Watch This Video: Are You Too Busy to Learn If You Have Prediabetes?

Is it just me, or are we in the Age of Convenience? Everything is at our fingertips: information, food, entertainment. I mean, Netflix. Do I need to say more? We don’t even need to put in the effort to search for shows we want, or even change channels anymore. Which is great, since our hands are too full with whatever deliciousness we’re binge-eating on the couch at the moment.

So commercials have to work HARD to break through my self-induced haze. Mostly, they fail. This one, though…Well, just watch it for yourself.

The video was created by the Ad Council, a non-profit organization that creates and runs campaigns for other non-profit and US government agencies. The Ad Council works with advertising and creative agencies, who craft the ads pro bono. Their goal is to inspire dialogue, engagement, and action around significant (and non-partisan) public issues, creating a “measurable difference in society”.

Why is this video awesome?

Of course video marketing does have a subjective quality to it – what speaks to me won’t necessarily speak to someone else of a different demographic, or someone who has a different sense of humor, or who isn’t interested in similar topics. But there are a few interesting aspects of this video that I think help it achieve its goals:

It doesn’t sell anything.

Say what? Why is this good for video marketing? Don’t companies want to push their products on people? Well, one of the things I love about this campaign is it doesn’t push anything that viewers need to buy. If you’re like me, you don’t love commercials interrupting your shows, shouting at you to buy this and buy that, and shoving products you don’t necessarily need down your throat. But I do love ads that pique my curiosity, teach me something, and make me want to learn more (but leaving it up to me to decide if I do want to learn more).

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This tactic makes me think viewers are similar to puppies or teenagers – if you demand they do something, they won’t, even if they were sort of interested. But if you engage them and let them decide for themselves, they’ll follow through and take action. Another great example of this tactic is the “Who Am I?” campaign for Ontario tourism. If you haven’t seen it, check it out:

Ontario itself wasn’t mentioned in the ads – it was up to the viewer to want to play along and learn more, which I think was a great and innovative way to engage and entice viewers, rather than demanding, “Hey, take a trip in Ontario, wouldya?”  

You might think this strategy wouldn’t work for your company or product because maybe you want something more direct. But just think of the possibilities – this approach could be just the first part in a series that entices people and then informs and sells them.

It’s unusually funny.

Video marketers know that if you want great engagement on your videos, you probably want your video to be either A) emotional, or B) funny. A lot of commercials directed at your health take a morose angle – think of all the commercials you see for prescription drugs. I’m likely to instantly tune out, even if I had the affliction, because the ads are too depressing (the emotional tactic gone wrong!) or too cheesy, filled with people struggling to get out of bed or watching their loved ones through a window.

Humorous videos about your health, now those get attention. Who doesn’t remember one of the first Viagra commercials with the guy who hopped and skipped and cartwheeled his way to work after a good night?

Much more engaging than a commercial showing a sad and rejected husband and wife, right? This prediabetes commercial could have been a real disengaging downer, but the actor is amusing and the script is well-written and even light-hearted for a serious topic, helping to get – and keep – the audience’s attention.

It engages a broader demographic.

When you think of prediabetes, what demographic do you think of? Older people who struggle to maintain a healthy weight? The thing about a lot of commercials directed at your health is, unless you already know you’re suffering from the problem, you may not be listening or think it applies to you.

This is why this video works so well. It doesn’t show the ‘sufferer’ so that we can envision anyone, including ourselves, in that role. It poses a question (“Do I have prediabetes?”), making us curious about the answer, rather than “You have prediabetes, here’s what you can do about it”. It engages people who may not have initially thought the message was meant for them.

Right off the bat, the ad talks right to us. It relates to us, makes us feel understood (we’re all busy, and we’re all likely sitting on a couch watching the ad) and pulls us into the conversation, so we’re more willing to see ourselves as part of the intended demographic, and engage in the message. This is a perfect example of relating to your viewers and leading them along a story instead of trying to yell for their attention.

It does the work for you.

A lot of commercials fall more into the top of the marketing funnel – you aren’t necessarily getting into the nitty gritty of your product or service, but just trying to create awareness, excitement, and interest, and trying to connect with people amongst a very broad demographic of viewers. Knowing that viewers are busy, bored, and just waiting for their show to come back, it’s just too hard to relate to them, snag their interest, and then actually educate them in a short period of time, right?  

This video proves otherwise. The great thing about it is that it calls out viewers’ own pain points – they’re busy, just watching a show, they may not feel your message will be relevant to them, and they just don’t care about ads. So this video does the work for us, educating us in the simplest and quickest of ways – it poses a few yes-or-no and easy-to-answer questions so that after a mere minute, we’re much more educated about our own likelihood that we’re at risk for prediabetes. We don’t have to lift a finger, get a pen and paper, visit a website, remember stats, or really do anything but follow along. That’s how to engage even the most disengaged and uninterested! Talk about impressive.

It doesn’t shame you…

Like I’ve been saying throughout this post, this video is great at speaking our language, saying what we’re thinking, and relating to us. We’re busy! We’re tired! We want our show back! We don’t want to do work and find out about our health!

This is a similar approach to what a lot of fitness clubs do – people don’t want to feel alone in their struggles. The other day I heard a radio ad from a gym talking about how their club is a welcoming place for people of all fitness levels to come in, work out, get the help they need, and not feel judged – because not many people would rush to the gym or feel comfortable if they’re surrounded by winners of fitness competitions.

This prediabetes ad works the same way – if we’re inundated with facts and checklists and made to feel ashamed about how we treat our bodies, we may be more likely to bury our heads in the sand rather than face the music and change our behavior. Did you know that about 25% of people even lie to their doctors about the status of their health? People don’t want to admit when they aren’t doing what they know they should do. This video acknowledges that general feeling, and helps us feel like we aren’t alone, it’s okay, and it’s going to help us along.

…Until it does shame you.

You’re not alone, and it’s okay to sit on the couch and binge-watch shows and not pay attention to your health. Buuuut only to a point. The video hooks you on its relatability, but it still needs to close you and make you take action. There’s where the final little bit of shame comes in to help close the deal: now that you’ve gotten the quick and easy education and you know where your health stands, you can’t bury your head in the sand anymore. The “doctor” has to be blunt and tell you like it is because you’re busy, but now it’s up to you to take the next step and visit the website. The ad has done most of the work for you already, so the least you can do is “just go to the site”!

So what do you think? Did this ad make you take the quick quiz? Did it make you want to learn more, or help ease your fears about your health?

What video marketing have you seen recently that you think worked really well? Have you checked your dongle yet or enjoyed the Ford barking lot?

The post Watch This Video: Are You Too Busy to Learn If You Have Prediabetes? appeared first on Vidyard.

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Is it True That Long-Form Blog Posts Perform Better?

As a blogger, you spend an enormous amount of time creating content. And you want that content to succeed, right? If you’re like most bloggers, though, it’s possible that you’ve fallen into a “comfort zone” where you’re consistently publishing content of a particular length.

And if this length is shorter than about 2,000 words, you may be damaging your conversion and engagement rates. There’s a lot of evidence on the web right now to support that long-form content performs better than short-form content.

Here’s everything you need to know about long-form versus short-form content performance, and why you should be publishing more of the former.

Why People Think Short-Form is the Answer

Today, people cruise the web on tiny screens, and it doesn’t seem like anyone has time to sit down and slog through a Moby Dick-sized blog any longer. That said, it makes sense that people believe short-form content is the answer. After all, what’s not to love?

