How to Combine SEO with Content Marketing to Maximize Traffic

This post is a little different from my usual posts…

Typically, I write about one specific topic, e.g., SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing.

But often, when I read comments and emails from my readers, I see a big problem with their mentality.

It boils down to a question such as:

Should I focus more on SEO or content marketing?

And I get where that’s coming from, but it’s the wrong question.

You’ve seen the stats:

• 77% of marketers will increase their content production in 2015
• 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing
• 46% of marketers will increase their spending on SEO and SEM in 2015
• 54% of marketers think that use of SEO will continue to grow in 2015

And these numbers can, of course, lead to some confusion.

If both SEO and content marketing are useful for a business, then which one is better for you?

The answer is both.

Although content marketing and SEO share some similarities, they are two different things that can be used at the same time to benefit a business.

And while most of my posts talk about one or the other, this one is going to focus on how you should connect your use of content marketing and SEO in your business. 

Where SEO and content marketing overlap

The reason why so many people have trouble connecting SEO and content marketing is because they don’t have a clear picture of what each represents.

We can fix that with a few quick definitions:

SEO: Anything that is done to increase your organic search engine traffic.

Content marketing: Creating and spreading content to attract traffic.

Although you can get more precise with the descriptions, those simple definitions are all you need to understand both concepts.

They have a lot in common: Although they are separate types of traffic strategies, both content marketing and SEO often overlap…

…starting with content.

For SEO, content is a must. And for content marketing, well…it’s in the name.

In the past, they required different types of content.

You could get away with thin, 500-word articles around your target keyword for SEO.

I’m not saying that you can’t rank 500-word articles, but it’s much harder to rank the same junk that you could rank before.

In the past few years, the content needed for SEO started to resemble the content needed for content marketing.

Quality and value are the top priorities for this content.

How do they fit together at a high level? Imagine being able to create one awesome piece of content and then use it to attract traffic from all of the biggest sources.

When you use your content effectively (and optimize it for different channels), you can easily double or triple your resulting traffic.

Instead of just trying to get search engine traffic for an article, you can also use content marketing tactics and promote it on social media.

But there are differences: It’s naive to think that content marketing is exactly the same as SEO even though some over-optimistic marketers seem to think that way.

SEO certainly fits well into most on-page and off-page aspects of content marketing. However, technical SEO is pretty far removed from content marketing.

Some parts of technical SEO will affect your search engine rankings (such as optimizing your crawl rate) but won’t have any affect on your content marketing results.

So, although they share a lot of similarities, know that there’s more to SEO than just the basic on-page keyword targeting.

They can also benefit each other in big ways: One thing that most don’t realize at first is how much SEO and content marketing complement each other.

Here’s a list of basic SEO tasks you might do:

• optimize page load speed
• make content responsive
• fix dead links and bad redirects
• ensure that your content has a clear hierarchy (i.e., heading tags)

All of those things can help your content marketing efforts.

A faster page load speed is good for the user experience no matter where they’re coming from. Same goes for responsive content.

By fixing dead links or bad redirects, you improve the reader’s experience as well as keep them on your site reading your other content (a very good thing).

Finally, a clear content hierarchy improves the readability of your content.

Content marketing is all about the user experience, and SEO has been heading in that direction for the past while, which is why they complement each other now.

1. Which one goes first?

Although both SEO and content marketing are compatible with each other, they are different in a few key ways.

For example, if you created a great guide, you’d still want to include certain keywords in the most important places.

So, do you find the keywords first and then build the content around them?

Or do you create the content first and then find appropriate keywords to use within it?

The answer is that either way can work, but they both have their own strengths.

The case for content marketing first: With this process, you’d focus on coming up with ideas for content that your target audience is interested in.

Once you create the content, you do some keyword research around that specific topic to find some keywords you think you could rank for. You add them mainly to your headings.

Finally, you find a way to get that content in front of as many people as you could.

There are two big benefits of this option.

First, if gives you a lot of flexibility.

If you choose the keyword first, you create the content around that specific keyword, so you don’t have much choice later on.

Here, if you’re having a tough time ranking for your keyword(s), you can just choose a longer tail keyword that will be easier to rank for.

Second, search volume doesn’t equal value to a reader.

This is actually really important.

That’s because depending on which approach you take, you generate content ideas in different ways:

• content marketing first – you learn about your target audience and figure out what their problems are. You create content to solve those problems.
• SEO first – you do keyword research and go after the highest volume keywords.

When you do typical SEO research, you find keywords searched for by the highest number of people. That means that it’s a common query.

However, that doesn’t always translate into value.

For example, a new business owner is likely to Google something like:

What is SEO?

Not surprisingly, that phrase is searched for a decent amount, about 10,000 times a month.

But all they’re really looking for is a simple definition in most cases.

No matter how good your content is, it’s not going to have a huge impact on their lives (they won’t value it highly).

But after they learn a bit about what SEO is, they have a bigger problem: “How do I actually do SEO?”

So, they search for:

SEO plan for a small business

or something along those lines. They find a really detailed guide that shapes their SEO work for years to come. This is an example of something that is truly valuable to a reader.

But guess what? That search phrase (and other similar ones) gets a negligible amount of search volume.

If you only create content based on highly popular terms, you’ll often miss creating content that solves your target audience’s biggest problems.

This is a big deal for two reasons:

1. You have a limited usefulness - When someone comes to Quick Sprout, I want them to find everything they need about marketing. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go to another site. I want to be the expert they come to for content, and later for business.
2. High value converts higher - If your content solves a big problem for your readers, they’re going to remember it. That’s how you get loyal subscribers, who later turn into customers. Getting hundreds of thousands of visitors is nice, but it’s not if none of them turn into customers because they’re coming for low value content.

