The better your editorial calendar template, the better the implementation of your business blog strategy is likely to be.
Developing a successful editorial calendar, however, is not always easy. What’s more it is often much more complex than just putting a bunch of dates and preliminary titles for blog posts together.
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Maximizing your landing page conversions is a serious business. Do you have Landing pages for your products and services that convert well?
Or are you struggling to get conversions from visitors to your site?
Landing pages are all about getting visitors who “land” on the page to do something: whether it’s sign-up for your newsletter, enquire about hiring you, download an ebook or purchase a digital product.
In this episode I discuss 5 simple changes you can make to maximize your conversion rates:
Actionable marketing is one of the key secrets to growing your business online.
By actionable marketing, I don’t mean the kind of creepy online marketing that gets you busted. I mean marketing that persuades visitors to your website to take a specific action.
Great copyrighting and design strategy should, as an example, result in visitors to your landing pages taking the action you want them to such as signing-up for a newsletter or trading their email address for a free ebook.
For your marketing to hit home you have to understand your audience inside and out. You need to know the demographics, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out online and where they don’t. In this way you can ensure that you or your team develop tailor-made content marketing for your audience. Giving visitors to your site exactly what they want or need will give you the very best chance of them completing the desired action whether it’s signing up to your newsletter or purchasing a product.
Great copywriting is meant to prompt visitors to your website to take action like sign-up for an email newsletter or purchase a product on a landing page.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is copywriting’s big brother; it’s blogs, podcasts, ebooks, white papers and video that are created directly for the purpose of marketing.
If you’re new to digital marketing, a first time business owner or just setting yourself up as a consultant, before you think about investing in professional copywriting services to tighten up or even create the copy on your website, it’s important to understand that online marketing is not just an online CV or newspaper ad.
Online content marketing, for example, is NOT:
I was listening to a podcast this week by an internet marketer and content producer. He was talking at length about how his income had diminished since he stopped charging for premium content. He then went on to talk about trying to figure out which way to go next to generate business.
Sometimes I think we as small business owners can’t see the wood for the trees. The best business opportunities are right under our nose. For example, the consultant in question makes a variety of excellent digital training products for one of his niches in conjunction with a podcast. Yet he does nothing for an equally great podcast that he produces in a slightly different niche.
Some business bloggers put affiliate links on their sites to generate extra income. If you aren’t, do you know why? Is this part of your strategy?
As far as I’m concerned consultants that try their hand at also including affiliate marketing on their site is fine as long as it doesn’t water down the key value proposition. After all, if you make more money as a consultant you don’t want to be sending all your traffic away for a few pennies from Amazon affiliates.
But missing out on business could also be more complex. [Read more...]
If you’re trying to lose weight with Weight Watchers you record the number of points you’ve eaten on a daily basis and then check your weight to see if you’ve lost anything once every seven days.
Making a business blog a success isn’t like trying to lose weight – you can’t track your points – but as online marketers we can all learn something from recording our progress, and tracking our data.
If you’re focusing on getting more traffic to your business website, say, with a blog and social media presence on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, perhaps it’s time to take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself whether your weekly online marketing initiatives are really enough. Just as if you were recording what you’ve eaten during the week.
I find with clients who are looking to develop their internet marketing from scratch it’s useful to start out with a ball park figure of what you need to be doing to get started, get noticed and build traffic and social media engagement.
So if this fits you then ask yourself whether or not during the last week you:
1) wrote and publidsh three blog posts that encourage your readers’ dreams, allay their fears or help them solve a problem?
2) checked each post for Search Engine Optimization with the premium Scribe WordPress plugin?
3) followed 5 new people on Twitter each day ?
4) retweeted a tweet by ten different people who already follow you each day?
5) wrote a comment that really added value to the discussion on three different blogs each day? [Read more...]