While short-form content may be easy for readers to digest, it doesn’t convert very well. Unless, however, you have a site with an incredibly high DA score.

If you don’t, short-form content won’t cut it, and you’ll find yourself falling short.

Long-Form Blogs and Google SERPs

If you evaluate the top ten results in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll notice that the average content length of content that ranks in the #1 position is 2,450 words. For proof, check out this SerpIQ graphic on the topic:

As the content on the graph moves from the number one to the number ten position in Google, you can see that the corresponding length drops, as well.

So why does long-form content perform so well? The answer is simple. In the last several years, the number of customers searching Google with long-tail keywords has increased, and people have begun to turn to the web as a primary source of information.

While some Google users do want short, fast content, others want in-depth, ultra-informative material. What’s more, Buzzsumo reports that there is 16x more content out there with less than 1,000 words than content with more than 2,000 words.

Since long-form content has less competition at the outset, it’s likely to rank better and find its niche of users easier than short-form content, which already saturates the web.

How to Rank With Long-Form Content

So you’ve decided you want to create more long-form blog content, but what’s next? Follow these tips to develop successful, long-form posts your readers will love:

– Format your long-form accordingly. Long-form content, when improperly formatted, can feel like a brick of text that users can’t access. Keep it accessible by formatting it accordingly. Use headers, subheaders, bulleted lists, and links to break the content up, and keep your sentences and paragraphs short.

– Include images. One of the best aspects of long-form content is that it provides all the room you need to include graphics and visuals. These graphics and visuals enhance the content and make it more valuable for readers, thus helping it rank higher. To keep your long-form content on the up and up, include visuals throughout.

– Keep it longer than 1,500 words. Content that is 1,500 words or longer will perform best. Bonus points if you invest in content that is 2,000 words or longer.

– Make it a list. To keep your long-form content skimmable, format it into a list post that readers can skim easily.

The Verdict: Creating Long-Form Content Will Help You Rank

While long-form content takes more time, energy, and effort to produce than short-form content, it’s an excellent way to help your site rank and gain more visitors. By creating more long-form content, you can easily distinguish yourself as a content leader and enjoy a higher ROI from the material you publish.

Dave is the CEO of Dave’s Computers Inc. He writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips covering the best tips about blogging and Internet marketing. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Original post: Is it True That Long-Form Blog Posts Perform Better?

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3 Things to Know Before Getting into Ecommerce

You might think that since most of the hard stuff is complete — initial funding, cash flow and inventory management— that you are prepared to open up an online retail business. There might even be some semblance of a budding marketing plan to drive traffic to your neck of the World Wide Web. While ecommerce is a great industry to get into with huge growth across the country (the United States Census reported a 14.6 percent increase in overall ecommerce sales from 2014 to 2015), and world (2015 worldwide sales totaled $1.55 trillion and expected to grow to 3.4 trillion by 2019), there are some things that you might not be prepared for before you launch your new online business.

Customers Aren’t Always Nice
Working in the retail industry is difficult — whether it’s in-store or online there will always be someone out to get something for cheaper than what you’re offering.

For example, sometimes as an online retailer, you will have clearance products that will sell at discounted prices. This is a great way to clear out inventory as well as make your customers happy. However, imagine that someone bought one such clearance item from your store, and upon shipping, it was determined that the item was not fit for sale. You check around other similar retailers or manufacturers, but everyone of this item is sold out and gone. This is the nature of clearance.

If you do not have a healthy customer service plan to deal with the backlash caused by not being able to provide your customers with the products that they have paid for, you might be in trouble.

Many of the best ecommerce site builders, like Shopify, will have customer management services built-in to their platform, which makes dealing with difficult customers, returns or exchanges a breeze.

Carrier Services Sometimes Lose Packages
According to their website, UPS delivers 18.3 million packages and documents a day. Now, they are the number one delivery service in the United States, but 18 million packages and documents is a lot of stuff – it would be crazy to think that none of those items were ever misplaced.

If you want to run an entirely internet-based ecommerce store, you are going to experience these lost parcels, and you should have a contingency plan for it — or else people are going to get mad.

The best way to be prepared for this is to consider all aspects of the shipping process. It takes a long time from the purchased item to go from your warehouse to the customer. The item has to travel through various vendors, shipping providers and technologies, whether you know about it or not.

While FedEx and UPS may be the biggest names in shipping, they may not be the most affordable. Drop shippers and other third-party logistics can help keep your shipping costs low. Drop shipping is when a retailer sends a customer order to a manufacturer that then ships the product out from their warehouse. This is a particularly attractive option for many ecommerce businesses that want to boost sales, while not needing to increase the amount of space needed for their own inventory.

Be Explicit with Your Terms of Use
Of all the things you will need to know, this one may or may not be the most surprising depending on how much faith you hold in the average consumer’s ability to pay attention. You will need to be crystal clear on all labelling of products, offers, and policies. Many, if not all of your customers, will skim over the material and misunderstand what you mean.

For example, let’s say you are a small business that sells designer hats, and you want to run a contest that will showcase all the cool places people have worn your brand. You have your prize, you have your submission forms – next, you need to have blatant and explicit verbiage explaining that the contestant must be wearing your particular brand in order to be eligible for the prize. Otherwise, you are likely to sift through a veritable mountain of disqualifying submissions.

You are going to learn a lot when you open up an online business, so be sure to prepare yourself as best as you can!

Original post: 3 Things to Know Before Getting into Ecommerce

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5 Joomla Tips To Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimization is has become so prevalent that it can’t be considered a matter of choice anymore. With the number of websites indexed by search giants rapidly growing, the competition to have your website at the top of the search results has grown fiercer. Bringing in traffic, specifically, unique visitors who are looking precisely for the products and services you are offering can only be accomplished by optimizing your web page. Couple that with analytics and you’ll see the first real results in a matter of few months.

Unlike similar content management systems and web tools available out there, Joomla has a set of tools designed specifically for website optimization. Bear in mind that this is not something that can be accomplished and mastered overnight and the optimization itself can prove itself to be somewhat expensive. This is why it may be a good choice to consult a professional before diving head first into search engine optimization, some practices are easy to handle, but some will require first-hand knowledge and experience on the subject.

1. Choosing the right type of server

Before you start fiddling around the serial configurations, check if the server you’re using is suitable for hosting a Joomla-based website. Using a Mac on an IIS Windows server can only result in lost equipment and the fear that the rewrite modules just won’t work well with the URL rewriting becomes a reality when installing and configuring Joomla. This is why choosing the right server is so important and Joomla generally works best on an Apache webserver with a mod_rewrite module integrated beforehand.

2. Sitemap installation

Sitemaps are used by to update search engines whenever you add new content to your website. The most important thing about sitemaps is to keep them up to date with your website structure, because and old sitemap cannot truthfully represent the current organization of your menu items. One of the best and the simplest way of creating a sitemap is to use an extension called XMap. This tool takes only second to create an XML map in a matter of seconds. All there is to do is to submit it to Google’s and Bing’s search consoles.

3. Submitting to search engine consoles

Submitting the sitemap you generated previously to Bing and Google webmasters, or search consoles is a very useful practice. This allows you to monitor the changes in your search engine optimization practices and provides you with invaluable information regarding your website, such as links, search queries, keywords and even crawl errors. Using these services provided by search engines, in conjunction with good SEO practices guarantees that your website will be indexed properly and you don’t lose any potential visitors.