That being said, low volume searches aren’t necessarily high value problems, and high volume searches aren’t necessarily low value problems. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

The main takeaway from this is that if you rely on a keyword tool—like most SEO-first marketers do—you’ll miss some big problems and interests of your target audience.

Missing those will significantly lower the potential results of your marketing efforts (i.e., sales).

The case for SEO first: After reading the first case, you might be all set on focusing on content marketing first, but there are a few advantages of going with the keyword-first method.

First, it can improve your content.

When you create your content first, you do everything you can to make it as good as possible for the reader.

If you have to add a keyword for SEO purposes, you’re detracting from the optimal phrasing that you originally had. It won’t necessarily be awkward, but your new version of a title might not be as intriguing as the original was.

But if you know your keyword from the start, you’ll always keep it in mind, which will likely change the overall message you create (compared to content first).

The second main benefit is that you do find out what the common problems might be, but they might not be as valuable to solve.

If you only get topic ideas from observing or talking with your target audience, you’ll typically hear from them when they’re having a big problem (a high value situation).

You won’t hear them express small problems very often because they’ll simply try to find an easy solution by searching for it.

By creating content around keywords, you ensure that you find all of the medium to high volume keywords, regardless of the value they hold for your target audience. Ranking for these terms is still a good thing even if those visitors don’t directly convert as highly.

If you’re smart, you can direct those initial visitors to other more valuable content that you’ve created after you’ve solved their first problem.

How about a hybrid? To me, it’s clear that both approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses.

The obvious solution is an effective one: use both methods.

You should spend time researching good keywords to create content around.

You should also spend time researching your target audience to find out what their biggest problems are. Then, create content to solve those problems and add keywords after.

2. Focus on evergreen content for the best of both worlds

Although SEO and content marketing both aim to raise your website traffic, they typically do so in different time frames.

When you create a new great post, you typically promote it hard right away. This includes emailing your list and doing a lot of email outreach to other site owners in your niche.

This results in a few quick bursts of traffic to that post, and then it’ll die down.

On the other hand, you’ll likely get no (or very little) search engine traffic right away unless your domain is very authoritative.

Over time, as you promote it and it accumulates backlinks, you’ll notice that the search engine traffic continues to increase.

However, that only happens for certain posts.

On others, that are news-related, you’re more likely to get some search traffic right away, but it’ll quickly drop down to near zero as your content becomes irrelevant.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of spending the time and resources to create a great piece of content only to have it attract traffic for a short period of time.

I want it to continue to be seen for years after I create it. That’s how you get an overall traffic graph that keeps growing. Your content essentially builds on itself.

To make sure this happens, you should focus most of your effort on evergreen content.

There are some exceptions, but for the most part, it’s your best option.

Maximizing traffic with evergreen content: Evergreen content refers to any content that will be just as useful in the foreseeable future as it is today.

Compare that to a story about Google’s latest algorithm change, which will be interesting for a few months at the most and then become useless.

Think about all of those link building guides from five years ago. Almost all of them are irrelevant in today’s SEO world.

The idea behind evergreen content is that you can get the short-term traffic boost from content marketing as well as the steady, long-term traffic from search engines.

In fact, the work you do to get traffic initially will speed up the time it takes to get search engine traffic.

Identifying evergreen topics: In most cases, you can spot evergreen topics with a bit of common sense.

Think about what you plan to write about:

Will it still be useful a month from now? A year from now? Five years from now?

Hopefully, the answers to all those questions are yes or, at the very least, maybe.

You can also search for a keyword and see how old the results are. If you see multiple posts that are years old, it’s likely an evergreen topic.

Some topics are more evergreen than others: I just said that an acceptable answer to those questions is maybe.

That’s because in some niches, you’ll never be able to find enough topics to write a definitive guide on that will stay relevant forever.

Many topics evolve over time. So, just because you can’t guarantee that a post will be useful in a couple of years from now doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth writing.

A great example of this is Brian Dean’s complete list of ranking factors. As long as SEO continues to change, ranking signals will also change.

But instead of creating a one-time post and then letting it fall into obscurity, Brian continuously updates all his guides:

Most of his content is evergreen because he doesn’t need to change it radically. Instead, he continues to make small updates on a regular basis to ensure that it stays relevant over time.

3. Pick metrics that represent both sides of the coin

Some marketers don’t know if their content marketing or SEO efforts are actually working.

If you want to be successful, you can’t just say, “I think this is going well.”

Instead, you need to pick metrics to track. These metrics should reflect the results of your work and tell you what’s worth doing.

If you don’t see that they are improving over time, you need to rethink your strategy.

When it comes to both content marketing and SEO, you can choose metrics that correspond to each part separately and both of them together.

Although you can choose whichever metrics make the most sense for your business, let’s go over a few of the most common.

Metric #1 – Traffic (SEO and content marketing): One of your main goals for both SEO and content marketing work is to increase the amount of traffic you’re getting to your website.

Quality of that traffic is also important, but in most cases, getting more traffic usually leads to more profit.

It’s important to look at your traffic over a fairly long time. Everyone is going to have spikes and dips depending on the day of the week and month.

Record your traffic data in a spreadsheet for each month. Then, compare it not only to the previous months but also to the same month in previous years.

You’ll want to start by recording your overall traffic numbers, which you can get from your Audience Overview in Google Analytics:

But that doesn’t tell you very much about the results of your individual work.

That’s why you should also record both your organic search traffic as well as your referral traffic.

To find these numbers, just go to your acquisitions tab in Google Analytics, and select “by source”.

Of course, some of your SEO work (like building links) may result in direct or referral traffic, but these are the best metrics you have. They don’t have to be perfect, just indicative of your success.

Metric #2 – Keyword rankings (SEO): In addition to being important for tracking your overall search engine traffic, keyword rankings are the most important thing to track from an SEO perspective.

If you’re doing good work, you will see rankings rise over time.

It doesn’t really matter which tool you use—just find one that lets you look at your rankings over a long time frame.

