in the thousands, there are sure to be more cropping up in 2016. As it stands, this year we’ve noticed:
The majority of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did in 2014
Content over 1,500 words is being shared more often
The average length of content for a web page that is ranking within the top 10 results for any keyword on Google tends to have a minimum of 2,000 words.
We’ve heard so much about sticking to the 300 – 500-word mark for blogging. But today’s reality is that those short posts just aren’t ranking. Not at all. So while you, of course, should be blogging for your readers, you need them to find you. One of those surefire ways is long-form content.
Case Study: Long-Form Content Works Today
In mid-December (2015), I wrote a monster blog that addressed the key principles marketers need to know in relation to the massive 160-page Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines document. I tried, but there was no way to keep it under 3,500 words. Well, in less than 4 days it had over 100 shares, and I heard from someone who said it was more “readable” than Neil Patel’s post on the same topic. Just an example to show why I’ve found that long-form content is absolutely not going anywhere. Instead, I think its popularity is increasing. Just be sure you address a question that deserves an in-depth answer.
Back to our overall content marketing trends. If budgets are going to remain more or less the same for content marketing in 2016, but you need to write longer-form copy, how can you save time on your endeavors?
Here’s what you’re going to have to do in the new year to shave off hours while improving the impact you have on the content as well as your lead generation programs.
3. Try Blogging Less, With Better Quality
You heard right. Blog less. I don’t mean fewer words, but rather less frequency. Yes, I know this completely goes against everything you’ve been taught, but let’s just think about it:
If Google’s first 10 search results all seem to have more than 2,000 words, there’s very little chance that blogging around 700 words 3 times a week is going to get you very far, is it?
If you’ve spent the last couple of years blogging and have kind of generated a good wealth of short-form, readable content, it’s time to change up your strategy and start developing content that can help cut through the clutter and start getting your site ranked. And that means coming up with content no less than 1,500 words.
I know what you’re wondering: how do you go about creating quality content of that length?
Think of it this way: if you’re blogging 500 words, 3 times a week, you’re already writing 1,500 words!
Rather than trying to come up with three short posts, leverage your buyer personas and tie all those posts together to blog 1,500 words, once a week.
For example, let’s imagine you want to write a post about when a business should start content marketing programs for their tech companies. The post could be broken up into 3 parts:
The common challenges that B2B technology companies face when wanting to start content marketing programs
Why these companies wait to start content marketing
The statistics that support when a tech company should start a content marketing program
Instead of coming up with 3 shorter posts, all 3 points can be tied together with a central theme. So in the same amount of time it would take to write three 500-word blogs, you can generate a 1,500-word post that will actually rank for long-tail keywords.
4. Short-Form, Spammy SEO Content – It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Consultants
Okay, this one sounds a little harsh, but very few SEO consultants are really qualified to write longer forms of content about anything, let along your pride and joy of a business. How can you save time here?
We all know that SEO has become a major part of content marketing. If you are creating content targeted towards certain audiences, you need to be working within the realm of SEO, or you risk wasting your time. Think mobile, social sharing, long-tail keywords. You don’t need a pricey consultant.
Spend a day working your way around Google and you’ll get to know everything you need to for optimizing your content for the search engine. Read a book, take a short course, add basic SEO to your skill set.
5. Content Should be Creative
Ever wanted to do something more dynamic? Ever envisioned animated infographics and other cool themes? Go with it! Rather than using the same old boring, clip-art filled infographics, create some seriously rich, creative media experiences for your audience.
There are quite a few tools beyond WordPress you can use, including:
Infogr.am lets you create and publish awesome visualizations of all your data. They offer some great pre-built templates that you can embed with your blog.
Tableau Public is free software for anyone who wants to regale engaging stories with public data on the Internet. It’s a fantastic tool for visualization, particularly maps.
Visme is a great tool that will let you create rich media infographics, presentations, reports, and even product demos
Let’s Wrap This Up
2016 is sure to be a busy, and interesting, year for content marketing.
With those budgets hovering around the same as the 2015 mark, and content fatigue setting in, you’re going to need to do a lot more to be more effective with the same resources.
To achieve this, you’ll need to be smarter about how you divide your time and the type of content you create. And you’re going to need content that will go the distance. Use these content marketing tips and do just this. Don’t skimp; involve more resources, time, effort, and investment to stand out in the sea and be a true content marketing leader. It will result in direct ROI: your efforts will be rewarded.
Image Credits
Featured Image: chondantrk/Shutterstock.com In-post Photo: Raywoo/Shutterstock.com
Search engine marketing, much like love, is a battlefield. You must have a plan in place before you begin, or success won’t even be an option.
People are often overwhelmed with the bidding strategies provided by their PPC platforms. The options can seem endless. There are cost-per-acquisition strategies, cost-per-click strategies, bidding position strategies, and more. How are you supposed to choose the overarching strategy that is right for your campaigns?
Well, that depends on your goals.
This article is a guide to help you improve the performance of your SEM accounts. The ideas within it can be applied to Bing Ads or similar PPC platforms, but Google’s options are more robust, so it will be my focus. My goal is to lay out the benefits of the most popular PPC bidding strategies, and who should employ them.
Conversion Strategies
How much is one conversion worth to you?
These strategies get down to brass tacks. Every change in your account centers on driving conversions within specific limits. The idea is to flexibly automate the exact bids that your campaigns place in the auctions, based on how likely a keyword is to lead to a conversion.
There are two basic conversion strategies: CPA targeting and enhanced cost-per-click targeting. Your goals should determine which one you use.
Cost-Per-Acquisition Strategy
A cost-per-acquisition (CPA) strategy allows you to maximize the conversions that you receive for a specific price. Setting a $10.00 CPA will tell your PPC platform to reduce your bids once it reaches the cost ceiling. The end goal is to drive conversions at or beneath the set price. You will find conversion optimization options in most bidding optimization tools like Marin or Kenshoo.
When to Use It:
Use a CPA strategy when you have specific goals that you want your website visitors to achieve. Setting up conversion points in your website is straightforward, but doing so can take time and a lot of research. You want your conversions to be as direct and easy to achieve as possible. Adding items to shopping carts or newsletter form submissions are good candidates for a CPA optimization strategy. The best ones are always yes or no binary actions – the visitor hit the button, or they did not.
Enhanced Cost-Per-Click Strategy
Enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC) strategies are useful if you want to optimize your clicks while retaining a bit more control over your bids. This type of strategy lets you modify your bids only on queries that are most likely to lead to conversions. First, your PPC platform analyzes the thousands of ad auctions it participates in normally. Then, it raises your max CPC threshold to capture clicks that the data shows to be more valuable.
How do PPC platforms know where to raise bids? They analyze the behavior of visitors you have received previously from ad auctions and calculate the probability of a conversion occurring. The decision is made after incorporating as much data as possible, which can include device type, time of day, location, and more.
When to Use It:
You should implement an eCPC strategy when you aren’t comfortable surrendering all of your control to a PPC tool. This approach is much less hands-off than the CPA-style bidding strategy, but it still offers a lot of automation. Your campaign will do everything it can to increase conversions, but it will take other restrictions like max bids when doing so.
