Lately, it feels like Google is cracking down harder on blackhat backlinks. The days of ranking by spamming blog comments across the web are over. You need to focus on building in-content, contextually relevant backlinks on high DA/PA sites. By “in-content”, I mean a backlink that’s within the article itself (not a comment or sidebar link).
Relevancy is also important, which is why you should always seek backlinks from sites that are in the same niche as yours. If you’re wondering why you’re not ranking in Google, then it’s probably because you haven’t built enough relevant backlinks. In this article, I’m going to show you 10 actionable ways to build whitehat backlinks to your website.
#1: Write “Blogger Roundup” Style Articles
Have you ever read articles with titles like “42 Experts Give Their Advice on….” or “10 Bloggers Share Their Favorite….”? This is an example of a blogger roundup style article. It’s when you gather the opinions of all the experts in your niche about a specific topic. You then publish this information as a single value-packed article. How does this get your backlinks? Well, chances are that at least some of the people you interviewed are going to share a link to the post on their own site. The more people you interview, the higher the chances of getting more links!
#2: Outreach (A.K.A. Guest Posting)
No matter how new you are to internet marketing, you’ve probably heard of outreach. Basically, this is when you reach out to bloggers in your niche and ask them if you can submit a guest post with your link in it. It’s a win-win for both parties: you get a link back to your site and the site owner gets awesome content for their audience. Of all the link-building strategies out there, blogger outreach is considered one of the safest in terms of not getting a Google penalty. Just make sure that you’re not posting on obvious link farms and you should be okay.
#3: Submit Testimonials
Companies are always looking for testimonials to put on the homepage of their site. Well, guess what? You can be that person who gives it. A lot of the time, companies looking for testimonials will publicly announce it: they’ll put it on their homepage, saying something along the lines of “Email us to have your site featured here” (or something similar). In other cases, they may actively email you asking for a testimonial (I’ve had both happen to me). The point is, submitting your testimonials can result in some powerful links, so don’t overlook this link-building strategy.
#4: Give Away Your Product/Service to Bloggers (For Free)
Do you have a product or service that you’re willing to give away for free in exchange for a link? If so, bloggers all around the web are willing to take them and write a review. Simply email a blogger that’s in your niche and ask them if they’d be willing to review your product or service. If they agree, they’ll write the review along with a backlink to your site. It’s fast, free, and efficient way to get a lot of backlinks to your site in a relatively short amount of time.
#5: Create an Awesome Infographic
While the popularity of infographics peaked between 2015 and 2016, they’re still very popular today. But you need to focus on making the infographic good, catchy, and memorable. On average, expect to spend a minimum of $400 on a good infographic. You’re probably thinking, “That’s a lot of money!” I agree- that’s a lot of money, but the link value you’ll get in return (if you do things right) is priceless. Once you create the infographic, submit it to bloggers in your niche and watch the backlinks flow in.
#6: Write Something Controversial
Want to get thousands of shares and/or backlinks to your site in a short amount of time? Then write something controversial. When I say controversial, I don’t mean write something spiteful, hateful, or discriminatory. I mean write something that goes against the grain. If all the bloggers in your niche agree with X, then write about why you think Y is better. For example, if you go to YouTube, you’ll notice that all the “Flat Earth Theory” videos have millions of views. Why? Because these videos are extremely controversial and provoke discussion.
#7: Broken Link Building
Broken link building is when you contact bloggers who have broken links on a specific page, and then you ask them to replace that link with one back to your site. The reason this works is because you’re helping the blogger- if you didn’t tell them about the broken link, they may have never known. To return the favor of you helping them, they’ll typically agree to replacing that link with one back to your site. It’s a simple, yet, highly effective way to build whitehat backlinks.
#8: Join HARO
HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. This is a site where reporters go to find sources for specific stories. You can sign up and then be the person who provides sources and information for reporters. If the reporter likes your respond, they’ll use you in the “Sources” section of their article, which will often include a link back to your site. One drawback is that HARO costs money to join. Still, it’s a powerful way to get backlinks from high DA sites like CNN.com, HuffingtonPost.com, etc.
#9: Turn “Mentions” into Links
Don’t you hate it when a site “mentions” you but doesn’t take the time to create the link? For example, they’ll write “Check out yoursite.com” but won’t physically insert the hyperlink. Fortunately, there’s a way to easily turn this around: simply email the site owner and ask them to add the link. Most of the time, they’ll happily do this. You can use BuzzSumo.com to see what sites are mentioning you but not physically linking to you.
#10: Do a Scholarship Giveaway
The last actionable way to build whitehat backlinks is to do a scholarship giveaway. Here’s how it works: you come up with the scholarship requirements and giveaway amount. You then contact universities and tell them about your scholarship. The universities will then link to your scholarship from their website. Since Edu links are very powerful, you only need a few of them to increase your rankings and traffic.