4. Optimizing texts and images

This is done best using Joomla’s content management interface by adding specific META descriptions to all of your pages. Most people tend to forget this, but making a habit out of it can really make a big impact when it comes to placing your website at the top of the search results page. The descriptions themselves should not be longer than 130 characters. Furthermore, remember no never use the default image title and to add a keyword-abundant alternative short description with a well thought out title instead. Avoid using duplicate META tags as they can have a negative effect on the optimization and overall ranking of the individual web pages.

5. Creating SEO-friendly URLs

More often than not, search engines are more likely to index clearly readable URLs. Unindexed URLs simply won’t show in the results where the indexed ones get the chance of being put in the top of the search results page. Changing the old URL into a search engine friendly one is a fairly simple task once you know how to. All you need to do is log into Joomla’s administration panel, go into Global Configuration area and enable the following:

– User URL Rewriting
– Search Engine Friendly URLs

The first option addresses the issue of removing the /index.php/ part of the URL. This action requires using the .htaccess file and the mod_rewrite module used in Apache. The second option is responsible for removing the random characters generated in the URL and replacing them with the menu item list set up by the user. If you have just started using it, the experts strongly recommend leaving the rest of the options in the Global Configuration area on default settings.

It’s worth mentioning that no SEO job is complete without getting links from web pages that are in the same, or at least similar industry profession as you. Developing a good link building strategy allows your site to be picked up by search engines and being ranked at the top of the search results page. Additionally, make sure to provide the users with relevant content they could comment on and share with their friends. No matter how good your website may be optimized, nothing beats well-thought out content.

Author bio: John Stone is a Joomla developer on Nirmal.com.au. Through years of experience as a, he became a devout believer in the notion that form should always follow function and that developing the ability to think outside of the box is a prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur.”

Original post: 5 Joomla Tips To Improve Your SEO

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How to Grow Your Email List by 750 Subscribers Per Day – Mark and Lauren Greutman

How to Grow Your Email List by 750 Subscribers per Day with Mark and Lauren Greutman

Episode: 287
Who: Mark and Lauren Greutman
Website/Blog: LaurenGreutman.com

Do you want to grow your email list, but you’re not sure where to start?

Are you sick of relying on social media to bring you traffic?

In today’s episode, I’m on the line with Mark and Lauren Greutman. They run one of the largest personal finance websites in the country: LaurenGreutman.com.  Lauren is a regular guest on the TODAY show, Dr. Oz, Fox & Friends and many more national TV shows, as well as the #1 best-selling author of The Recovering Spender.  Mark is the content and website manager, as well as an email and paid advertising guru. Together, they work hand in hand to continue to build up their email lists using multiple strategies, which often net them 750 email sign ups per day. You’ve heard me say it before: your email list is one of your most valuable assets. So Mark and Lauren are here to share their secrets for boosting growth on your email list.

Mark and Lauren’s Story

It’s Mark’s first time on the show, but Lauren has actually been here twice before! If you want to know more of the backstory, check out Episode 147: How to Get Media Exposure for Your Blog and Episode 173: A Pinterest Strategy That Makes Sense.

The last time Lauren was on the podcast, Mark had just quit his job as an actuary to come home and work with Lauren full time. Both of them say that the first year working together was difficult, but now they’re in a good groove.

I had two questions right away: what does an actuary do? And why was that first year so rough?

Mark says that an actuary basically does lots of number crunching. You can find them in many different places, but he worked on pension plans and healthcare. As a result, he’s really, really good at spreadsheets. He’s got a spreadsheet for everything, which is super helpful when it comes to the email list!

The first year was rough because Mark stepped into Lauren’s world, but they hadn’t set out clear roles ahead of time. The website had been up and running for four years at that point, and the business was doing well. But Lauren wasn’t prepared for taking on another full-time employee. At the time, she would do things because she knew they worked, but she wasn’t necessarily able to explain them to someone else.

Mark will also be the first one to tell you that he didn’t understand Lauren’s audience at first. He would spend all day writing some amazing content, only for Lauren to throw it out because it wasn’t speaking to their audience.

Mark and Lauren Greutman with their four children

Mark and Lauren also have four children, and they didn’t plan out clear roles or put together a schedule for who would do what around the house when Mark left his job. There was also a lot more pressure for the blog to be successful once they didn’t have the fallback of Mark’s separate income. So basically, Lauren says, “It was just a big, jumbled mess.”

So what happened? How did they get out of the mess?

Lauren’s book deal was a game-changer. Once she got offered the book deal about a year ago, she had to let a lot of things go. It was physically impossible for her to write and promote the book and do the website full time and be a full-time mom and cook dinner every night. So the book helped Mark and Lauren to find a balance.

Let’s Talk Email Lists

Was an email list always a priority for Lauren?

Nope. She did an RSS email for years.

Then two years ago, when Facebook had its big algorithm changes, Mark and Lauren decided they needed to build their email list. They realized that they couldn’t just be dependent on social media to reach their audiences any more.

Emails with a personal touch and a freebie

So they stopped the RSS emails and started writing emails to the list with a much more personal tone. Lauren says she doesn’t use “form emails,” where you’re just getting a digest of new content. It has to look like you personally have written the emails. You’ve got to write them as if you were writing to a close friend.

Mark and Lauren also started offering freebies for signing up the email list. They’ve got different freebies available depending on what content you’re looking at when you sign up.

They’ll also start the email with your first name, when possible. Now, it’s true that the more details you ask for when someone is signing up to an email list, the less likely they are to sign up. Mark and Lauren only ask for your first name and your email address, most of the time. But on the mobile version of the site, they only want your email address, because it’s harder to fill in multiple fields on a phone or tablet.

Mark and Lauren use ConvertKit to manage their email marketing, but Lauren also responds to every single email that comes to their inbox.

Convert Kit

 

Wait, what?! 750 new subscribers per day, and she answers every single email?!

Yes! Lauren is careful to say that she only gets about 20 emails per day, even though they have lots of new subscribers. And she does use some canned responses, if people send frequently asked questions. But she does spend one to two hours per day just answering email.

This really sets the blog apart: Lauren and Mark are willing to invest in the people who come to their website. The community is everything. Lauren says, “if we don’t have them, we don’t have anything.”

Where Do I Start?

So if I want to build my email list the way that Mark and Lauren have, where should I start? How do I up my marketing game?

Offer a ton of value in your free giveaway

The first thing, Mark says, is to think about what kind of people you want on your list. Then, make sure that your freebies match the audience you’re targeting.

For example, Mark and Lauren were previously giving away a meal plan as a freebie, but they have since changed the focus on their blog. Where they were more about food before, now they are more focused on budgeting and debt reduction. So the meal plan giveaway no longer attracts the right kind of audience.

You need to think about who specifically you’re targeting, even within your niche. What are their needs and problems? Then, think about what you can create that will be attractive enough to them that they’ll want to sign up to your list.

You also want to offer a ton of value in your free giveaway. This helps to build trust in you and your brand. Don’t just throw them a one-page printout. Lauren says that kind of thing is just “lame.” Instead, really “knock their socks off.” Lauren and Mark are currently offering a 15-page budget pack with an explanation of how to use it and a customized spreadsheet. That’s the kind of thing they could charge for, but they’re happy to give it away if it gets people in the door.

One thing that stands out to me is the utility of that budget pack. This freebie is something that Lauren and Mark’s email subscribers will use every day in their life or in their business. And because the spreadsheet is branded, they’ll be reminded of LaurenGreutman.com every time they open it. Genius!

So think: if you were in the position of your target reader, what would actually be useful for you? I could picture giving away an affiliate tracker spreadsheet, or an income tracking spreadsheet for bloggers, for example.