Like in a CPA strategy, you should consider implementing an eCPC strategy when you have clear conversion events. This style performs better when your campaign is nuanced. Maybe your pricing varies significantly in a different location, or perhaps mobile phone users don’t convert as well. ECPC bidding is very open-ended, so it is easily applied to many situations.
Revenue/Conversion Strategies
PPC bidding strategies often drive bottom line revenue. Luckily, modern platforms have become precise enough to measure and predict the revenue and profit your campaigns are driving.
ROAS Strategy
ROAS helps you measure the effectiveness of your ad spend
Return on ad spend (ROAS) bidding strategies are designed to deliver a specific amount of revenue over your advertising costs. You set a multiple of your costs that you would like to see returned to you in revenue. PPC bidding platforms follow the traditional ROAS formula:
ROAS = (Revenue)/(Cost)
Most PPC management platforms will work to return a set ROAS for the amount spent on your campaigns. Individual conversion values can vary, but your tool will average out the costs to meet the ROAS you set. It is important to monitor your campaigns using ROAS strategies to make sure you aren’t stifling areas where you can afford to spend more. Marketers often discover that conversions with low ROAS dragging down conversions with high ROAS when they are bundled in the same campaign. It’s a good idea to group together campaigns or ad groups with similar ROAS goals.
When to Use It:
Imagine that you want to spend five dollars for every conversion generated by your website. You calculate that you can expect to receive twenty-five dollars for every completed conversion. If you generate five sales, then your ROAS formula will look like:
($125)/(25) = 500% ROAS
This type of bidding strategy is great for businesses with products or services that are worth varying amounts. If you sell car parts, for example, implementing an ROAS strategy will average the revenue you generate across all of your products. Group together products that should generate similar amounts of ROAS and let your PPC tool do the work.
Visibility Strategies
Search engine advertising can be adapted to nearly any overarching strategy. It’s not always about conversion goals. Sometimes increasing visibility in strategic areas is more important.
Search Page Location Strategy
Occasionally, good advertising is all about location, location, location.
Sometimes you don’t need to be delicate with the amount you spend per conversion. Strategies that target locations in the search results will spend whatever it takes to maintain a position in the search auction.
This type of strategy allows you to set and forget your search bids. Your management platform will change bids throughout the day until your budget limit is reached. While this strategy can be very convenient, it can easily drive up your costs while gutting the profitability of your campaigns. Search auctions are always in flux; the costs-per-click change dramatically based things like device, time of day, and auction participants.
You should implement a target search page location strategy when you are comfortable spending money that might not return direct revenue. Otherwise, you will have to keep a very close eye on your campaigns, and may as well change your strategy to something less stressful.
When to Use It:
Search page location strategies are great when you have money to spend. The problem is the shrinking or sometimes non-existent profitability that you might see. That is why this strategy is useful when your primary goal is visibility and recognition. You will save yourself a headache by holding these types of campaigns to a different standard than the rest of your account.
Focus on metrics like impression share and assisted conversions instead of direct conversions and ROI. The goal is to get your name out there and influence conversions down the road, so take a step back and think longer term.
Outranking Share Strategies
Outranking share strategies keeps you in the race, where your ad copy can shine.
Sometimes the goal is to outperform an opponent. An outranking share strategy is used when you want to outrank a competitor and capture more clicks on average. Implement it to make sure that your ads show more frequently than those of a competitor in search results.
Outranking share strategies generally involve three components:
The competitor’s domain: It is important to remember that this strategy focuses on outperforming a single, specific competitor. Most PPC platforms will not let you enter a batch of domains you want to beat in the auctions. Position yourself against the domain that makes the most sense financially and from a branding standpoint.
Target outranking share: The percentage of auctions that you aim to dominate. Mastering this part requires you to take a hard look at why you are pursuing this strategy and the target domain. Can you afford to outrank them in the vast majority of auctions? If you can afford to, should you? Run your numbers to see what share of auctions you are comfortable pursuing.
Max bid limits: Much like the position bidding strategies, outranking a specific domain can become incredibly expensive quickly. Many advertisers make the mistake of underestimating a competitor’s advertising budget and reach, and wind up biting off more than they can chew. Platforms like AdWords will set your max bid limits for you if you would rather not work through the math, but be sure to keep an eye on your costs over time.
When to Use It:
Outranking share strategies can be incredibly effective when rolled into a larger competitor strategy. Positioning is the name of the game here. Aside from the advantage of a higher position in the ad auction, the huge value in this strategy is the ability to associate your brand with that of your competitors. Your potential visitors see your ad above your competitors (which increases trust) whenever a search is made. This is an opportunity to strategically advertise the differences between your brands. Many small brands competing with big players use this strategy with great results.
How can you convince a searcher that what you offer is a better choice than what your competitor offers? The key is to write stellar ad copy. Outranking an opponent isn’t worth a lot if their ads are better than yours. Remember, though, that conversions aren’t the only metric to use when measuring the success of this strategy. Branding plays are nebulous by nature, so it can be difficult when measuring your success.
Click-Based Strategies
Maximize Clicks Strategy
Perhaps the most direct of them all, this strategy will maximize the volume of clicks available for your budget. You won’t be able to set any CPA or ROAS targets, though. You will have to keep an eye on your campaigns to make sure they are profitable. While maximizing clicks is less sophisticated than the other strategies discussed above, there is still potential for a marketer who has deep knowledge of their account.
Most PPC platforms will require two pieces of information from you:
Budget: How much are you willing to spend on the campaign? Remember that you pay for every ad click, so you are essentially telling your tool to charge you are much as possible.
Max CPC: How much are you willing to pay-per-click? Your max CPC will determine the amount of clicks that you will receive.
When to Use It
A click strategy is simple to execute, which makes it extremely versatile. It would be easier to write about situations when it would not work for you. For example, accounts with thin margins would not be good candidates. You risk quickly overspending in areas where you are not profitable, especially if you are bidding on head terms or other expensive keywords. Make sure you keep your CPCs in check. Volume is the name of the game, so marketers pushing eyeballs to websites who make money on ad impressions have used this strategy with success.
Question: Which bidding strategy do you use most often? Did I miss one?
In this modern age of technology, you can’t let yourself get left behind if the people around you are improving and developing. Nowadays, everyone wants to keep going. They don’t have time to wait. Their busy schedule is their top priority. If your visitors’ expectations are not met, they will look somewhere else.
The same experience can also happen on any site. Imagine your marketing team giving their best effort to increase traffic to your website. If your site doesn’t meet the standard expectations for load speed, how would you feel about that?
You might feel that all the time and effort your marketing team has invested was useless. Don’t let it happen. There are other important sections on a website you need to look into.
Here are a few crucial reasons why site speed matters:
It gives your visitors a better user experience.
It helps your visitors go from one page to another across your website with convenience.
Google looks at site speed as part of their ranking factors.
It reduces your visitors waiting time for the page content to load.
You want to decrease abandon rate.
Here are some suggestions on how to make these needs a reality for your website.