Bottom Line
I hope you enjoyed this post on building whitehat backlinks. Remember that building backlinks is all about persistence and patience. In other words, it’s about long-term success- not short-term gain. Whitehat backlinks typically have far less risk when it comes to getting penalized, so you can confidently build them without worrying about losing your rankings during a future Google update.
Back in 2003, online video was in its infancy. YouTube hadn’t been launched yet, and Netflix was still in the business of mailing out DVDs. But for Todd Hartley, founder and CEO of video marketing firm WireBuzz, the writing was already on the wall. Back then, Hartley was leading digital marketing for seven of the largest nationally-syndicated talk shows in Hollywood, and his job was to report what was most successful every week. “Back in 2003, it was obvious that every week my report was the same – video was getting 10x the results of our audio programs, images, blog content, articles, and anything else we were doing.”
But, as Hartley told us in interview, the timing wasn’t quite right – yet. “I placed a mental note that as bandwidth becomes more available I wanted to specialize in this tool that got freakish results. And before I knew it, in 2010 I opened up WireBuzz! Bandwidth was available, YouTube became a force to be reckoned with, and I decided that I wanted to use this powerful tool to help boost sales conversion for customers. That’s really my passion area.”
Over the past 8 years, Hartley and his team have learned quite a bit about what makes video such a powerful tool for sales and marketing. Here’s what he had to say:
What’s one aspect of video production that most companies get wrong?
The strategy part! There are random acts of video that happen every single day, and most people – even smart marketers – start to think of video and jump right to creative and ideas. But they need to step back. You have to start with strategy. When you’re dealing with strategy, you’re thinking of your end game. What is the goal? Once you have the goal you can create the strategy. Once you have the strategy, you can create the right content and then bake that strategy into the content, and start promoting it to generate that goal.
Most companies get it all wrong – they just create the video and then they try to reverse engineer how it will accomplish their goal. How are we going to deal with the CTA? And where is this video going to live? That is a big mistake. And that’s where video fails online.
Smart marketers start out with the really smart strategy and they’re able to execute all the way through the process. But most importantly, not only do they prove ROI for that video, but they also get to demonstrate that video works, and that they’re not wasting resources.
Are there any industries that you see missing out on the power of video?
The industries that have the biggest opportunity tend to be industries that are more complex to explain. In a lot of those industries the business leaders tend to be people who have seen success in an old business model and are now leading in a new business space, but haven’t evolved the way they communicate with customers.
Let’s talk about science. If the product or service has some type of research, medical, or laboratory component, that’s precisely where you should be using video. Our brains process information 60,000x faster with video than they do with text. And in those older businesses where technology or science is being used, but they’re still explaining or teaching with literature to convince and convert their prospects, they’re the ones that aren’t doing a very good job.
In these industries, the market leaders with the largest percentage growths are starting to explain what their product does through the power of video. And that’s a huge opportunity – explain the complex, in simple to understand terms, and people buy at faster rates. It’s just that simple.
How can businesses and their agencies get the most out of their relationship?
From my experience, the easiest, smartest thing to do is have a primary point of contact at both the agency and the business. These are the people who are going to filter, digest, and report back to their respective companies all the relevant details. Both companies have their own quarterback, and both quarterbacks need to clearly communicate with one another. They must be very conscious about they way they describe things, and what those changes are that need to be made. Almost every one of my clients have a very complex review process, including legal that needs to look over changes, regulators, brand managers, and brand bosses that slow down the process.
That’s totally fine with me – but where I see the biggest opportunities for growth is how those companies communicate, and how they move information. Often when the company communicates through multiple people, they end up making projects more expensive.
So I would say have one point of contact at both places, and make sure they work together – they’re not enemies! They are colleagues that are working together for one result, which is to create a very smart and very sophisticated video that helps move some business metric that these two people have decided. And once you do the the whole process starts to smooth out.
What companies do you see that are doing really great things with video?
The first one that comes to mind isCampaignMonitor. If you’re a new prospect and you arrive on their website, CampaignMonitor is doing a fabulous job of educating you from when you first arrive. They’re a marketing automation and email platform, and they start by showing you their feature set. They build instant credibility by showing you how big name brands are using their tools to amplify results. It’s really well done.
Another one is Natera, who is a client of ours. Natera is a genetic laboratory with a bunch of different tests. They have created sales enablement tools to be able to help their sales teams convince and convert at a faster rate. They communicate to two different audiences because genetic counsellors or health care professionals need to understand how the tests work. But in some cases they need to create patient-friendly videos that also bring a patient down through the awareness, consideration, and decision path too.