Write a really creative, compelling, long form piece of content.

Okay, so you’ve created your awesome resource to give away. Now what?

Write a really creative, compelling, long form piece of content with an emotional hook that gets people to sign up for your list. For example, Mark and Lauren recently did a post called “How to Budget When You Don’t Make Enough Money.” It hits all the pain points of people in debt or up at night worrying about bills.

The invitation to download their budget pack is embedded in the article copy, repeated at the end of the article, and in a pop-up. So a reader has three different opportunities to sign up.

Using Social Media Advertising

Then, once you have the content, get it out there on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Keep in mind that you’ll pay less for ad space if you are promoting content. It costs significantly less to promote a blog post as compared to a landing page.

Your goal is to get people to this piece of content in the cheapest way possible. The secret? Really good copy for the text you see on the ad itself. This is so important. It has to be super engaging if you want the cost per click to go down–which you do!

Get Your Content Out There

The first step to creating amazing copy is to test it out with organic reach. Mark and Lauren have 134,000 Facebook fans, so they can usually tell within the first hour if something they’ve posted is doing really well and is worth promoting. We’ll stick to tips for Facebook here, since that’s where most of my audience is focusing.

That might seem intimidating if you only have 500 or 1,000 followers, but your audience are still the best gauge of how strong your copy is. If you normally get 5 shares, but something you post gets 20 or 30, you know you’re onto something.

Mark also emphasizes that shares and click-through rates are much more important statistics than likes when testing your copy. Then, when you set up your ad campaign later on, make sure you’re measuring clicks, not engagement.

In the organic phase, it can be good to test copy by posting the same content a few different ways. Or, you can just go in and edit a post that isn’t performing as well as you’d like. Mark and Lauren have done this before, and they always see an increase in engagement once they adjust the copy.

You want to be paying attention to your RPM. That’s your ad revenue per 1,000 page views. If you know your RPM, and you divide that number by 1,000, you’ll have a rough sense of your ad revenue per page view. So if your RPM is $10, you’re getting a penny per page view.

So now, the goal is to get people onto your site for a penny each, because then that’s free traffic. In other words, you want to be earning the same amount from each visit that you’re paying for each click. And then, once they’re there, everything you make through autoresponders and your own products and affiliate links is “gravy.”

Getting Cheap Clicks

Sounds good, but these are hypothetical numbers. Like, it’s not possible to get down to a penny per click…right?

Actually, Mark and Lauren say, “YES.” It is definitely possible to get down to a penny per click. It takes some testing and experience, and it won’t happen every time, but it is possible. They’ve done it.

So how do we get those cheap clicks? Unfortunately, there’s no single formula that works every time. Mark said that it takes testing. So what does he test? And how?

You’ve got to test all kinds of things: the audience you’re targeting, the image you’re using, the copy… Basically, you have to do some kind of split testing if you want to get the cost per click relatively low.

Split Test Social Media Ads

If that sounds intimidating, there are some third-party sites that can help. Mark and I have both used AdEspresso in the past, which makes split testing really easy. It costs $49 per month, but it will auto-generate ads with all the different variables for you, which is a big help, especially if you’ve never done split testing before.  

You’ll also need to think about who you’re targeting, and how. Hit your own fans first, and then branch out to a “lookalike audience.” A lookalike audience just means an audience that has similar demographics to yours. Facebook’s ad manager can help you identify and target these audiences.

Sometimes, it’s even easier to just target Facebook pages similar to yours. If you know that there’s an audience within your niche who would be interested in your product, you can target them directly through a Facebook fan page rather than targeting a generic lookalike audience.

It can also help to have multiple email lists. So, for example, if Mark and Lauren have a cookbook list, and they want to target them with a budgeting freebie, they can upload that cookbook list to Facebook and target those people with ads for their new product.

You’ll want to cast your net pretty wide with all of this stuff. Sometimes, your cost per click goes up because your ads are just landing in front of the same people over and over, so they’re not clicking again. You need to be able to scale up once you have a formula that works.

Final Tips?

Make sure you’ve got autoresponders set up! Once you get people on your email list, you need to engage them right away. Make sure that they’re a “warm” list.

Engage with the people on your list

When someone signs on to Mark and Lauren’s email list, they get a thank-you page with a video of Lauren right away. It helps to put a face to the name.

Then, they get multiple emails from Lauren over the course of the next week through one of the autoresponders. Again, it’s important to give these emails a really personal tone. You want your audience to feel like you’re just talking to them. This helps them to feel more engaged and keeps your unsubscribes down. That way, you can focus on selling them, and you can use the list when you launch a new product. In addition, your list will come back to the site and generate even more ad revenue.

Mark points out that it’s also important to have relevant affiliate links. You should also make sure that you tag them, so that you can keep track of exactly what people are paying for and how much each person on the email list is worth to you (but that’s a whole other podcast…!).

If the numbers in this podcast seem intimidating, don’t worry! These tips will help you grow your email list no matter what stage you’re at. If you’re currently growing your list by 5 people per day, and you can get that up to 20 or 30 just by spending some money on ads in a targeted way, that’s a huge, huge improvement! Those are people that you can nurture and build a relationship with. It doesn’t have to be hundreds of new subscribers to make a difference.

And, finally, remember that “your money is in your list.” Mark and Lauren say that their email list is the number one most valuable asset in their business, and it should be yours, too!

Where Can I Learn More?

If you want to know more about what Mark and Lauren are up to, or you want to take advantage of that awesome budget pack, or maybe you even want to buy some of their products, head on over to LaurenGreutman.com.

Resources Mentioned

• Website – LaurenGreutman.com
• The Recovering Spender – best selling book written by Lauren
• Previous interviews with Lauren at Become a Blogger:
  • Episode 147: How to Get Media Exposure for Your Blog
  • Episode 173: A Pinterest Strategy That Makes Sense
• Tools used:
  • ConvertKit – helped them manage email marketing
  • AdEspresso – helps make ad split testing easier by auto-generating ads with all the different variables for you

Infographic

How to Grow Your Email List by 750 Subscribers Per Day

The post How to Grow Your Email List by 750 Subscribers Per Day – Mark and Lauren Greutman appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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Check Out This Chrome Extension to Network Like a Boss!

As you probably know, networking is essencial, regarless of your professional field. Whether you are a lawyer, teacher, corporate employee, freelancer or business owner, having a large and active network of contacts can make or break your career.

Back in the day networking was all about going to conventions and trading business cards. Today, thanks god, things are digital. Instead of trading business cards you add people on social networks, which include Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to get started.

With me so far? Good.

The problem is that the vast majority of business communications take place over email. Even people who still like to trade business cards will only include their email addresses and phone numbers on the business cards. That is a problem because while email helps for networking, it’s not ideal.

Networking is also about getting to know the other person, her interests and areas of expertise, her latest career moves and so on. Likewise you want to show to your network of contacts your interests, areas of expertise and so on.

Social networks are the ideal platform for that, but so far we only have the email of our professional contacts.

Is there a solution? Yes, and it’s a clever Google Chrome extension called ManyContacts.

I say clever because it’s a very simple yet quite useful idea: simply visit a web page and it will recognize all the emails there and display their respective social networks. For instance, if you open your gmail, it will display the social networks of all your contacts. Sweet huh? Here’s a video showing how it works:

Now get off your bu** and start adding those contacts to your social networks. If you have a lot of them, do so in daily batches (20 or so every day). It’s a bit of work now, but it probably will pay its dividens in the future!