Convert Your Images to JPG Format
Images are a crucial part of the web. They give life to any document found online. But did you know they often cause page speed performance issues? Here are two examples:
A user is browsing from a poor internet reception area and looking to buy accessories online. Most image-driven pages might not load the full content due to the internet connection issues. This might cause unsatisfactory experience on the user’s end.
Imagine you are unaware of image format not being compatible on all browsers. It does not matter whether your website loads faster. If your images are not compatible to load on your users browsers, you are kicking your visitors away.
You can see a table of image format pros and cons on Social Compare.
If you own an online retail site, images are your best asset to attract buyers. If your images are not optimized for users’ benefit, you should consider optimizing your images.
Remember, a non-optimized image from a camera can be at least 2MB megapixels. If you uploaded a default size image from your camera, they should size higher than optimized images.
HTTP Request Reduction
Web page documents consist of pieces of information collected from the server. Images, flash, slides, scripts, and more— downloaded to your browser. If your webpage has a lot of HTTP requests from your server, this would take much longer than ideal load time of 1.5 seconds.
In that case, your visitors may leave before your page completes its download request. To resolve this issue, you can:
Combine your scripts into one script
Combine your CSS into one single stylesheet
Combine inline images into your cached stylesheet to reduce HTTP requests
Additional Resource
John Stevens points out the value of reducing plugins and social buttons on your website on his article.
Reduce Chain Redirects
URL redirection takes time. The more redirects you have on a single URL, the longer they take to load. URL redirection triggers extra HTTP requests, which can lead to delays.
There are some tools you can use to detect if your website has 301 redirect, such as Screaming Frog (which is free). This is not the best feature of the tool, but you can rely on it when detecting server response status code.
Pro Tip:
Never link to old URLs.
Make sure that your URL is final and easy to remember by search users.
Common Reasons for Chain Redirection
You are working on websites with a huge list of crawl errors.
You are working on large websites.
You are working on an old website with existing redirection.
Additional Resource
Dan Shure created a step by step tutorial on how you can track and fix your website chain redirects.
Avoid Empty HTTP Tags
Most are not aware of this, but it seems to occur more often that you’d expect. To reduce invalid HTTP request, you need to track down if you have placed any empty HTTP tags.
If you place empty HTTP tags, possible conflicts might happen in specific browsers:
Chrome and Safari: These browsers make the request to the actual page itself. Since there is no indicated path in HTTP tag, chrome will request it to the page itself.
Firefox: This browser no longer sends a request to an empty HTTP tag code in a page. This is a good sign but few are using this browser.
Remove Duplicate Script and CSS
Another cause of potential page speed performance issue is duplicate scripts. By having duplicated codes on a page, it might send unnecessary HTTP requests from the server. There are two-page speed delays that duplicate script might cause which are:
Unnecessary HTTP request
Unnecessary Script execution
This redundant behavior of the HTTP request affects a user experience. Hubspot says a typical HTML page should load in 1.5 seconds. Anything beyond that can be subjective for speed optimization.
Pro Tip
Remove unnecessary requests that trigger the delay.
Final Thoughts
There are other important sections we should consider in digital marketing. Page speed optimization is just one of them. These five, quick page speed optimization tips are a good place to start. Master all methods of page speed optimization and apply best practices, and you’ll likely be ahead of your competitors.
Image Credits
Featured Image: SINITAR/Shutterstock.com Screenshot by Joseph Gojo Cruz. Taken December 2015.
I’ve met a good chunk of my colleagues in the marketing world while speaking at or attending conferences. I’ve found most conference speakers are not only highly educated about their subject matter, they also are usually highly motivated at make for some great friends.
This year, I had the opportunity to speak at four conferences (which is still peanuts to many), which allowed me to fully grasp the power conference speaking can give you, no matter your expertise or industry.
Here are some of the ways conferences can help you grow your company branding and exposure.
Exposure and Networking
This is the most obvious benefit to speaking at conferences: the ability to network with others in your industry and even potential clients. Most events offer a plethora of networking events or downtime to socialize with others you meet in sessions. Being a speaker at a conference not only gives you access to these events, it also allows you more exposure than a regular attendee, as your badge will say SPEAKER on it. This usually leads to more people seeking you out for advice or using your badge as a conversation starter, which can lead to business opportunities.
Additionally, many of the larger conferences have speakers’ lounges, which lead to even more time to spend with other highly qualified professionals in your industry. It’s usually a quieter atmosphere, and the shared experience of speaking at the conference makes for an easy icebreaker.
Get Feedback
One of my colleagues told me at Pubcon Las Vegas this year that he loves speaking because of the feedback he receives, both during his session and in feedback surveys. While the idea of constantly receiving feedback, often live and from your audience, can sound intimidating, it gives you a unique view into what your target audience is looking to learn more about.
For instance, if your presentation is about local SEO and you keep receiving questions about Yelp, it might be worth considering offering Yelp consultation to your agency’s offerings. Or, you could write an e-book on Yelp “SEO” that could help small business owners follow the review site’s best practices to increase visibility.
Audience questions can also bring up holes in your presentation, especially if it’s one you are going to give at more than one conference. If you are repeatedly asked about the same slide or portion of your session, it likely means it wasn’t clear and needs to be revised.
This is extremely helpful because we are often too close to our own work and assume listeners know what we are talking about, so we gloss over it. Because most conferences cater to all levels, it’s likely worth it to explain key terms or examples to the audience briefly in a slide, since the room usually has a few beginners. Getting this type of feedback about what content to include (or even cut) can help improve it over time.
Thought Leaders Equal a More Reputable Company
Many people I’ve met while they were speaking at conferences lead with their own name and expertise, instead of their company. This means that even though they may work for a well-known player in the industry, they’ve done an excellent job at branding themselves as an expert. While this is obviously extremely beneficial to the speaker (as it provides both job security AND exposure), it is also beneficial for their employer.
At conference trade shows, I’ve overheard many conversations where a company’s name is recognizable simply because the attendee had heard of someone who worked there. In order industry, people like Jim Boykin, Scott Monty, or Kris Jones have made a name for themselves and their organizations have been brought alongside them in the process.
That being said, it’s important for organizations to recognize the power that conference speaking can have for both their own credibility and their employees. It not only offers employees a chance to represent their company at networking events, it also allows them to become better speakers and topic experts. Growing thought leaders within your organization will help grow your influence and cement your hold within your industry.
What benefits have you seen from speaking at conferences?
Creating great content isn’t enough. Although getting lots of traffic and social shares is nice, it’s not the goal of content marketing.
Pop quiz: What is the real purpose of any marketing?
To make sales.
Now, you can’t typically do that straight from blog posts, at least not for most products. However, what you can do is collect your readers’ contact information—even if it’s just an email.
Ten years ago, you could get a decent sign-up rate just by having a box in your sidebar that said “Subscribe to the blog.” But now, brands are producing a lot of content, and 70% of marketers plan to create more content this year than last. I don’t see this trend slowing down anytime soon.
People are overwhelmed by the amount of content coming at them. And everyone creating that content wants their email addresses. That old opt-in form in the sidebar won’t collect much of anything other than dust these days.