Metric #3 – Subscribers (mainly content marketing): In order to judge the quality of your traffic, you want to see how many of your visitors turn into subscribers or customers.

But your subscriber rate is also indicative of how valuable and persuasive your content and call to action are, which makes this a good overall metric for content marketing.

To track this, you can set up goal tracking in Google Analytics:

Or you can just look directly at reports provided by your email marketing service provider:

Metric #4 – Engagement (mainly content marketing): Subscriber rate isn’t the only way to measure how valuable your visitors find your content.

You can also track other engagement metrics to help complete the picture.

Obviously “engagement” isn’t a metric you can track, but I’m referring to any metric that reflects engagement on your website:

• Average time on page
• Pages per visit
• Visitor recency (how often people return to your site)
• Comments

You want to track most of these over time, just like the other metrics. Measure them once or twice a month, and record the data (you should have an average for each time period).

After you collect data for at least three months, you can start to see if your engagement is increasing as expected.

For example, you can look at the number of comments your newest posts are getting:

And compare that to your older posts:

Since your topic will influence most engagement metrics, it’s important to look at averages over a period of time to even things out.

4. The best links for SEO are also the best links for content marketing

When you create a great piece of content (for your content marketing), what’s your goal for promoting it?

It should be to get large audiences to see it.

This might be in the form of direct traffic (like if you send it to your email list) or in the form of links on other web pages, which is even better.

Obviously, the best links are the ones that send the most traffic.

As it turns out, exactly the same links are some of the best links for SEO purposes (increasing authority and therefore rankings).

Type #1 – Guest-post links: One use of content marketing is to drive traffic back to your site by posting on other sites, i.e., using a guest post.

In these posts, you usually get one or two links back to your website in an author bio.

As long as you’re guest-posting on highly authoritative sites (the ones with a lot of traffic), these links will not only send direct traffic but also improve keyword rankings.

In addition, sometimes you can add extra links to other content you’ve created in the body of the guest post.

Type #2 – Contextual links: When it comes to SEO, nothing beats the value of a contextual link on an authoritative page.

These links are a part of a sentence and are as natural as they can be:

The better your content marketing is, the more of these links you will get, which will not only send you traffic but also improve search traffic over time.

5. Internal links serve two purposes

Most people include internal links in their content just because bloggers tell them to.

But it’s important to understand how they affect both your content marketing and SEO results.

Also, don’t forget that internal links include any link not only in your content but also in navigation elements on your site. They all affect your results.

In particular, they have two main benefits.

Benefit #1 – Send link juice to other content to help SEO: If your site doesn’t have much authority yet, it won’t have a big effect, but internal links can still help you rank better.

They help you do this in two ways:

1. Adding relevance – Google looks at the anchor text of the internal link, as well as surrounding content, to try to understand what your page is about in order to rank it for any queries.
2. Passing through authority (“link juice”) - Many SEOs focus all their energy on ranking a page by getting external links (from pages on other websites). If you have a strong domain, you can often rank quickly for easy keywords with new content by adding a handful of internal links to that page.

It’s a good idea to schedule a bit of time each time you publish a post to add a few internal links to your new page from older (relevant) posts on the site:

It only takes a few minutes to do and will help your rankings significantly.

Don’t use the same anchor text for all the internal links to the same post—use a variety of fitting anchor text.

To find those old relevant posts, use this search string:

(topic of new article) site:(your site name)

For example, if I wrote a new article about writing funny email subject lines, I would search for:

Writing funny email lines site:quicksprout.com

This will show you the posts that Google thinks are the most relevant to your new one.

Benefit #2 – Expose your audience to more of your content: Remember those engagement metrics from before?

Two of them are probably more important than the others:

• Pages per visit
• Visitor recency (how often people return to your site)

The reason why they are more important and useful than the others is that if you’re creating great content, they should both go up over time.

They are also less subject to large variations like comments (which depend a lot on the topic) and time on page (which depends a lot on the length of content) are.

Often, when reading a particular post, a portion of your readers will want more information. A well-placed link can get a click-through rate of 1-5%.

Considering that you can have several internal links in a single piece of content, you can almost guarantee that most readers who like your content will find more topics to read about on your site.

The more useful your internal links are, the more time visitors will spend on your site (if they like your content).

Additionally, if they run out of time before they can consume all of your content because they find so much of it through internal links, they will come back to keep reading.

Finally, other than the 5-10 posts on your home page, how many posts do your new readers see?

In most cases, it’s not many.

Which isn’t ideal, especially if you’ve created hundreds of posts. You want them to find as much relevant to their situation content as possible now. In order to do that, they need to find older posts.

The perfect way to show them those older posts is through internal links.

Conclusion

Both SEO and content marketing are highly effective ways to drive traffic, conversions, and profit for the vast majority of online businesses.

But you don’t need to pick one or the other. You can get the full benefits of both at the same time.

In fact, focusing on one will often increase the results of the other.

I’ve gone through five main areas that either affect or are affected by your SEO and content marketing.

If you understand all five concepts, you should be prepared to handle both sides in your future marketing.

Some of those concepts are more difficult to understand than others.

So, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

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Rent Social Media for the Best Properties

If you’re in the market for a rental property, then let social media help you find your home sweet home.

More and more rental agencies are promoting their properties on sites like Facebook and Instagram, which makes social media a great resource for finding the perfect rental.

Here are just a few ways you can use social media to find your next rental:

Local Listings

There’s a good chance that if you’re looking for a rental property, you’re probably looking within your area. Social media is the perfect destination when it comes to searching for local rental property listings.

For example, Facebook now offers local sales ads for realtors and rental companies. Although this doesn’t sound like anything special for you, the renter, it actually is.

Local Facebook ads means the rental property advertisements you see are for rentals in your area.

This makes Facebook not only a social site, but also a research site when it comes to finding a rental property in your area.