Original post: Check Out This Chrome Extension to Network Like a Boss!

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Why the Video Platform Reigns as the Best of Internal Communications Tools

If you’re on an internal communications team, you’ve probably felt at some point that you’re in a bit of a thankless job. You don’t have a direct line to bringing in sales and increasing profits or building product lines. Yours is the job that’s tougher to measure – you’re focused on communicating with and engaging employees, and helping them feel connected to the business, leading to an increase in morale and productivity. But employees are too busy for you and your messages! They have work to do and don’t want distractions or uninteresting information.

Your role is vital to your business, yet your efforts may not be getting the recognition they need and deserve. But why? You’re using email, communicating on your company intranet or social platform…you’re trying to strengthen your strategy with all the best internal communications tools.

But are you using video? 54% of internal communications professionals say their employees expect video. Not only do they want it, but employees have come to expect it! So if you want to give employees what they want and need, video is key. But how do you do it? You can’t put internal (and confidential) information on YouTube, and you probably don’t have a background in IT or development to figure out how to embed video files on your site.

That’s why the smartest internal communicators look to a video platform to enhance their communications tools and strategies. Why? Let me count the reasons for you, so when you’re considering the best internal communications tools to strengthen your own results, you’ll know exactly what to look for:

1. Securely share your internal and confidential information

One of the biggest concerns for an internal communications team? That any of the materials disseminated to employees may find their way outside of the company, which can lead to product patent issues, security leaks, or any other breaches. With a video platform, you can lock down your videos so they are accessible only through certain domains, or by predefined groups or email addresses. So no matter how you share your information, you can rest easy knowing that it’s well protected, and can only be viewed by the audience you intended. 

2. Embed and share your videos where your employees are

YouTube isn’t always a great solution for internal communication teams due to security, and also because some locations around the world block the site. If you’re a large company with offices around the world, you need something better. No matter what size company you are, you need a solution that reaches your employees on any device, using multiple communications vehicles. If a video platform is one of your internal communications tools, you can easily embed your video content on your Intranet, or even in your email (by including a clickable video thumbnail that opens up on a branded ‘sharing page’). You can even include all your content on a Video Hub, which acts like your own internal YouTube channel, where employees can search organized content. No matter where they are, or if they’re using a mobile device or computer, you’ll be able to get your employees video content that will help them feel connected to you.

3. Edit your content easily, without the mess of tearing down and resharing

One of the constants about internal communications is that it’s always changing. Often messages need to be edited to heighten urgency, revise dates or action items, emphasize key points or remove outdated ones, or even fix accidental errors. But if you’ve shared content through a variety of vehicles it can take a lot of time and effort to pull down all the content and reshare it – you may even lose track of where it’s been shared. When you’re using a video platform as part of your internal communications tools, you can edit a video in your library, and wherever that video has been shared by you, it will automatically update with the new version. You’ll have the confidence of knowing that your employees will always have the latest and greatest information.

4. Get the analytics you need to strengthen your content

However you’re disseminating your messages, how do you know how they’re being received? Are your employees deleting your emails or only skimming them? How often are they accessing your Intranet? If you’re using a video platform to manage your video content, you’ll get detailed analytics on what your viewers are watching, skipping, and rewatching. You’ll know for certain, in greater depth than with other communications mediums, how your content is resounding with employees. That kind of data can help you plan your future communications content and goals, so you can give your employees what’s most useful and relevant to them. You can access this unmatched insight into your audience’s digital body language any time, giving you a more honest and real-time look at employees’ true engagement levels.

5. Take advantage of the full power of video live streaming

Town hall meetings, executive messages, company events…with live streaming, you can share whatever you want in the moment, bringing your employees into a relevant and exciting experience. If you’re using a video platform, you can live stream your videos and offer the content to employees on any device and through multiple vehicles. Your video platform can even give you analytics on this live streamed content, like who watched, which parts they watched, and where they dropped off. You can even turn this live streamed content into immediately accessible on-demand video, so the content can live on and continue telling its story (how useful is that for out-of-office or sick employees, or those who work in different time zones!).

6. Control your story by providing a distraction-free journey of relevant content

If you’re sending out internal communications messages in a one-and-done format, you may keep your employees’ interest for one message, but how do you hold on to that engagement for the next and the next communication? How are you offering related content on the same or similar topics?

If you’re using a video platform, you can add annotations and calls-to-action into your videos (during playback or when the video ends), so right when your audience is interested in learning more or if you want them to take a required action, you have a way for them to do that. Like this:

You can add ‘playlists’ of videos into your video as well, so you can link related content and keep your audience moving along a journey without making them sit through one giant, long video. Then they can pick the video that’s most relevant to them, especially if you’ve created content based on team or skill/knowledge level etc. Like this:

If you’re using the right video platform, you can also create a Video Hub, which I briefly mentioned above as a place where your videos may be embedded and shared. A Video Hub is essentially your own YouTube channel but better, so they’re perfect for creating a journey of content: there are no distractions, no ads, no trying to dig through videos and find what you’re looking for. You can organize all your video content in one place, in whatever searchable categories you like, so your employees can easily and quickly get what they need. Your strong content can live on, continuing to drive action and improve engagement. Here are a couple snippets of one of our Hubs, showing videos broken down by category:

7. Create an experience for your employees that’s part of your brand

You know when you’re searching the Internet and you come across a video on a website and you know instantly that it’s a YouTube video that they’ve embedded on their site? That’s because of YouTube’s easily recognized and ubiquitous branding: their play button, red colors, and logo all give it away. But do you really want to be representing YouTube (or any other video player) to your employees? While it is actually possible to remove the YouTube logo from your videos, a video platform can take your branding even further – you have the ability to brand your own video player (the container that holds and plays your video file) with your brand colors and logo so you can strengthen your brand’s power with your employees. After all, credibility can be influenced by the small details; just like you wouldn’t want your communications going out with spelling and grammar mistakes, a branded player can tell your audience that you’ve worked hard to present them a polished, professional, and strongly relevant and engaging message.

8. Don’t worry about coding or bugging the IT department

The best may have been saved for last! Communications teams need to work fast – imperative messages can’t wait. You need tools that work as fast as you do, and make your job easier. The right video platform handles all the nitty gritty work so you don’t have to. No coding to embed or update videos, or share live streaming content, or add calls-to-action. No having to work with IT to get your video content and platform working seamlessly with your other tools and communications vehicles. With the right video platform, all you need to worry about is your message, and the platform handles the rest! Isn’t that a relief!

Still unsure if video is right for you? Here are a few more reasons why your employees really want video!

Are you using a video platform or looking to add it into your strategy? What excites you the most about it? Do you have any burning questions you’d love to get the answer to? Let us know!

The post Why the Video Platform Reigns as the Best of Internal Communications Tools appeared first on Vidyard.

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Color Theory and Blog Design: What You Need to Know

While the heart of blogging is writing, don’t assume that you can develop a successful blog without paying attention to strategic design. A good design attracts visitors and increases the likelihood that they’ll stay on your site for longer periods of time. Specifically, you should be paying attention to the role of color theory in blog design.

Why Color Matters

In order to understand the power of color, let’s pause and think about the analogy of a flower garden. A flower garden is designed to attract people. But if there are no bright colored flowers, will anyone even pause to experience it? “In order to transform a garden, it needs vibrant colors that can capture the attention of all those who walk past,” points out Tammy Sons of Garden Delights.

The same holds true for a blog. A blog is designed to attract people, but unless there are visual and psychological triggers reeling people in, nobody is going to pause to read and share the content. And much like a flower garden, color plays a role in this attraction.