As marketers, though, we evolve with the times, and our tactics evolve, too.
We began to offer free products such as e-books, courses, checklists, and videos for anyone who signed up to our lists. These are called lead magnets because, well,they attract leads.
And it worked.
You’re essentially trading value in the form of premium content for your reader’s email address. But now, almost everyone offers a free bonus.
If your lead magnet isn’t something special, one of two things can happen. Either you won’t get many sign-ups, or you will get sign-ups, but those readers will be unimpressed with the bonus and unsubscribe right away.
The most successful marketers today create lead magnets that are a step above.
Yes, it takes some time and effort, but raising your opt-in rate just 2% or 3% can produce tens of thousands of dollars in the upcoming year.
It also takes some skill and knowledge to create a good lead magnet, which is what I’m going to teach you in this post.
By the end of it, you will know how to:
Find an idea for a lead magnet that your readers want
Create a lead magnet that they love and use
Specific tactics to skyrocket your opt-in rate
Step #1: Research Always Comes First
One of the hardest parts of being a good marketer is understanding your audience. Even when you think you understand them, you might realize you have different views on what is and isn’t valuable.
So, if you’ve created lead magnets (of any kind), but they’re only converting at 1% or less, you’re probably off the mark.
And I know that’s tough to hear, but I think it’s actually good news. It’s really easy to fix, and you can double or triple your opt-in rates just by fixing this one issue.
The point of this research is to discover what your audience finds most valuable. And there’s an easy way to see what that stuff is: look at what they buy.
A great lead magnet should be of such quality that people would actually pay for it. But since you’ll be giving it away, you’ll obviously get great conversion rates.
There are tons of places to look if you want to see what your readers value, but there are three in particular that work for almost any niche.
Kindle Marketplace
Amazon started out as a book seller and only later became the giant it is today. But it still sells books—a lot of them.
I would look primarily at the Kindle books, just because e-books are more like a typical lead magnet than physical books are. The people who like to buy things online (hopefully from you, eventually) are usually the same people who would feel comfortable buying a book online.
Start by heading to the Kindle marketplace.
On the left-hand sidebar, you’ll see a list of categories. When you click one, the new page will have a new list of categories. Keep clicking through until you get to your specific niche.
For the sake of an example, let’s say I run a yoga website. I clicked through three different levels to find the yoga section:
Obviously, you get a list of books as your results. In the top right, sort the results by the average customer review:
Now, you’ll have the top-rated results in your category:
Just from the top few results, you can already come up with two great ideas for lead magnets that people are willing to pay for:
A guide to Yin Yoga (free e-book)
A guide to Yoga Poses (could be an e-book, video series, or even an email course)
Reading the actual reviews will tell you what readers valued the most. Make sure you include those aspects in your lead magnet.
What Do Your Competitors Sell?
Your competitors have a large portion of your target audience.
Assuming they are more established than you, they probably have products of their own. If you go to their site, you’ll probably find a link to a shop or landing page in the top menu bar or in the sidebar:
There are a few things we can learn from their products that could help you come up with a great lead magnet that your audience will value.
The first option is to look at the “intro level” products. These cost under $20, which isn’t making anyone very much money. But since people buy them, you know they value them, which is all the evidence you need.
Now, you’ll create a similar product but offer it as a free lead magnet.
For example, on the example authority site pictured above, there’s a product in the shop that consists of a 20-minute guided yoga meditation session:
People pay $7.99 for it.
When it comes to products at this level, there are three types of people:
Very willing to pay: They’re pretty sure that they’ll like the product and think the money is well worth it.
Not sure: They think they might like it, but they’re not sure.
Will never pay: Some people either don’t have the money to spend on such products or always try to find a free alternative.
When you create a free version of a product they are looking for, you will attract the people in groups two and three. Obviously, the ones in group two are most valuable because they might actually buy from you in the future.
Here is what happens. When they discover this product on your competitor’s site, they might search for a “free 20 minute guided yoga meditation session.” They are looking for a free version to give it a try, and then they might purchase the other paid product based on that.
If you really impress them with your free lead magnet, they might feel like they don’t need the paid product. They figure if your free content is that good, your paid products are probably even better. If they’re going to buy something, it’ll be from you in most cases.
Course Ideas
Most lead magnets are problem-based. They solve a small, specific problem that your audience has. Essentially, they’re mini-courses on a topic.
At the same time, online education is exploding in popularity.
Universities are putting up full high-quality courses, and private educators are creating their own courses. Some are big, and some are small.
The best place to look for these is Udemy. Anyone can post a course there, which has led to a huge variety of courses.
Start by finding courses about your niche. You can search for a keyword in the search bar, browse the course catalog, or pick categories on the left hand side.
In our example case, I searched for classes on “yoga.”
Always start by sorting the results by popularity. You want to see courses that people are actually interested in.
From the top results, you can already see three great ideas for a lead magnet:
A 30-day yoga email course challenge
A 14-day yoga detox email course
A video or email course on yoga for busy professionals
People actually pay for these courses and obviously value them. If you offer a free version, your target audience will be interested as well.
Step #2: Ask Your Readers
One amazing source of lead magnet ideas are the people who are already on your email list. They already like your content and obviously feel that you have something valuable to offer them.
When you send them your next post, ask them if there’s any way you could improve it for them.
Don’t publish the post publicly yet, wait for any feedback. If you have a large list, you only need to send this to a few hundred subscribers at first. Send them a template like this:
Hey (name),
I just wanted to share with you the latest (your brand) blog post, called:
(Post title and link)
(2 paragraph description of post)
Could you do me a quick favor?
After you read the post, I’d like you to tell me if there’s any way that I could make the post better. Is there anything you’re especially curious about?
Thanks,
(Your name)
Your best readers will reply with some great ideas for a lead magnet. You can create one quickly and then offer it within the post once you publish it publicly.
Step #3: Don’t be Afraid to Listen
Another great source of high value lead magnet ideas is your comments section—specifically from readers who haven’t yet signed up for your email list. They clearly read your content—and like it enough to comment—and probably even have your blog bookmarked.
So, what will it take to get their email addresses?
Readers will often tell you the things they are most curious about in the comments section. For example:
This comment was on a post about how to generate over $300,000 on Instagram, a blog post on my company’s blog, QuickSprout.
Yume and Kyle were both interested in how someone mentioned in the article created lists that helped her connect Instagram promoters with great products. This could easily be turned into a lead magnet. I could record a video or text interview with Jessica, asking her to spill her secrets, and then offer it as a bonus on the post.
Step #4: One Way to Skyrocket Your Opt-In Rate
In order to get someone to subscribe to your email list, you need to offer them something they want in exchange. And in order to generate interest in a lead magnet, your reader needs to be interested in the topic you’re writing about in your blog post.
So, what would happen if you focused on writing about topics on your blog that your audience was most interested in?
It would attract more shares, traffic, and eyeballs to your lead magnet. This will, of course, lead to more email subscribers.
How do you find out what they’re most interested in?
Simple. Go to Google Analytics (or whatever analytics software you’re using), and look at the data based on pages.