Likewise, because your Facebook newsfeed refreshes constantly, you can rest assured you’re getting the latest offerings from local rental agencies.

Viewing Property Photos and Videos

As the following article looks at, rental companies know how to make prospective renters fall in love with properties online: eye-catching photos. This is exactly where photo and video-friendly social sites come into play.

Instead of just putting photos up on the company website, rental agencies are beginning to showcase their properties on social media.

Facebook is a great place for viewing rental property photos and videos.

You can either visit the Facebook pages of rental agencies or follow rental companies to receive listings directly in your newsfeed.

Instagram is also growing in popularity among rental companies for sharing photos and short video clips.

Rental Deals for Followers

Following rental companies on Facebook and Instagram is beneficial for a number of reasons.

As mentioned before, you’ll get the latest local listings in your newsfeed simply by friending the company’s Facebook page or following their Instagram account.

In addition, you’ll also be the first to know about all rental deals and promotions the rental company has to offer.

Whether it’s a free month’s rent or discounted monthly rent for signing a lease during a promotional period, following rental agencies on social media is a great way to track down deals and discounts.

Open House Invites

Photos and videos are helpful, but it’s always nice to walk through a property before signing a lease. A growing trend among rental companies is posting open house invites on social media.

Instead of missing out on open houses for rental properties in your area, you can simply keep an eye on your social accounts for invite updates and reminders.

Questions and Comments

Social media is social for a reason: it makes it easier than ever to communicate with friends, families, and businesses.

When you go the social media route for your rental search, you can send questions directly to rental companies about the properties they’re offering.

Likewise, you can also use social media to reach out to friends and family to find out which rental agencies they use. All of this makes the hunt for a great rental property a breeze.

If you want your next rental search to be an easy, hassle-free experience, then go the social route.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

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Instagram Looks To Snapchat For Inspiration

What To Say When Your Friend Copies Your Outfit…

Looks like Instagram is using Snapchat and Twitter for inspiration when it comes to curated content. The social media site wants to take popular content for a specific event and make it easier for users to see, think like Snapchat Live and Twitter Moments. Instagrammers were able to see this feature on Halloween when a prompt directed scrollers to an “immersive” video feed curated by Instagram employees. Curation is the future people! (Source re/code)

Quote of the Day: “Look up.”

Google, Facebook, SpaceX and OneWeb all have one common goal. That is to beam internet everywhere. The United Nations set a goal for themselves to have 50% of the world offline by 2020 compared to the 57% it is at now. But unfortunately, the UN doesn’t think that will happen. This isn’t stopping Google, Facebook, SpaceX and OneWeb though. They believe this lack of Internet could simply be fixed by beaming Internet from high flying drones or low flying satellites. Each company has large, expensive plans on how they can do this which you should check out here. (Source CNN)

Don’t Screenshot My Selfie!

Last week, Snapchat changed their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. And some people low key freaked out. Snapchat selfie takers feared that their snaps were being stored by Snapchat but the picture messaging app released a blog today saying that pictures are not stored or being stockpiled from them. But they can’t help you if your friend screenshots your double chin selfie. The new Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy updated users on a license for the Live Stories and talk about in-app purchases. (Source CNET)

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5 Extraordinary Things to Know about SEO Friendly Web Design

Whether you are a small business owner designing your website for the first time or thinking about redesigning an existing one, you have to wonder about the introductions and changes that need to be made for making your web design search engine friendly. Ensuring that the design of your website is search engine optimized can aid you in ensuring that you can get high rankings, which can impact the volume of traffic and your sales and profits in the long run. There are lots of things you have to consider in order to make your website design search engine friendly, but the top five things that every small business owner should be aware of are discussed here:

Number 1- Your website design has to be responsive.

As far as small businesses are concerned, the local ones in particular, it is incredibly important to have good rankings in mobile search. Why? First off, about 50% of the people who conduct a search on mobile visit the shop within a few days of their search. In addition, more than 70% of the searches done via mobile eventually end up leading to offline purchases. You need to have a mobile friendly website design if you want to do well in mobile search results. Responsive web design is considered the best because it offers the same experience to smartphone users, tablet visitors and those on desktop as well.

Having a responsive web design saves you from the effort of creating multiple pages for various screen sizes. All you have to do is create a normal website design and the responsive template or theme will make the necessary adjustments for fitting on any screen.

Number 2- The text should be your focus.

While almost all types of media are crawled by search engines for determining the rank of a website, it is undeniable that good old text remains the ideal option for search engine optimization. This is one of the primary reasons why content marketing has gained such importance; every page of your website needs to have written content. Every page needs to have text even if it is in a small amount. If an audio or video is posted, it is best to have a text-based transcription as well.

Text is also required for the META description and SEO title for every page, which have to be unique and should also comprise of the main keywords or phrases for optimization purposes. Most businesses make the mistake of mentioning crucial information in images rather than text. However, text contained in images isn’t tracked by search engine crawlers and using a text-version for providing important information is recommended in order to be discovered.

Number 3- Images should also be optimized.

Yes, text is important, but so are images and they also need to be optimized for better search visibility. When you use text for this purpose, you can enjoy double benefits. This is due to the fact that your product page will be optimized for a specific keyword phrase and it will also give your image the golden opportunity of appearing in the image search results of search engines like Google. There are several ways you can use text for optimizing your images. Firstly, the filename of the image can be renamed for including a specific phrase or keyword. In this way, the main keywords can also become part of the images. Secondly, all HTML attributes should be used for inserting images on webpages. Thirdly, you can also write a caption beneath the image explaining the purpose of the image or its content.

Number 4- A proper navigation structure is required.

Another important rule for SEO friendly website design is to make a website that has text links and a clear hierarchy. There should be at least one static text link that can be used for reaching every page. You should take the organization of your website into account when you are planning the link structure. This could be simple, depending on the number of pages on your website because you can simply create a main navigation bar that links to all webpages of the site. Sometimes it can be complicated too as you have to think of categories and subcategories and the pages contained in each.