Three Things You Need to Know

Whether you realize it or not, color matters. Great blog content is important, but you won’t have any readers if you don’t visually and psychologically entice them. Here are a few specific things you should know about color theory and blog design:

1. Different Colors Have Different Meanings

Color isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about, but the world’s most successful brands spend thousands of hours stressing over getting the perfect pigmentation in their color schemes. Why? Because they realize different colors have very different meanings.

Whereas blue promotes stability, confidence, and trust, red ignites feelings of passion, power, and desire. Green is usually associated with the great outdoors or money, while purple is the color of royalty and luxury.

Depending on your blog’s aim, your current color scheme may be helping or hindering your goals. Studying color theory and understanding the meanings behind different colors and how they interact with one other in a color theme can help you tremendously.

2. There’s Value in Negative Space

It’s easy to fall for the assumption that more color is always better, but as you’ve probably discovered from visiting other blogs and websites, the minimalist approach is popular right now. Particularly, there’s value in negative space.

“The use of negative space plays a huge role in usability,” designer Rob Bowen says. “Users not only need to be able to comfortably read all of the content on the site, but they also need to be able to easily find what they are looking for.” Negative space – which is most often white, but doesn’t have to be – creates division and simplifies the user experience for the reader.

3. Colors Draw People In

We often think about color in terms of big picture schemes and layouts, but color also plays a role in the details. For example, colors are frequently used to bring attention to CTA buttons, subscription forms, or other conversion-based elements. As you can see from this oft-cited study, simply changing a button from one color to another can have a significant impact on conversion rates. Keep this in mind as you make color decisions in these areas.

Make Color a Priority

As you can see, color shouldn’t be an afterthought. In terms of blog design, it needs to be made a priority. If you respect the role that color theory plays in influencing the human brain, then you stand a much better chance of developing a vibrant blog that reaches people on many different levels.

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More Content is Not Always Better – Wise Words from Chris Vandermarel

Content marketing may be all the rage, but now that everyone is doing it — how can brands stay relevant? Leveraging good content is just the beginning – but taking advantage of every opportunity to engage with prospects and keep them excited is what smart marketers are doing to keep ahead of the curve. And to understand how companies can make the most of their content, we sat down with Chris Vandermarel, Demand Generation Manager at Toronto-based LookBookHQ.

Vandermarel helps bring leads into the popular content engagement platform, and his place within the company is one part drive, one part serendipity. “I love technology, and from the early days I had a Mac at home, and really loved the intersection of art and science that happened in the digital platform,” Vandermarel said, “Coming out of school, I graduated with a business degree, concentration in Marketing, and I knew I really wanted to exist where marketing and technology coincide.”

Past roles at ESRI and the Activa Group gave Vandermarel a solid background in marketing automation and demand generation, but it was a chance meeting that brought him to LookBookHQ. “By coincidence I ran into an account executive at LookbookHQ who I went to school with at an airport. He quickly gave me a demo of LookbookHQ and after that I got connected with the Director of Marketing and found my home in demand generation at LookBookHQ.”

We sat down with Vandermarel to get his take on how content marketing has evolved, and how demand generation professionals can keep prospects coming back for more. Let’s dig in!

How has content marketing evolved since you started in demand generation?

Content marketing has changed a lot, and I’ve definitely seen a few big shifts. A lot of marketers have been asked to think like publishers, and I think a lot of marketers also misinterpreted that and started creating more and more content with a “more is better” mentality. But we really have to move beyond that and try to work to surface the right content at the right time — as well as keeping buyers engaged once they interact with that content.

How can B2B marketers stand out amidst the noise?

Digital B2B marketing has become a very noisy space. A lot of people are trying to say a lot of things, but I can talk a bit about how we get around this at LookBookHQ. We’re blessed with a really solid creative team here. They do great work, and we really try to look at things in two ways. We look at not only at what we’re saying, but how we’re saying it.

With respect to how we’re saying it, we really try to have a tone that is attractive, funny and ironic. It really gets to the point and doesn’t use fluffy words.

And in terms of what we’re saying, we want to serve up content that people will find valuable. We know whether it’s an eBook or a white paper, or case study, the people consuming the content are trying to answer the question “What’s in it for me?” I think that’s something that we all need to think about as marketers and make sure that we’re always answering that question, otherwise our campaigns are doomed to fail from the beginning.

How do you keep prospects engaged with your content?

Our tagline at LookBookHQ is “do more with the moment” and what we’re really trying to do is take those precious moments of attention that those prospects give you, and make sure that you’re maximizing them, and that you’re getting as much out of it as possible.

This is something that digital publishers do really well, including sites like Netflix and YouTube. I don’t know how many times you go on YouTube trying to find a certain video, but then you end up watching three, four or five additional videos because there’s just so much recommended content that comes up as you’re watching that primary piece.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with our platform and our own marketing – we’re trying to do as much as we can with that moment of attention because it’s very costly to bring people back with retargeting and email communications, with click-through rates as low as they are. So the more that you can get with that moment of attention the better!

How does LookBook market itself?

I would say our marketing is both efficient and effective, and what we usually try to do is start with a core message that we really want to own, and want to resonate with our audience.

It really all trickles down from there because we can pump that into all kinds of different campaigns that we’re running. We’re also very critical of the programs we take on, we make sure that we’re calculating the ROI on them, we make sure that they’re having a strong impact on the funnel, and most importantly we look at the attributed revenue when we’re done.

What resources do you read, listen to, or watch to become better at your job?

Of course, I love the Vidyard blog – I think you’re doing awesome stuff there. I like the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog too. I think that the Demand Gen Report and MarketingSherpa are doing a great job with the different research studies they’re putting out, and the case studies that they have.

I really try to make sure that I’m a part of the online communities for technologies that we use, from Marketo to Eloqua to Engagio, and I make sure that I stay apprised of what’s going on there. And with any live events, I’m making sure I come out to any case studies, and hands-on sessions so I can see the tactics that marketers are using.

The post More Content is Not Always Better – Wise Words from Chris Vandermarel appeared first on Vidyard.

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5 Psychology-Backed Design Tips to Dramatically Improve Your Blog Engagement

Why do people read blogs?

In some cases, they’re looking for information. In others, they’re looking for things to buy. Sometimes, they just want to be entertained.

No matter what the case may be, one thing is certain: when people find that perfect blog, they stick with it – coming back day after day to read, comment, and share.

The question is, though, how you become that blogger. If you’re looking for ways to boost your blog engagement and entice your readers to stick around, the answer may be as simple as tapping into your readers’ psychology to make your entire site more compelling from the inside out.

Read on.

How Your Blog’s Design Affects its Message

Let’s face it: people don’t base their opinions of your blog solely on the words that you use. Instead, they look at the whole picture: the layout, formatting, and design of your blog, as well as the content.

While most people assume they don’t need a beautiful blog, a beautiful blog layout can provoke powerful subconscious reactions in your customers. In addition to the fact that a well-designed blog looks more professional, it’s also more compelling, which makes readers more likely to convert.

Want a Bigger Blog Engagement (Starting Right Now)? Try These 5 Science-Backed Design Tips for

So, you want to offer the whole package – amazing content and a beautiful layout, but how do you do it? According to Neil Patel, the best approach is through psychology.

Here are five science-backed design tips that you can apply to your blog, starting right now.