To do this, navigate to “Behavior > Site Content > All pages” using the left menu. The more posts you’ve written, the better.
Then, decide which category each of your top posts belongs to. I’d look at your top 10-30 posts, depending on the number of posts you have all together. You’ll notice that one or two categories get way more views on average than all the rest.
If you simply focus more attention on those categories, not only will you grow your email list but you’ll also grow your overall site traffic.
How to see what content your audience loves when you don’t have an audience: That simple strategy above assumes that you’ve already developed a healthy level of blog traffic.
Obviously, that isn’t the case for many people.
You have two options at this point. You could just write about a whole bunch of different topics in your niche and see which ones do well, which is totally okay. Or you could do a bit of research and find out which topics are the most popular for sure.
There are two ways to do this type of research.
First, you can try Reddit. Find a subreddit related to your niche. For example, if I was starting a new marketing blog from scratch and with no prior knowledge of what’s popular, I would go to the marketing subreddit.
Then, click the “top” button along the top menu to see the top posts of all time. All subreddits have thousands of posts submitted to them (some have millions), so you get a really good idea of what that particular audience likes.
Go through the top 100 results or so and categorize them like we did before.
You’ll see that certain categories pop up way more than others. Note there will be irrelevant submissions as well since Reddit submissions include much more than just blog posts.
The second option is to look at close competitors.
If they are more established and have the audience you want, you can look at their posts and see which topics are the hottest. The biggest limitation here is that you don’t have their traffic stats.
However, you can write down the title of each post along with the number of comments or social shares it has:
It’s not a perfect substitute for traffic numbers, but it’s a good approximation.
Step #5: What You Need for High Opt-In Rates
The biggest thing I’ve tried to emphasize is that you need high quality lead magnets.
Your new subscriber should be shocked you aren’t charging for it. After you give it away a few hundred times, you should get at least one or two emails telling you exactly that.
I can’t go over how to create every single type of lead magnet, but I can show you how to create the most common ones so they stand out from everyone else’s. They’ll look great, and your subscribers will actually use them, which will lead to them staying subscribed to your list for a long time.
How to Make a High Quality PDF Version of a Guide
If you post really lengthy guides and tutorials, it’s tough for readers to get through the whole thing at once.
If they don’t have a lot of free time, it’s hard for them to ever get through it.
Many bloggers offer a copy of the post in a PDF format in exchange for the reader’s email. It’s something I’ve seen Brian Dean do fairly often:
This is a solid option for a lead magnet for a few reasons.
First, anyone who subscribes because of it is probably going to use it. They’ll download it and read it at work, on their commute, or somewhere they have a bit of free time.
Secondly, it’s really easy for you to make. If you’re not creating lead magnets because you simply don’t have the time to make them, you can create a PDF version of a post in just a few minutes.
Something I strongly suggest doing is creating a custom cover for the post. It makes it look like a professional e-book, which readers will value more.
You can make one yourself, or you can buy one from Fiverr. Just search for “e-book cover,” and pick a gig with a high rating:
Note that most take at least a few days to get back to you with the cover, so plan as far ahead as possible.
Aside from that, you can convert your post into a PDF by just highlighting and copying all the content in the article:
And then pasting it inside a blank Word document:
There might be a few formatting errors, so go through the article, and fix any weird spacing. If you use Google Docs in particular, it does something neat.
The heading tags from WordPress are automatically recognized as headings in the document. This allows you to quickly create a table of contents for your PDF, which makes it even more useful. Just go to Insert > Table of contents:
You’ll get a very simple table of contents with links to each section:
Depending on the number of heading tags you use, this can be very useful. If you do have a cover made, just paste it on the first page before all the content.
Then, when everything looks good, go to “File > Download as,” and choose PDF:
Alternatively, use this simple tool: If you’re really pressed for time, you can use a tool called Print Friendly.
Paste your URL in the tool, and click the “print preview” button:
The tool will quickly generate a minimalistic version of your post, optimized for printing. If anything shows up weird, you can hover over it and delete it (“click to delete”).
If it looks good, click the “PDF” button at the top of the page, which will start downloading the file:
How to Make a High Quality Checklist
The second type of common lead magnet is a checklist.
Checklists are a great way of breaking down a process into concrete steps that your audience can follow with ease. They are best used when you’re outlining a particular strategy or technique to your readers.
But what do you think of when you hear the word “checklist”? Probably something like this.
Don’t get me wrong, it could still be useful, but it’s so plain.
But what if there was a way to make a checklist sexy? To really blow away your new subscribers? That’d be pretty cool.
It’s something that Bryan Harris at Video Fruit has done really well in the past. Take a look at this checklist:
That is not a typical checklist. It has a professional cover plus a custom layout that looks amazing.
People might actually print this out and use it—unlike what they do with most checklists, which might be used once and then thrown into the recycling.
And although that looks super fancy, there’s no reason you can’t create something similar.
Again, you can get a similar cover made by a designer on Fiverr. Or you can create the actual checklist yourself. You could use software like Illustrator, but you can make it easily in a standard Google Doc.
First, start with your headline. Make it big and bold, and pick a font you like:
Then, write a brief description in a normal size.
After, go to Insert > Horizontal Line to separate the header from the content.
Now, how do you get the number, step name, and check box to look so nice and lined up? It’s pretty simple.
Again, go to Insert on the menu, but this time, insert a 1×3 table. Then, drag the vertical lines separating the cells to match the layout you want.
To re-create Brian’s checklist, make the left cell a square. Then, highlight that square cell and change the text to white, and the background to black. You’ll also have to increase the size of the font:
The middle cell is simple enough: It’s the name of the step on the checklist. Just type it in.
And then we come to the checkbox. There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is probably to put your cursor in the third cell, and go to Insert > Drawing, which will bring up a new screen.
Pick a rectangle from the shapes drop down menu, and then draw a square by holding a shift key while you click and drag a box out:
Click “Save,” and close when you’re done. The box will show up in the third cell. If you click your new square, you can drag it to resize it.
So, now you have something that looks like this:
Doesn’t quite look the same, does it?
Now you need to highlight all three cells of the table, right–click, and select “Table properties”:
In this pop-up, change the border to “0 pt”, which means there is no border:
If any of your cell’s text isn’t centered, highlight that specific cell, right-click it again, and choose “Table Properties”. Then, change the vertical alignment to “center”. If you’ve done that, you have a good-looking table, and you’ve done the hardest part.
Now, just go to the lines below and type in a description, including any bullet points.
You can align the description with your step title by highlighting the words and then dragging that little blue marker on the top ruler over to the start of your title.
Feel free to copy and paste that whole section to save time on the rest of the steps.
Finally, if you’d like to give the page a background, go to File > Page Setup, and choose a color for Page Color:
You can enter a custom color if you’d like. In the end, we have a great looking checklist:
Pair that with a great cover, and you have a product people are thrilled to give you their email addresses for.
Step #6: Understand the Two Biggest Factors Behind Opt-In Rates
At this point, you understand most of the best practices when it comes to thinking of lead magnet ideas and creating them. But those are just tools you can use.