You have to also be studying what Gary Vaynerchuk is doing with video. He’s doing the best job with building thought leadership in the power of video and taking people along through his daily journey. The videos tell a great story because it’s Gary’s big brain in action. Watch his team, see him sit down with clients, basically get a free demo with Gary. When businesses have $30 or $50k a month to spend, they’ve already seen and been a part of the Gary V world. So they know they want to bring those resources and have him work on their project.
If you are not working on SEO, you are doing it wrong! SEO will probably give you the highest possible ROI online. That is because once your website starts ranking well you will get thousands of free visitors to your site. Not only that, those will be relevant visitors, and they might keep coming for years!
Below you will find 4 tips that you might not be using yet.
1. Optimize for mobile
Optimizing your site for mobile devices is a must today. Some large websites like eBay already get more visitors and business from mobile users than from desktop ones! On some cases, the mobile part represents 70% of all traffic and sales!
The first thing you need to do in this regard is to make sure that your site is mobile friend. Google offers a very useful and free tool that can help you identify and fix any problems that your site might have.
2. Optimize your content
Content is a big pillar of SEO, and you need to optimize it if you want to maximize your returns. There is a service called WebTextTool you can use to get real time recommendations to optimize your content and find keywords that will bring more traffic to your site. The difference between a bad and a good keyword can literally be tens of thousands of visitors every month.
If you use a CMS like Drupal or WordPress you can install their plugin and get the recommendations directly in your text editor. This will both save you time and make sure that you don’t forget to do that optimization part.
3. Get links to your content
Writing great content alone is not enough. Unless you get high quality and relevant backlinks, no one will find your great content. You can use Ahrefs to get an overview of the backlinks to your site.
Social media and social news sites represent a great way to get those initial, high quality backlinks. For instance, you can get links from YouTube, Medium, Reddit, Instagram and so on.
4. Track the progress over time
You can’t improve what you can’t measure! Make sure to track how many visitors you are getting from Google (with Google Analytics and Google Search Console), overall and for each of your popular articles.
Identify the articles that are performing better, and try to understand what you did different on those. Identify those factors, and replicate them on future articles to make sure they will attract a lot of visitors as well.
Breaking through all the marketing noise is hard enough on its own, but when your audience is other marketers, you have your work cut out for you. How do you engage people who spend every hour of their workday thinking through the same problem? We can create blog posts, ads, and case studies to grab the attention of our prospects, but when they know all the tricks of the trade, creativity is key.
At Influitive, we’ve worked for the past five years to build a whole new category of marketing—advocate marketing—to help B2B companies ignite growth through the voices of their customers. Our platform gives marketers the ability to discover, nurture, and mobilize their customer base to reach a wider audience, accelerate the sales pipeline, and improve customer engagement. It’s my job to educate our prospects on what advocate marketing is, why it’s important, and why they need it.
In 2015, Influitive created a new industry event focused on advocacy, customer engagement, and experience. We called it Advocamp. The first year was a huge success and we wanted the 2016 event to be even bigger; our goal was to more than triple attendance. But it wasn’t going to be easy to get the attention of so many B2B marketers and convince them to attend our virtually unknown event. Oh, and did I mention that we only had three months to get everyone registered? No sweat.
We had our normal promotion vehicles—the website, email, content, and social ad campaigns—but we knew to stand out in a sea of events that look more or less the same on paper, we were going to have to get creative.
Enter Camp Counselor Buck.
Show, Don’t Tell
To convince people to attend a brand new marketing event instead of or in addition to the dozens of other events out there, we couldn’t just tell them Advocampwas the best conference ever. We had to show them. We had to make them feel something.
When you have to grab people’s attention quickly, and don’t have the luxury of a 1,500-word post to explain the awesomeness of your event, the best tool to accomplish this is video. It can help build that emotional foundation, and it’s much easier to be funny, sad, or joyful through video than almost any other form of content. But sometimes it’s also a lot harder to produce.
Fact: 87% of online marketers use video. What’s your excuse? @Vidyard #videomarketing (Tweet This)
This is where our video partners come in. We had worked with a video production company called Sparksight on many video campaigns in the past, including some basic Advocamp commercials in 2015. Among these Advocamp promo videos was a camp counsellor character named Buck—think B2B marketing meets summer camp with a large helping of physical comedy. We called these videos Buckshots.
While the early Buckshot videos from 2015 were super funny and people seemed to enjoy them, we could only use them for brand awareness, which is marketing speak for “we have no way of measuring the impact of this.” We made them, put them online, and hoped they would take off. I’m sure you can guess that they didn’t. They got a few hundred views each. But we weren’t done with video. We realized we had to put significant distribution efforts behind them just like any other piece of content we produced.