If you wish to provide a streamlined and smooth user experience, it is best to stick to just three levels. Your job should be to simplify the experience rather than making your customer jump from hoop to hoop in order to reach their desired destination. Apart from clear navigation for your visitors, the website should also boast simple text links in the footer for the main page of the website. In this way, you can rest assured that search engine crawlers and visitors alike will be able to discover it.

Number 5- Redirecting is also necessary.

When you are redesigning your website instead of making it for the first time, you should bear in mind that the old pages shouldn’t be completely scrapped. If you remove the page, your visitors will be informed that it doesn’t exist any longer. SEO expert Neil Patel writes in his post on what is SEO, if the page had a good ranking in search engines, but doesn’t open anymore; it will be removed from the search engine results. This means that you will end up losing traffic, which you were receiving previously. Hence, it is a better decision to redirect the old page to a new one in order to continue receiving the traffic.

The same concept is applicable when you are updating the permalinks on your website. If you wish to incorporate keyword-optimized permalinks in your website, it is essential for you to redirect the previous URLS to the new ones to prevent loss of traffic and potential customers. You can also customize a 404 page where you provide your visitors with alternative links if they are unable to access a particular page or URL.

When you incorporate these tips, your website design will become search engine friendly as well as visitor friendly and improve the functionality as a whole.

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11 Clever Tricks for Effective B2B Landing Pages

B2B or business to business means a situation when one business is performing a commercial transaction with the other. It is as simple as that. You might have known this already. But you might not know what is landing page? A landing page is the destination page at which you arrive when you click on a link from the results of a search engine. Landing pages are important from the point of view of generating business. A business looking for a commercial transaction on a search engine will most probably convert leads (not sales) only when it lands to an effective destination page. If you are a B2B vendor, you must know these 11 clever tricks for creating really effective landing pages.

1. A single main message

A landing page should focus on a single message that is your goal. The remaining conversation should revolve around that goal only. You should be clear when writing the content on a landing page. For example, if you want to offer a free trial of your product, then you can also present a case study of a client already satisfied by your product. It will complement your free trial. But, if you give a link to a downloadable useful data, it may distract the website visitor from the offer of free trial.

2. Relevant content

Your business to business web design should be relevant to the content the visitor was looking for. If it is not relevant to the search, the visitor is anyhow not going to stay on your webpage.

3. Educate the prospective B2B

You should design the landing page in a way that the message is conveyed that you not want to close the sale right now. You should focus on educating your prospective B2B client. Provide the right information at this phase. Do not push the B2B prospect to talk to you.

4. Ask for permission to send mails

Do not intervene in the personal space of the B2B prospect. Ask for their permission to interact further. Respect their privacy if they do not want any emails from you yet.

5. Use bulleted format

Try to use paragraph breaks, bullet points, etc. when your landing page contains a lot of data. Such formatting features catch the attention of the visitor and keep him engaged for a longer period of time.

6. Do not ask them to contact you

Do not impose it on the B2B prospect to call you. Instead, you can ask them to leave their number and preferred time so that you can make a call to them.

7. Do not advertise aggressively

Aggressive advertisement pulls the visitor away from the website. Advertise in limit. Do not be pushy. The visitor has landed on your webpage because he was looking for something that you were offering. Advertisements may force him to leave.

8. Call to action

If you are offering an interesting free product, you can provide a CTA or clear to action button. It means that you can ask them to take an action by using great words like “subscribe”, “enjoy” or “get”. By doing this, you can also judge the success of your landing page.

9. Trust seals

It means that you can procure the approval of a third party which is credible to ensure the trust of the user in your webpage.

10. Testimonial quotes

You can your satisfied clients to write positive testimonials for you. You can also give them goodies for the favor done.

11. Transparency about your privacy policy

If you are clear about privacy policy with your B2B prospects, you can increase your chances of converting your leads. Being transparent increases the faith of prospects. 

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Socialize Your Ecommerce Platform

Whether your brand is solely Ecommerce, or Ecommerce is just one aspect of it, you’ve got to promote it.

One of the best and fun, most effective and budget friendly marketing strategies to use these days is social media.

Whatever it is that you do or sell, social media can help you out. You just have to do it right.

Pick Your Platform and Strategy

Between all the social media platforms, you can probably find a couple that stand out to you as being the ones that you’ll find the best work to with and those that bring you more business. Then figure out what strategy will work best and you’ll enjoy doing.

As the following article looks at, take a look at what some businesses are doing with their eCommercePlatform to promote their brand:

• A great example of a company that has a strong brick and mortar presence but is pulling in virtual customers is Sephora. With “Fan Friday” specials on Facebook, social media fans can reap the benefits of discounts and specials. Many other companies are doing the same by promoting on Facebook or other platforms so their followers and fans can see what’s going on and get extra benefits. It brings a bit of a personal feeling.

• Some companies that are solely Ecommerce are doing great things with social media, as well. Contests are huge and bring in tons of customers. For instance, Om Nom Nom Cookies has run selfie contests. This is huge with Ecommerce businesses, and it’s where contestants post pictures of themselves with the brand, in this instance, a cookie. Winners can be picked at random, but it’s a great, fun way to gain followers and customers. Another way to promote a photo contest is to have your followers vote. Not only will this engage them even more, but you’ve got the potential to go viral depending on how invested your contestants are. You may be amazed at how many more followers (hence customers) this brings you.

• Other companies, like Ikea, ask followers to post how they are using their merchandise. Even if it just gets a customer a retweet or a share, it’s fun for everyone and followers can see what real people are doing. Excellent form of marketing – and it’s free!