If you really want to achieve great opt-in rates (like bloggers who get 10-20% rates), you’ll need to truly understand why people opt in to your list. And it all comes down to two important factors:
Relevance
If I’m reading a post about social media marketing and someone offers me a lead magnet on yoga poses, I’m probably not going to be interested in it.
That’s an extreme example. Let’s look at a more realistic one.
Maybe you’re reading a post about SEO, and there’s an e-book offer for a social media traffic generation strategy. You are interested in getting more traffic, but at this point, you’re likely most interested in getting it from SEO. So, some readers of that post will opt in for the lead magnet, but not a very high number.
But what if you were offered an e-book (or other lead magnet) about SEO while you were reading that post about SEO? Of course, you’d be interested!
This is called a post-specific lead magnet, which is also being called a content upgrade lately. By making lead magnets for each post (or each topic) you write about, you dial-up the relevance of the offer.
Bryan Harris has reported getting opt-in rates of 20-30%, and sometimes of up to 62%, using content upgrades. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s the post title, which is ironically about the ways to use lead magnets.
A bit further down, just after the intro, there’s a bright blue box that offers a free download in exchange for the reader’s email address:
The bonus contains 35 examples of lead magnets—the exact thing the reader is interested in learning about.
Value
Just because you’re reading a post about SEO, and the bonus is about SEO, doesn’t mean you’ll get a ton of opt-ins.
Why? Because your offer might not be valuable.
If it’s a list of “SEO basics,” not very many readers will care enough to give you their email addresses for it. On the other hand, if you reveal a secret link source or tactic, readers will place a ton of value on it, and you’ll get an extremely high opt-in rate. The more valuable your reader thinks your bonus is (before they even see it), the higher your opt-in rate will be.
If you follow the first five steps in this post, your lead magnet will be highly valuable to your reader.
Conclusion
Lead magnets are a very powerful tool to collect information about your readers.
You can then use that information (mainly the email address) to build a relationship that will eventually turn some of readers into customers. But if you approach lead magnet creation half-heartedly, you won’t get high opt-in rates.
If you follow the six steps outlined in this post, you should be able to get an overall opt-in rate of 3%-5% (minimum). If you get really good at it, you might be able to raise that conversion rate to over 10%.
Let me know which types of lead magnets you’ve tried and which ones have worked best for you by leaving a comment below.
This post originally appeared on Quick Sprout, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Africa Studio/Shutterstock.com All screenshots by Neil Patel. Taken November 2015.
It’s one of the biggest drawbacks of content marketing. How are you supposed to find time to create high quality content?
On top of all the other things you need to do, now you need to find the time to create epic posts.
These types of posts often take several hours to create. If you’re a small business owner, you have a ton of other things on your plate demanding your attention: customer service, product creation and improvement, social media, and other forms of marketing.
And if you’re a marketer of any kind, you’re being asked to create more and more content. Seventy percent of B2B marketers reported they are creating more content this year (compared to last year).
I’ll tell you something for sure: Most of those 70% of marketers don’t even produce epic content. And yet, they’re spending even more time on it. Why? Because it’s still working for them.
Over time, their results will diminish, and they will decide to either give up or up their content game.
I hope you’re ahead of the curve and are already creating next level content. But that leaves you with the time and resources issues. It’s hard to continually devote 20+ hours a week to creating content. But there are a few ways to lessen the extent of this problem.
First, you can write more efficiently.
But you can also be more selective about which types of content you create. Some types of content take a few hours to put together, while others can take hundreds of hours.
One of the most effective types of content (when you look at results vs time to create) is curated content. The basic idea is to take some (or all) of content created by someone else and feature it along other related content. (Of course, you always provide credit.)
Even something as simple as a link to a guide in a post for more information could be considered curated content. You’re finding content you know your readers will be interested in and then connecting them to it.
Almost all content marketers curate content in one way or another. In fact, one report found that 82% of marketers curate content. Overall, the best marketers create around 65% of their own content and curate an additional 25%.
One of the most common ways to use curated content is for social media marketing. You typically need to share content other than your own to be successful, so finding the best content for your readers (that you didn’t make) is a key part of the process.
Curated content on social media represents about 47% of all clicks. And curated content can be used in almost any niche, which is part of the reason why it’s so powerful.
However, not all businesses are successful at curating content.
If you do it the wrong way, your readers won’t pay much attention to what you offer, and you won’t get the results you’re after. Luckily, I can show you how to do content curation right.
By the end of this post, you’ll know which types of curated content you should create as well as how to create them in order to maximize your results when it comes to traffic, shares, and subscribers.
Four Reasons You Should Publish More Curated Content
I’ve touched on a few positive aspects of curated content, but I want you to understand all the ways it can help you. Incorporating curation into your content strategy benefits you in four main ways.
It’s Faster and Cheaper to Create
Curated content is much faster to create than original content. A great example of this is Brian Dean’s link building guide for SEO.
In the guide, he divides link building into different chapters. Each chapter is literally a list of links:
In total, he links to at least a few dozen really great resources on link building.
How much time do you think it took him to put this together? My guess would be under 10 hours.
Now imagine if Brian tried to write each of those sections by himself. The content marketing section alone would take him a minimum of 10 hours to create. And all the other sections would take a similar amount of time.
All in all, we’re looking at 50 hours for a guide like this as a minimum, or about 500% more time than he probably actually spent. I think that example really shows how much time curation can save you.
On top of that, there’s one other cool way in which content curation saves you time.
If you are active on social media, and most businesses are, you need to share content that others have created.
Well, guess what? Since you’ve researched all the best content to include in your curated content, you can just share these resources on social media and save yourself a ton of time.
Sometimes, the Results are Just as Good (Or Better)
Logically, it makes sense to assume there’s a trade-off.
With your own content, you get more traffic, engagement, etc. than you do with curated content, right? It’s true, you probably won’t achieve the same results with curated content as you will with your own, but you don’t lose that much either.
Case in point: Let’s look at that link building guide again. As of writing of this post, it has over 740 Tweets and 440 Facebook likes:
In order to make a valid statement, we have to compare those results to Brian’s typical results.
I picked one of his most recent posts (it’s had more than a few days to collect shares), which currently has 594 Tweets and 223 likes.
Despite having increased his readership since posting that original guide, he actually got fewer shares with his 100% original content.
Obviously, the topics are different, so they can’t be compared perfectly. However, I think this shows that curated content can still achieve some impressive results when done right.
That’s why 50% of surveyed marketers said that curated content helped improve their brand visibility, SEO, traffic, and buyer engagement. The same report also revealed that 41% of marketers found that curated content increased either the number or quality of their sales leads.
Expand Out of Your Area of Expertise
Even after more than five years, I still write on the same types of topics—mainly about social media, content marketing, and SEO. But I know some of my readers are interested in other topics as well, topics that I might not have as much expertise in.
I could, of course, take extra time to research and experiment in those areas, but it can take months to become an expert. Or I could simply curate the best content on those topics.
For example, I could create a guide to buying an online business with curated content. It is something I don’t have much experience with, so I couldn’t comfortably write about it right now, but I could curate it for my readers.