1. Choose your colors according to the emotions you want your visitors to feel

Did you know that color has the potential to influence mood? Some of the biggest bloggers out there know this. Take a look at Moz, for example, which uses a color scheme of blue and white:

There’s also HubSpot, which relies on orange, white and gray:

According to various scientific studies, colors have a large impact on the way people think and feel. For example, one experiment conducted in Glasgow, Scotland found that adding blue-tinged (a color associated with peacefulness) streetlights to crime-prone areas decreased the crime rate. Other studies have found that red increase the rapidity and force of a person’s reactions.

With this in mind, consider what emotions you want to convey through your blog design before you choose your color scheme. To help you decide, here’s a breakdown (courtesy of Robert Plutchik’s color wheel) of various colors and the emotion associated with them:

2. Use images to make your readers have a physical reaction

Visuals are powerful, and they make a large difference in the way people perceive blogs. While people remember only 10% of what they read, they remember 65% of what they see. The reason for this is simple: a picture is worth a thousand words and a quick glimpse at an image can fill us with emotions ranging from happiness to anguish, and everything in between.

With this in mind, make the most of visuals to evoke a profound physical reaction from your readers.

For a company that does this well, look no further than Airbnb, which features stunning images on both its homepage:

And its blog:

While visuals can make your blog more impactful, there are a few rules for using them. Follow these tips for best results:

• Keep visuals relevant to your audience. If an image is of a place, it should look like the place you serve customers or live. If an image is of people, they should resemble your target audience. The more relevant an image is, the more compelling it will be.
• Visuals must be high-quality. Low-quality visuals will damage your website more than they improve it. With this in mind, seek out high-quality stock images, or hire a professional photographer to take pictures of your products or goods.
• Visuals must serve a purpose. If you’re going to use visuals, make sure they add something to your site. Customers don’t want to navigate random visuals, nor should they have to.

3. Use fewer social sharing buttons to increase shares

Sound like a counterintuitive bit of advice? It’s not. The reason behind this is a little thing called Hick’s Law. Hick’s law states that, when people have more choices, they take longer to make decisions. In some cases, the volume of stimuli can be so overwhelming that a person won’t make any decision at all. If that person is on your blog, and the decision is whether (and how) to share your content, that’s bad news.

Take Hick’s Law into consideration on your site by decreasing the number of social share buttons associated with your blog posts. Not convinced this will help promote engagement? Neil Patel reports that, when he increased the number of share buttons on Quick Sprout from 3 to 5, his shares declined by 29%!

With this in mind, look at the breakdown of your share percentages according to site. If there’s a button that’s not performing well, remove it and give your readers a break.

Check out how HubSpot does this on one of their recent blogs:

4. Make the design of your CTA stand out

The human brain loves symmetry. Multiple studies have shown how symmetrical patterns like the markings on a butterfly’s wings or the patterns of a coral reef fish are pleasing to the mind. As a marketer, though, you can take this desire for symmetry and use it to your advantage by making one key component of your website asymmetrical.

That’s right.

Because the brain is so drawn to symmetry, making something asymmetrical serves to grab a person’s attention, without making them angry or alienating them in the process.

For an example of a CTA that does this well, check out how Neil Patel uses a very asymmetrical CTA button at the top of his page:

While the color scheme of the button (orange, like other elements on his page) allows it to blend in, its size, shape, and font are asymmetrical when compared to the other menu items. This draws more attention and, presumably, more clicks.

To bring this to your site, design the most important component of your site (your CTA button, your “contact us” button, etc.) to stand out by making it a different size, shape, or format than everything else.

5. Be interesting by being interested

People crave emotional connection. In 1995, scientists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary published a paper titled “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” The paper stated that people need positive human interactions and long-term care and concern from other people to be happy.

To apply this tactic to your marketing, seek to develop emotional connections with your readers on your web page. Why? When readers are emotionally connected to your brand, they’re more likely to engage with your content, share your material, and return to your site again and again.

With this in mind, here are several tips for developing an emotional relationship with your readers:

• Be interested in them. Poll your readers for their experience, ask for their input, and feature their photos, videos, and reviews on your site. All of these things show that you care for your readers and that they play an active role in your business.
• Tell stories. Stories are an elemental thing, and people find them comforting. Because of this, bring storytelling elements into your brand story, blog content, and social media.
• Respond to their questions, concerns, and needs – and do it fast! To build a long-term relationship, engage with your customers via blog comments, social media, and reviews. Be advised that 39% of customers expect companies to reply to complaints and inquiries on social media within 60 minutes, though, so it pays to be snappy!

A More Engaging Blog Starts Here

Writing a blog you can be proud of starts with knowing how to use psychology to make it as engaging as possible. Whether your blog is for personal or business use, these five science-backed tips will contribute to making it compelling, unique, and engaging for your audience.

Dave is the CEO of Dave’s Computers Inc. He writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips covering the best tips about blogging and Internet marketing. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

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Pinterest Strategy: How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog – with Bob Lotich

Pinterest Strategy: How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog – with Bob Lotich

Episode: 286
Who: Bob Lotich
Website: SeedTime.com

Did you know Pinterest can boost traffic to your blog?

Think your content isn’t right for Pinterest? Think again!

For today’s episode, I’m on the line with Bob Lotich, creator of SeedTime.com. It’s a personal finance blog that looks at money from a Biblical perspective. He started it back in 2007, and it has since grown into a multi-author blog with a whole bunch of awesome content helping people all over the world. At a recent conference, Bob shared how he has been using Pinterest to cause an explosion of traffic over the last few years.

Needless to say, I was impressed. Why? Because his blog isn’t about cooking, DIY or any of the other very visual platforms that seem to dominate Pinterest. His blog is about managing your finances. I thought to myself, if Bob could kill it with Pinterest in that niche, we could all learn a lot from what he’s doing!

Bob’s Story

Bob has actually been on the podcast twice before. He was here for Episode 81: How to Build a Successful Blog in a Competitive Niche and for Episode 168: How One Simple Strategy Increased Adsense Earnings by 80%. If you want to know more about Bob’s backstory, head on over to those episodes.

Back then, Bob’s blog was called Christian PF, but he’s in the middle of rebranding to SeedTime.com right now. He’s still trying to reach a Christian market, but he and his team feel that this change will help them reach their goals as a business. The name comes from the Book of Genesis, where it says that there will be seed time and there will be harvest. Basically, when you invest the time to plant, you will reap the rewards.

So…Pinterest?

So what makes a personal finance blogger decide to get into Pinterest?

Bob says that his Google traffic started dropping off in about 2013. And he started to get nervous, because he’s feeding his family with this blog!

So he took action by diving into Facebook. For about 6 months, he devoted all of his energy to getting traffic from Facebook. And it worked, sort of. He ended up with about 10-15,000 views per month from Facebook. That’s okay, but it paled in comparison to what he had been seeing previously.

Seed Time Facebook page

Then he started really looking at his analytics and he realized: he had put all that effort into Facebook, and he was still getting more traffic from Pinterest without doing anything. He had made a Pinterest account years ago, but he wasn’t very active on it.

So Bob thought, “why don’t I try to actually learn Pinterest?”

After 18 months, he had gone from about 12,000 views per month to 500,000 views per month from Pinterest. Yes, you read that correctly. Five. Hundred. Thousand. In his best month, he had 640,000 views from Pinterest. That dropped off a little after a while, and today Bob routine gets 300-400,000 visits per month just from Pinterest. Not too shabby.

How To Use Pinterest

If you want to snag some of that traffic, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First of all, think about conversions. You can have millions of visitors, but they’re worth nothing to you if they aren’t there for the right reasons. Bob told me a story about his wife’s blog to illustrate this point.