• Join with others and promote them. If you have a community of Ecommerce businesses that you are involved in – promote each other. Say you own a jewelry business and your friend has a cupcake store – promote each other through contests, giveaways and fun photos. After all, who doesn’t love cupcakes and jewelry together? The more you do for others, well, the more they’ll do for you.

One of the best components about Ecommerce and social media is that you can have a lot of fun with it.

You don’t have to rely on stuffy marketing campaigns.

Instead, be creative, engaging, and supportive and the customers will flock to you.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a High Converting Webinar

I know that you understand the power of blogging and building an email list.

But the next step is often harder to grasp.

How do you turn those readers and subscribers into customers?

I’ve seen many online business owners work hard for several years to build a solid audience and not know how to profit from it.

And without any profit, how will you be able to keep producing free valuable content for your audience?

You can’t.

So, how do you convert those audience members into customers?

You can employ many effective tactics.

But there is one tactic with which I’ve had an incredible amount of success, and I know that many other businesses have as well.

That tactic is using webinars.

Webinars are essentially one- or two-hour live video streams, usually like mini-courses.

Anyone viewing the webinar can type in questions and comments throughout the presentation.

Webinars can be incredibly effective, on average converting around 20% of viewers into customers buying products. And these aren’t just cheap products—they are premium products.

Although I won’t go into the technical details of creating a webinar here (e.g., creating a slideshow, using webinar software), I’ll teach you a step-by-step procedure you can use to create webinars that convert.

Some businesses use only webinars in order to sell their products, and they do very well…I am talking about webinars just like this one I created. 

Why webinars might be the best form of content for any business

At their core, webinars are just another type of content.

However, webinars are a type of content that is optimized for selling. Why?

First, viewers typically place a higher value on webinars than other forms of free content, which means that they pay closer attention to what you’re showing them.

In addition, since the webinar is done live, they are forced to pay attention so they don’t miss anything.

Put those two things together, and you will have a captive audience when you deliver webinars the right way.

With webinars, you get to deliver your full message to your audience, whereas with blog posts, you never know how much of the content your website visitors read.

Finally, webinars allow you to connect with audience members in a real way. Other than creating a conference and trying to convince your audience to attend it, webinars are the best way to talk to hundreds, even thousands, of people at once.

And unlike with a blog post, you can actually answer the questions your audience has in real time during a webinar.

The conversion rate of webinars is insane: Say, you create a fantastic email sequence for a product you’re selling.

If you did a great job, you’ll get a conversion rate that is somewhere between 1-5%, depending on the price and a few other factors.

I would say that 5% is the low end of even a mediocre webinar.

Back at KISSmetrics, we used webinars a lot and had great results.

Our first 77 webinars had a total of 155,386 people who signed up to attend a webinar. Of those, about half (74,381) actually attended, and a solid 16,394 turned into high quality leads.

That’s a conversion rate of 22% (of the people attending).

A few other businesses have published results of their webinars.

Adobe claims a solid 19% conversion rate, while Buzzsumo says that 20% of webinar attendees turn into paid customers.

Depending on what you sell, a single lead can be worth upwards of $50. It doesn’t take much math to figure out how incredibly lucrative webinars can be (even with small audiences).

But a difference in conversion rate of just a few percent can be the difference between thousands of dollars in profit.

If you’re going to incorporate webinars into your content strategy, you want to make sure that you’re at the upper end of conversion rate (20%) rather than the low end (5%).

If you want to make a high converting webinar, follow these six steps.

Step #1: Learn how to warm up the crowd

Despite being a great sales tool, a good webinar isn’t a sales pitch at all.

A good webinar is a lot like a blog post. It actually provides value to the audience without asking for anything in return.

And just like with a blog post, you shouldn’t start off by digging right into the meat of your topic.

Instead, you want to build a bit of anticipation and excitement as well as take advantage of the opportunity to engage with your audience members.

The point of engaging here is two-fold: first, you start to loosen up, which will make your presentation better, and second, you get your audience into an engagement mode.

Since you’re interacting with them now, they are more likely to interact throughout the webinar.

There are a few different options at your disposal, and I recommend trying different combinations of them.

Option #1 – Have a quick chat: You should always arrive 10-15 minutes early to make sure that you don’t have any technical difficulties, which do happen from time to time.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, you will likely have a few minutes before you can start the webinar.

There are always a few people that come to the webinar early.

This is a great time to start talking with them about anything in the chat box.

Simply getting to know them a bit and learning about why they’re at the webinar (and why they’re so eager to get started) will improve your conversion rate down the line.

At the same time, you might learn some interesting things about your audience.

Option #2 – Ask a few questions: It’s always good to ask questions during the webinar, but it’s especially good to do at the start.

Basically, when you get your viewers responding in the chat box, they get used to it. And that makes them more likely to respond to you and ask more questions in the future.

Ideally, you want to get them in this habit early.

That’s because once they realize they can actually talk to you, they are more likely to pay attention throughout the webinar so they can ask questions about something they didn’t understand.

Option #3 – Ask attendees to fill out poll or survey: Instead of asking questions and getting responses in the chat box, you can have your viewers fill out a poll or survey.

These have to be prepared in advance, so it’s best to use them for questions that reveal something useful about your audience.

Here are a few sample questions you could use:

• “How many webinars have you attended?” - So you know if you need to explain webinars at the beginning.
• “How familiar are you with [your brand]?” - The less your audience knows you, the more important personal details and an introduction become.
• “How important is [webinar topic] to you?” - Over time, you will see that your customers care more about certain topics than others. Do more webinars about those important topics.
• “How much experience do you have with [topic]? - If your audience is more advanced than you thought, you don’t want to spend too much time on the basics. The opposite is also true.

Just about every leading webinar software (e.g., GoToWebinar) comes with built-in survey and polling tools. You can see the results as people answer your questions.

Or start the webinar with an introduction: It’s a good practice to introduce yourself near the start of a webinar.