You can Use it to Open Relationships
One huge potential benefit of curating content is that it provides value to influencers—if you do it right.
A good piece of curated content will actually drive traffic to the sources you link to. In addition, if you only include the best of the best, it increases the brand recognition and authority of the people or businesses you include.
Look at these comments on a pretty mediocre roundup:
There were more comments like these ones. People appreciate being featured, which gives you an “in” to develop a relationship with them. If JC (the author) contacted any of these website owners, they’d know exactly who he is.
And, if you create curated posts like I’m about to show you, this even works with the top influencers in your niche.
Step 1: 7 Types of Curated Content You can Publish
There’s one thing you need to know about curated content: No type fits all.
What I mean by that is curated content can be used in almost any niche, but certain types work better for some than others. Your first real challenge is understanding the different types so you can pick the best ones for you.
The best way I can teach you about each type is to show you an example of each, so let’s get started.
Ultimate Guides on a Topic
There is more written content published online than any other type of content.
We’ve actually already looked at an example of an “ultimate guide”, the guide to link building by Brian Dean. What’s the best use for it?
When you try to create a complete guide to anything, it’s usually going to be about one of your main topics. There’s no sense in creating a massive resource on a topic that only a small fraction of your target audience is interested in. These types of guides are designed to wow readers and attract traffic, links, and social shares.
You should consider creating a curated ultimate guide when creating a complete guide from scratch isn’t practical. Part of that is deciding the scope of your content (more on that later).
Since Brian wanted to cover such a huge topic (everything there is to know about link building), it would have taken him months to create all original content. The curated guide that he published probably took him less than a few weeks.
Who can use it?
Massive guides like Brian’s are best used in niches where audiences are willing to learn. They are great in almost any hobby niche (e.g., sports, music, video games, etc.) as well as any niche related to learning about a specific profession (e.g., marketing, SEO, job hunting, management, etc.).
Roundups
You’re probably familiar with at least one type of roundup, but there are a few different types of curated roundups we can look at.
First is the content roundup. An example of one is “The Moz Top 10″ email newsletter that goes out semi-monthly. In these emails, the primary feature is the best 10 pieces of content for SEO.
Regular email roundups like these are best used in niches that move quickly. There are always changes happening in the SEO niche, which is why this works for Moz. Basically, this type of roundup will work in any niche that has at least one thriving niche news site.
The second type of roundup is the expert roundup.
With this kind of roundup, you collect original answers from influencers and present them within one awesome post. Typically, you’ll ask them all the same one or two questions, record all the answers, and then additionally add some insightful analysis of the results.
This type of roundup isn’t purely curationbecause you can also mix in your own (or a contributor’s) original content.
Let’s look at an example of this type of roundup.
Richard Marriott created a highly popular roundup by asking experts what their 3 favorite SEO tools were.
On top of collecting and posting the answers from 55 experts, he also provided a brief but useful introduction and analysis. This brings up the most important takeaway: Don’t be afraid to mix original and curated content.
Often, you can add extra value to the curated content by presenting it within certain context.
This type of roundup is best used in niches with tons of influencers, where the same questions are asked over and over. Usually, the questions are being asked repeatedly because they have subjective answers. This is where answers from experts (more is better) are given the most attention.
The Best Webinars
I wanted to quickly add webinar curation to this section. It’s a list of the best webinars/video tutorials in your niche. Webinars are getting extremely popular (I used to use them at KISSmetrics a lot). However, they are also pretty long. A curated list of the best webinar replays on a topic would get a lot of attention.
Case Studies
In some niches, case studies are the most interesting type of content to readers.
Personally, I’ve seen how much readers appreciate seeing the results of case studies in the conversion rate optimization niche. But running a complete test can take weeks, and then you’ll have to write the post as well. In the end, readers are only interested in the idea behind the test, how you did it, and what the results were.
In a situation like this, what if you could put several case studies together?
Showcase all the important information in a few hundred words for each case study. If people love one case study, they’ll love having more in one place.
Here’s an example: A post with 100 conversion optimization case studies on KISSmetrics’ blog.
As you can see, it’s been shared over 2,000 times, with plenty of comments and links to the page.
It would take years to run 100 good tests on your own. But by curating case studies others have published (and only including the best ones), you create a really interesting and valuableresource. Your audience can’t help but love it, and you could put it together in less than a week.
Where else can curated case studies be used?
Chances are you already know whether people appreciate case studies in your niche.
I’m actually a little surprised no one has created a post like the one above for SEO case studies. People love to read about how website owners improved their traffic by X% over 6-12 months.
Here’s an example in the home design niche, where the author put together a list of 101 home remodeling projects (equivalent to case studies).
Reading List or Education List
Some niches are built around learning. As you’ve seen, there are already a few types of curated content that work great in these niches. In these niches, there are always people trying to teach (and often sell) to anyone who will listen. This results in a ton of content that no one has the time to read.
Of course, this is a perfect opportunity for curation. You can create something of tremendous value by simply going through the content and picking the best of it. You’re saving your audience from reading the crap while also showing them the content they will love.
One example of this is Tim Ferriss’ book club:
Out of thousands of books Tim has read, he’s picked six so far he says made a meaningful difference in his life.
That kind of selective curation means a lot coming from someone with his reputation. Every entrepreneur will want to read these books.
Your own curation doesn’t have to be quite that strict.
Here’s another good example: James Clear’s book list. He’s included more than 100 great books, sorted by category:
Now we’re getting into some advanced curation; not only picking out the best resources but organizing them in a way that is most useful to the reader. Finally, this type of curation can extend to online courses.
For example, online computer science classes are offered free by hundreds of sites. Some are obviously better than others. This post puts together the 16 best ones in the author’s opinion.
What makes this post valuable to readers is that it’s clear the author spent time testing and reviewing each course.
Customer Stories
Influencers aren’t the only ones who can create content. So can customers and readers.
Although you can only really do this if you have a large or raving fan base, one option is to curate the best customer reviews:
It’s easier than ever for bigger brands to do this now since many customers post pictures of themselves using the product on social media without even being asked. If you monitor your hashtags, you’ll be able to find them and save the best.
Top Sites or Experts
Finally, if you’re looking to build relationships with influencers in your niche, you can also create a “top” list of all the best sites or experts in it.
This is not as effective as it used to be because it is the most used form of content curation. It can still be useful, but the main reason you should be doing it is to reach out to the people you include and open a dialogue.
Step 2: Understand the Finer Details of Curation That Make the Difference
Many website owners post curated content on a daily basis. The vast majority of it doesn’t get much attention.
I don’t want yours to be part of that. In order to make sure that doesn’t happen, you need to understand the true value of content curation: quality.
If people just wanted to learn about a subject they like, they could head to an aggregator such as Alltop:
Just about anyone can submit content there, and it is categorized.
People are getting overwhelmed by the amount of content out there. Although they don’t want to miss out on the truly useful content, it’s hard to wade through 20-30 pieces of content to find one or two good ones.
That’s where you come in. You care about your audience and are willing to do the hard work for them.