Bob’s wife ran a style blog for a while, and back in 2010 she had posted about a friend’s wedding. It was a very Pinterest-worthy wedding, and the photographer took gorgeous photos. When Bob’s wife pinned the story, she got something like 400,000 repins on the platform and over 1,000 views per month on the site–but she made almost no money from it.

Seed Time Pinterest page

Why? Pinterest is a very visual medium, and so people were coming to the blog just to download the pretty pictures and not to actually engage with the content.

The lesson, Bob says, is that “you can have things get repinned like crazy, and you can even capture traffic from Pinterest, but if it’s coming to your site for the wrong reason, it’s of no value to you.” A repin is not the same as a visit to your site (just like a Facebook share or a retweet), and a visit does not automatically equal value for you. You want visitors who are there to learn something or to buy something, not visitors who just want to download an image.

What Works on Pinterest?

That said, Bob’s Pinterest visitors are actually among his most profitable customers. Pinterest traffic has actually performed better than Google traffic for him! They sign up to the email list at a much higher rate, and Adsense offers convert better, too.

The key, he says, is to know how to target your audience.

Problem-solving content works really well on Pinterest. A “how-to” image pulls your audience in for all the right reasons. It’s about aligning their intentions with your business goals.

For each of his blog posts, Bob includes an image formatted for Pinterest. That means vertical rather than horizontal orientation, because vertical images get more “real estate” on Pinterest. It’s best to have a 2:3 ratio (2 wide to 3 tall).

Use the recommended Pinterest image format for your pins

Then, he creates a text overlay that explains the content of the post and gives the title. That way, no one is going to repin Bob’s images just because they’re pretty. They’re repinning and clicking through because they want to go to the article and find out the answer.

Top tip: don’t put the answer on the image! Create a little mystery. Infographics will get repinned like crazy, but they won’t drive traffic back to your site.

Even though you don’t want your visitors to be totally focused on the image, you still have to make a really great graphic. Bob usually creates his images in Photoshop, but you can also use a free service called Canva.com. In fact, I use Canva for Become a Blogger! It’s a great service that even has some Pinterest templates to get you started.

Remember that Pinterest is a VERY visual platform. You’re competing with great designers, and the audience in 70-80% women. You’ve got to have great images, with consistent branding, in order to be successful.

Collaborative Boards

Okay, so you’ve got great images, you’ve got tantalizing descriptions, and you’re ready to start pinning. What now?

Bob says you have to understand that most people use Pinterest as a bookmarking platform. It’s not social in the same way that Facebook and Twitter are. People may not intend to share when they repin. They might just be saving the article for later. But the sharing happens as a side effect. As a result, people might pin 10 or 15 things at once. It’s not like Facebook, where one or two posts per day will do the trick. The intention is different.

Still, when something gets pinned, it goes out to the pinner’s followers. So it’s important to have a following.

But what if you’re starting from scratch? That’s where collaborative boards can be really useful.

Pinterest is structured around user “boards,” which basically work like bulletin boards. If you were working on a project, you might have a bulletin board where you pin up inspirational images. Pinterest works on the same principle. So boards are usually topical: you might have a gardening board, or a blogging board, or a wedding planning board.

Seed Time – Money Saving Board on Pinterest

Collaborative boards or group boards are boards that have multiple contributors, so lots of people are pinning content to the same board. Some group boards have hundreds of contributors. And they’re great because once you’re on a group board, you’re all tapping into each others’ audiences.

So if Bob had a blogging group board, and he invited me to pin there, I could pin to Bob’s blogging board whenever I wanted. And if Bob had a much bigger following than I did on Pinterest, that could be really, really helpful.

But how do you know which boards to join? How do you even find them?

Bob recommends a site called PinGroupie.com. There, you can look for group boards that you’d want to be part of. You can get a description and some stats about each board. You want to look for boards with lots of repins per pin and likes per pin, although repins are more important than likes.
Once you find a board you want to join, take a look at the description to see if they’re accepting new contributors. Some will be totally closed off, but others will provide information about how to contact them if you want to join.

PinGroupie Filter

These group boards sound great! Why bother even having your own boards? Why not just devote all your time to group boards?

Bob says once you’re set up on Pinterest, it’s definitely fine to focus on the group boards. But having your own profile gives you credibility with group board owners. If your profile is just totally empty, the board owner might think you’re a spammer.

Also, if someone finds you through a group board, but then your profile is empty, they won’t be incentivized to click through to your blog or to follow you.

So you should also spend some time building up your own profile on Pinterest before you ask to join a group board. Bob advises taking a couple of weeks to build up your own following, get some pins up, and do some repinning yourself before you reach out to group boards.

Bob’s Pinterest Workflow

Bob says it’s important to have a “Pin It” button on your website, which you can set up with a WordPress plugin. Even just including that button will bring you some Pinterest traffic.

“Pin It” buttons placed in the website

It’s also crucial to look at the rules and guidelines for each group board that you join. They’ll all be slightly different. Bob recommends making a spreadsheet to keep all of that information in one place.

Bob uses a mixed workflow with Pinterest. Some of his pins are scheduled, but he and his assistant manually pin a lot, too. It’s so easy to do, and he thinks there may be an algorithm advantage to manual pinning.

Determine the Number of pins per day you need to do

When you start building your profile, or you start pinning to group boards, it’s best to start with your highest-performing content.

Check board rules about repinning the same content. Different boards will have different “spam thresholds,” so build a schedule and a pattern for repinning that you’re comfortable with and that follows the rules.

In terms of quantity, Bob and his team don’t push boundaries in terms of what boards allow. Even if he was allowed to do ten pins a day on one board, he wouldn’t. It’s just too aggressive. He’s on about 100 boards, and he says that 15-20 of those are what he would consider his top boards. He pins at least once a day to those. Overall, Bob pins 15-30 times total per day to group boards.

He also pins other people’s content on his regular (non-group) boards. He’s got 15-20 of those, and they’re mostly topical. He mostly repins other people’s content on those boards, partly because it generates good will on the platform and partly because it gives his a boost in the site’s algorithms.

A final tip: remember that you have more potential ways to communicate what a visitor will see when they get to your site on Pinterest than you do on a Google search result or even on Facebook. You’ve got the image, the title, the text overlay, the description… there are a lot of ways to get the information out. That stuff helps conversion, if you do it right. Other than that, just do what you would do with any traffic source on your site: offer content upgrades, and make sure your page design and advertising are working for you.

Where Can I Learn More?

If you want more detail about how to drive traffic using Pinterest, you’re in luck. Bob actually did a talk about this subject at FinCon in 2015, and the whole thing is up on his other site, EfficientBlogging.com. Head on over http://ift.tt/2fEW5pn to hear and see his 45-minute talk.

Resources Mentioned

• SeedTime.com – Bob’s website
• Social Media Pages for SeedTime.com
  • Facebook page
  • Pinterest page
•  Previous interviews with Bob here at BecomeaBlogger.com:
  • Episode 81: How to Build a Successful Blog in a Competitive Niche
  • Episode 168: How One Simple Strategy Increased Adsense Earnings by 80%
• PinGroupie.com – where you can look for group boards that you’d want to be part of.
• EfficientBlogging.com – Bob’s new blog/ website where he shares what he’s learned about building his blog and growing his traffic to his site

Infographic

Pinterest Strategy: How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog – with Bob Lotich

The post Pinterest Strategy: How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog – with Bob Lotich appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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