Yes, you’ll have some long-time readers in the audience, but you’ll also have some brand new readers watching. Introducing yourself will allow you to start building trust with your new viewers, which will lead to them becoming customers (if not today, in the future).

A good introduction should be fairly brief, but don’t be afraid to show some personality and put in a joke or two.

Step #2: Without intrigue, you will fail

Webinars can provide a ton of value for your visitors.

But you are also asking for a lot.

They basically have to agree to spend 45 minutes (minimum) focused only on your presentation.

That’s a lot of time for many people.

You also need to consider that if at any point a viewer doesn’t like how the webinar is going, they can just click the “exit” button.

This is why your number one priority should be to keep them interested in your material.

There are a few things that go into this.

Without an intriguing topic, no one will show up: Interest starts with your topic. If you have a seemingly boring topic, no one will want to attend the webinar, no matter how good your actual presentation is.

The most important part of drawing attention is the title of the webinar. It functions exactly like a blog post headline.

Most of the same rules of writing a powerful headline apply here too.

You want to include specific results that your reader is looking for while not giving away the answer.

Here’s a bad headline:

Social media marketing efficiency

It’s boring, vague, and not provoking curiosity.

But how about:

How to plan your weekly social media marketing schedule in 60 minutes or less

That takes care of a specific problem (wasting time on social media) that a visitor might have. But it also makes the reader want to watch the webinar to find out the answer.

On top of the headline, you can also write a few high-impact bullet points on the landing page.

Those bullet points should contain the most important benefits from your viewer’s perspective.

In addition to putting them on the landing page, it’s always a good idea to put them on one of your beginning slides:

It’s easy for viewers to forget the specific reason why they signed up for the webinar, and this can jog their memory and get them to stick around.

Here’s one important aspect of picking a topic: The most intriguing topics for a webinar are the ones that act as mini-courses.

They take one specific important problem and solve it in those 45-120 minutes.

If you look at past KISSmetrics webinars, you’ll see that most of them involve the word “How”. Many headlines are “How to…” headlines.

Not only are these topics the most intriguing, but they are also the easiest ones to create a great presentation around.

Your presentation becomes a walk-through of the solution.

How do you get people to stay on the webinar? After you get your audience to register and attend the webinar, you still need to keep them intrigued by your material.

While some attendees will be entranced by the presentation, you’ll always have a large chunk on the edge of leaving.

They’re either not sure if this topic is really important to them, or they already know a lot of the things you’re covering but just want to see what you say about a few key aspects.

There are two things you should do.

First, don’t reveal everything about your solution at the start of the webinar.

It’s fine to give some details, like “our solution is to use batching along with a social media calendar.” Just don’t give out too much, like how you’re going to accomplish it.

If you pick your topic right (a how-to topic), your valuable content will be automatically spread out through the steps you present, so you don’t need to worry about this much.

But if your webinar is something like “7 secrets of…”, start with a really good one, and then mention that your last one will be the best one.

Another option is to provide an incentive to viewers who watch the entire webinar.

The bonus might be:

• a recording of the webinar
• a related bonus e-book
• a transcript of the webinar (or a PDF of it)
• free coaching
• or a special offer

For example, when guest presenters help out on KISSmetric webinars, they often include a related bonus book that a huge percentage of viewers will stick around to get:

Step #3: Every part you teach needs to accomplish one thing

A webinar is all about giving value, but it’s about giving the right kind of value.

It should educate your audience about their problems as well as potential solutions to those problems. This is valuable to any viewer.

At the same time, one of the solutions you show them will likely be a product or service you sell.

Assuming it’s legitimately a great product that solves the problem or makes the solution as easy as possible, all you have to do is present the product honestly when the time comes.

Until that time, everything in your presentation should have two purposes.

Phase #1 – Make the pain worse or the benefit better: Viewers sign up for webinars for two main reasons.

Either they have a problem that is causing them or their business pain and they want to solve it, or you’ve made a great promise that they’d like to get.

Here’s some examples:

• Pain: “I’m not getting any organic search traffic.”
  • Webinar: “7 steps to ranking #1 for long tail search terms”
• Benefit: “I wouldn’t mind making more money even if I’m doing okay now”
  • Webinar: “6 ways you can make an extra $1,000 per month”

Whatever the reason, you need to mention it early on. Remind them why they are there and what they will get out of the webinar if they stay for the whole thing.

When you do this, your viewers will pay closer attention to your presentation, and that’s when you jump into phase #2…

Phase #2 – Educate viewers about a solution: Don’t just educate them in general—educate them about specific solutions.

This will be the meat of your presentation, where you break down solutions, step by step:

Most viewers don’t care about the technical stuff going on in the background. They just want solutions that they can apply.

Among the solutions, you can include your product.

Or you might pitch your services at the end, offering to solve this problem for them.

Step #4: A buying audience is an engaged one

I’ve mentioned a few times so far how important an engaged audience is.

Let me clarify what I mean by that. Engagement is a measure of how much focus your audience is giving your webinar.

If you have low engagement, it means that people aren’t paying attention, despite watching the webinar.

It could mean that they’re zoning out maybe because the presentation is boring, or it could mean they’re distracted by email or social media.

A small percentage will just keep the webinar on to see if you offer a free bonus at the end, but don’t worry about those viewers.

A highly engaged audience will watch everything, and a decent portion of those viewers will jump at the chance to interact with you.

The more involved viewers are with you, the more invested they will be in the solutions you’re presenting.

The people who are talking to you the most during the webinar are your best leads for sales.

It’s obvious that getting your audience engaged is a good thing.

Here are a few different ways you can encourage engagement.

Idea #1 – Launch a poll: Every once in awhile, it makes sense to see if viewers are actually understanding what you’re saying and getting value from it.

If you’d like to do it informally, just ask a question and get responses in the chat box.

But if you also want to know if you’re presenting effectively, a poll is a good idea because you’ll get concrete feedback.