Don’t get lazy: To curate content properly, you need to do two essential things.
First, you need to find all the content that fits your topic. When you say you’ve assembled the best content out there, you need to be sure that you didn’t miss anything. As soon as you miss one great resource, readers will doubt you were as thorough as you claimed.
Second, you need to review all the content. And I’m not talking about skimming the content. Do you think a movie critic just skips through a movie to review it?
Never. You shouldn’t either.
It might seem like hard work, and it is. This is the main source of value of your curated content. If you don’t review every piece of content you’re considering thoroughly, your final result won’t be as valuable to your reader.
Those are two simple but absolutely crucial steps if you want to see results.
Step 3: How to Find Perfect Topics for Content Curation
The beauty of curated content is that you can really use it for any good content idea that you had in the first place. However, you’ll still want to quickly run through this 3-step process for picking good ideas.
First, pick a type of curated content: The reason I spent so much time on the different types of curated content is because you need know which ones are valued the most by your readers.
If you’re in a niche like marketing, you have a lot of options:
Ultimate guides
Roundups
Webinars
Case studies
Reading lists
Top experts
You can use any type effectively.
However, if you’re in a niche like camping, there likely aren’t webinars or case studies. In that niche, readers value informative guides and video tutorials, so you’d want to stick to those types of content.
Second, define your scope: The scope of a piece of content refers to how large of a topic you’re going to tackle. The term is mainly used in descriptions of academic papers and studies.
But it’s really important to pick a scope that matches your content type.
When you create your own content, you need to focus on a narrow scope and cover it in great depth. But when you’re curating content, you need to capitalize on the fact that you don’t need to create the content. This allows you to not only go deep on a topic but also wide.
Think back to Backlinko’s link building guide. Here are the first three chapter titles:
Link Building Fundamentals
How to Get Top Notch Links Using Content Marketing
How to Execute Effective Email Outreach Campaigns
Each of those sounds like a huge post that I might write. That’s why Brian links to at least 3-4 amazing resources in each chapter.
When you’re curating content, choose a large scope.
Brian didn’t just curate a guide to getting links with content marketing—he created an ultimate guide to link building.
Finally, find a unique angle: If you’re curating content on a topic, that means a lot of content has been produced on that topic. But that also means you need to find a way to add significant value to it if you want to stand out.
There are a few ways to do this:
Go bigger: In some cases, more is better (e.g., case studies)
Increase your scope: Cover a large topic everyone else is too scared to do (e.g., ultimate guide to link building)
Go after a unique aspect: If many people have curated a topic, you can stand out by modifying it for a more specific audience (e.g., instead of “top X marketing blogs”, do “top X marketing blogs for SAAS startups”)
Step 4: 5 Tools to Track Down Amazing Content & Work More Efficiently
Once you’ve picked the type of content you’re going to create and the topic, you need to do the actual curating.
First, find absolutely everything there is to know about the topic you selected. Then, read/watch it, and save the best pieces. There’s no wrong way to do this, but I recommend using a combination of tools to save time on discovery.
Feedly
This is the leading RSS reader. It lets you add feeds from the top sites in your niche and then shows you recently published articles so you can quickly see what interests you.
Add all the major blogs in your niche, and you’ll never miss a post.
Reddit
Reddit is one of the largest community websites in the world. It is broken down into subreddits, which are essentially different categories. You can find a category for just about any niche, no matter which one you’re in.
After you find a relevant sub-reddit, you can visit it every once in a while to see current trending posts. These posts are semi-curated by the community since they vote on them. In addition, you can also click on “top” along the top menu of any sub-reddit to see the most liked posts of all time:
Evernote
Evernote is an extremely popular app that will help you stay organized, and it’s free. It’s essentially your own personal notebook that syncs across all your devices.
When you come across an article that you think is amazing, you can add it to your notebook and add tags and comments to it.
When it’s time to create content, just search for a few related phrases to bring up past content you’ve saved.
Trello
If you have a specific topic in mind already, your main challenge will be organizing all the content. One option is to manage it with Trello, which can save you a lot of time.
Trello allows you to create boards and then add lists to them. On each board, you can add “cards”, which is where you’d put the great content you find.
Put the headline as the title for each card, and click the card after you make it. Then, add the link to the content plus a comment if have one:
Pocket
If you’re not a fan of Evernote, you might want to give Pocket a try. It’s designed similarly, letting you save interesting content you find on the web to your “pocket“.
Get in the habit of saving the best pieces of content you come across because you never know when you’ll need it for a curated post.
You can use Pocket on any of your devices and can save a link to a piece of content with just a few clicks. You can also tag posts so that they are easy to find in the future.
Step 5: Don’t Just Slap it Together
Doing all the research for your content will take a ton of time. It will be tempting to just publish your results in the easiest way possible; After all, the value is still there. But if you do, you’re throwing away a huge chunk of your potential results.
There are two types of people in your audience that will read these types of posts.
First, your target audience. These are your typical readers that you created the post for. When they come across a curated post, they have one main question:
Should I trust that these resources are actually the best?
If the reader doesn’t believe that your list of the “best books on X” is a good list, they’re not going to give it a second thought.
How do you gain that trust? Two ways:
Be so well-known that all readers know you as an expert (e.g., Tim Ferriss, James Clear)
Present your content so professionally that readers assume you must know what you’re doing
Design matters: Brian Dean is well-known in the SEO industry. He could have put up simple links in his curated guide, but he didn’t because he understands the value of design.
If you want readers to think that your content is a big deal, it needs to look like a big deal.
Secondly, if you’re covering a wide scope (like you should be), you’re going to be curating several (or hundreds) of other pieces of content. Organization is key.
Most readers will only be interested in specific parts, so make sure it’s easy for them to find those parts. Create a custom table of contents or filters that readers can use.
The other part of your readers: Other than your regular readers, you also have all those people whom you featured in your content.
When you curate content, it means you think that content is the best of the best, which is flattering to those content creators. Most will check out your content when you send them a message about it.
When they do, they’re going to look at just a few key things:
Does it look professional?
How am I featured?
Who else is included?
If it doesn’t look professional, it’s all of a sudden a lot less flattering. They’ll see you as a “nobody” who probably doesn’t have an audience.
They also care about how they’re featured. If they’re named as an expert, with a picture or glowing recommendation surrounding your link to them, you get a few bonus points here. They’ll feel more special.
Finally, they care about other included people. If they think that other pieces of content you’ve included suck, they’ll be disappointed. When they see you put in the time to include only the best, being featured is going to be a big compliment to them. If you just picked the first few resources Google showed you, it’s not impressive.
Conclusion
Curating content is a great way to save time while also creating high value content your readers will love. It can attract shares and traffic and is a great way to open a dialogue with influencers you’d like to connect with.
Follow the five steps in this post, and you’ll have a killer curated piece of content to show the world.
I’d love to hear how you’ve used curated content in the past or how you plan to in the future.Just leave me a comment below.
This post originally appeared on Quick Sprout, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: LOFTFLOW/Shutterstock.com All screenshots by Neil Patel. Taken November 2015.