It’s a good idea to launch a poll or quiz immediately following a particular section. Ask the viewers about the main takeaway, for example.

Not only will it give you good information, but it will also make your viewers solidify their learning.

Idea #2 – Don’t read from your slides: One way to bore your viewers quickly is to create slides with a ton of words on them and just read them out loud.

If you’re going to do that, why do they need you?

Instead, put a few words on a slide, which attract attention, but fill in the blanks yourself.

Idea #3 – Mention viewers by name: This tactic is great at making your viewers feel more involved.

Instead of just being a screen name typing into a chat box, your viewers can feel like they are part of the webinar if you address them by their names along with saying something positive:

That’s a really good question, Neil! …

If you, as a viewer, get a personal compliment from an expert teaching a large audience, you’ll feel good about it. And chances are, you’re going to look for more opportunities to contribute and stand out from the passive viewers.

Idea #4 – Small webinars can be better than large ones: The default tactic is to try to get as many people to register for your webinar as possible. It’s not a bad one.

However, if you have a particularly complex product, you’ll need to be able to explain whether your product works for all specific situations that your viewers might have.

This is impossible if you have hundreds of viewers on the webinar.

But if you only had 25-50, you could cover quite a few scenarios and make a few big sales.

First, you should make it clear on the landing page that only 50-100 seats are open for the webinar (about half to two-thirds will show up).

Then, note the audience size right away at the start of the webinar. Say something like this:

I’ve kept the webinar really small on purpose; there are only 50 people here. I did that so I could talk with more of you one-on-one to find a solution that works for you. In order to do that, I need you to type in any questions or comments you might have along the way in the chat box.

Step #5: It’s closing time

If you’ve done everything up until this point right, making your pitch is actually really easy.

You’ve given away most of the value you promised, so at this point, it’s just a matter of giving away your bonuses (if you have any) and tying in your product or service with the solutions you just provided.

First, transition into your offer smoothly: The only way to really mess up at this point is to say, “Well, that’s all I have for you today. Now I want to show you a product to buy.”

As soon as you say something like that, the viewers will feel like they are being sold to, and no one likes that.

With a webinar, there’s an understanding that at the end you might make an offer, but it should flow naturally from the topic of the webinar.

The offer should have two qualities: it should be unique and valuable.

For example, if the webinar is about conversion optimization, I could offer a discount on Crazy Egg software.

First, that’s unique because they wouldn’t be able to get that discount anywhere else.

Secondly, it’s valuable because people who are learning about conversion optimization will need heatmap software, and Crazy Egg is among the best options.

It’s crucial that you tie your offer into how it will benefit the viewer in the context of the webinar topic.

Hold a Q&A session after the pitch: Before you even mention your product, tell the viewers that you will answer any questions they have in just a minute.

Although a large percentage of viewers will drop off here, the ones that stay are the ones that are really interested in your solutions.

By doing the Q&A after the pitch, you are forcing your viewers to at least listen to the pitch if they don’t want to miss the Q&A session.

Plus, making the pitch before your Q&A will allow you to answer questions about both the webinar material and your offer.

Once you’re done with the questions, you can finish the webinar with one last mention of your offer.

Step #6: You’ll miss out on a large amount of sales if you don’t do this

If you’re selling a particularly expensive product, you can’t expect all your viewers to be ready to buy right away even if you give them a great offer that they are interested in.

Some people will want to think about it a bit more, while others will need to get an approval of a boss or their significant other.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t take you up on your offer; it just might not be the second you give it to them.

Additionally, depending on the time of your webinar, some attendees may just want to go to sleep or have to go somewhere.

Neither of these scenarios allow time to carefully consider a major purchase.

So, what should you do to maximize your conversion rate? Follow up with them within 24-48 hours.

Assuming you’re using software like GoToWebinar, you will have access to all of your registrants’ email addresses.

This is your chance to provide even more value (which will help get a high email open rate) while also getting your offer in front of viewers one last time.

Here’s what a good follow up might look like:

Subject: Recording of last night’s webinar on [topic]

Hi [name],

I know that we covered a lot in the webinar yesterday, and it’s easy to miss things. That’s why I’ve put up a recording of the webinar that you can stream or download. Here’s the URL:

[URL of the webinar]

If you still have any questions about what we covered, just reply to this email, and let me know what they are.

Additionally, you still have 48 hours to take advantage of the 20% discount.

This is a pretty special offer that doesn’t come around very often, and I feel you could really benefit from [product] in 3 ways:

• (benefit #1)

• (benefit #2)

• (benefit #3)

If you want to take advantage of the offer or want more information, click here:

[URL of the landing page]

Best regards,

[your name]

No hard sell—just the last chance to get your offer in front of your viewers. If they are ready to become customers, they will do so now.

If not, don’t worry about it. If they enjoyed this webinar, they’ll likely sign up for a future one and might buy from you later.

That’s the beauty of webinars. They’re still part of your content marketing plan, and even if they don’t directly lead to a sale, they will help build your brand in the eyes of your attendees.

Finally, make your past webinars publicly available. This is something that KISSmetrics does.

At this point, there are over 100 webinars that anyone can access if they provide some basic contact information.

In my time at KISSmetrics, the old webinars provided about 20% of our overall webinar leads, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Conclusion

Webinars might be the single best tactic to not only attract visitors but also convert those visitors into leads or customers.

They offer a unique opportunity to engage with your potential customers, which no other form of content can match.

They also have a high perceived value, which means that attendees typically focus on the webinar the entire time, assuming that it’s interesting.

When you’re creating your next webinar, whether it’s your first or hundredth, make sure that you follow all six steps of this post.

If you do, you will have a webinar that can convert viewers at about 20% as long as your offer is enticing.

If you have any questions about the six steps in this post, let me know below, and I’ll see if I can’t clear things up.

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1P9RF6E via transformational marketing
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