Although we couldn’t tie registrations and hard ROI directly to these original Buckshots, we did get a lot of positive feedback from our colleagues, partners, customers, and other Advocamp attendees. Marketers attend so many events every year, and often they feel like just one big advertisement. We heard, however, that we had hit the mark when it came to instilling a different kind of emotional impact associated with our event. It made a promise about the event experience that stood out from the competition. More importantly, attendees told us we delivered on that promise a few months later at Advocamp.
Brand awareness = ‘we have no way of measuring this’. Stop spraying and praying! @Vidyard (Tweet This)
When 2016 rolled around and we set that stretch goal to register nearly 4X the number of Advocamp attendees from the previous year, we knew we couldn’t produce videos that merely entertained. We had to convert. We had to change our strategy if we hoped to come even close to our goal, so we started investigating ways to make an engaging medium like video turn into an ROI-driving, seat-filling tactic.
A few months before we started promoting Advocamp 2016, we started using video marketing platform Vidyardto host all of our video content. The cool thing about Vidyard is that it integrates with your marketing automation platform (in our case, Marketo) to track and measure the impact of your video content. Video can be more costly and time consuming to produce than any other type of content, so it’s critical to tie those investments back to sales pipeline and revenue.
Around that time, Vidyard also introduced some innovative new functionality that allowed marketers to personalize video campaigns in the same way we personalize emails.
Personalization
Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” When someone uses your name in conversation, you feel respected and important. While our previous email campaigns used this tactic—Hi {first_name}—it was lacking in our videos.
The first batch of Buckshot videos in 2015 were all about Advocamp and how much fun the conference would be. But they didn’t put the viewer there, right next to Buck, experiencing the fun for themselves. With Vidyard, we could easily create hundreds of personalized videoinvitations without having to shoot hundreds of unique Buckshots.
By now, you’ve probably seen these types of personalized videos; they usually involve a character holding up a piece of paper with your name on it. But we couldn’t have Buck in the middle of the woods holding up some random paper, so we stuck with the theme and inserted the personalized text field into a merit badge sash (check out the video below to see). Now all we had to do was get these videos in front of the right people.
Delivery
In the past, if we wanted to email personalized videos to folks in our database, we’d have to create thousands of unique videos and thumbnail images for each of the recipients and insert them one by one into the emails. This is just way too many steps. With Vidyard, all we needed to do was send them our list, and through the integration between Vidyard and Marketo, we could automatically send unique thumbnail images with a link that would open their personalized invitation—all housed and hosted on Vidyard’s platform.
The Results
Our previous Advocamp promotions (email, social, and through our customer AdvocateHub) yielded modest results: 16.1% open rate, 0.7% click-through rate, and 4.5% click-to-open rate. The personalized video campaign crushed those numbers:
The key to #marketingpersonalization? Carnegie said it’s all in the name. #videomarketing (Tweet This)
These numbers told us that clearly way more people were seeing our message, engaging with our emails, and then following through to watch the video. But these metrics don’t mean much unless we could put people in the seats. Luckily, we did that too. While we fell slightly short of our ambitious goal of 4X attendance, we tripled our attendance from the previous year. And we learned a ton.
Learnings
With most email campaigns, you work hard to draft a catchy subject line, engaging copy, and a compelling CTA. Then you send it out and…crickets. Or, if you do hear anything back, it’s almost always negative: “I don’t know how I got on this list!” “Take me off!” But with the personalized video campaign we received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. People loved their videos and asked us how we pulled it off—and these were our fellow marketers! People who know all the tricks of the trade and spend all day everyday looking for new marketing magic. That’s when we knew had achieved our goal of conveying the emotional spirit of the conference.
That special feeling and “magic” of innovation was now associated with Influitive’s brand, which was something that would’ve been near impossible to achieve through traditional marketing plays. It also laid a great foundation for our future Advocamp marketing efforts.
In addition to the personalized video invitations, Sparksight also recorded all the sessions at the event. These were first available to attendees and then to those who were unable to attend. These session recordings gave us a soft-touch to follow up with the people who didn’t attend, and to this day one of our most watched videos (out the more than 500 we have hosted on Vidyard) is Daniel Pink’s keynote on “Advocate Marketing and the Science of Motivation.”
If you’re considering adding video to your marketing campaigns, make sure to give yourself plenty of lead time. Video takes a while to get right, and it’s not something you want to rush. Also, one thing we didn’t do this last time that we’re hungry to get into for the next campaign is testing. A/B test your subject lines and email segments to better understand what content resonates most with each customer segment. In addition, video isn’t cheap, so optimize to ensure you’re getting the biggest return on your investment. And finally, find a trusted video expert to help you through each step of the process—you and your audience will be happy you did.
Note: This post was originally featured on upshot.
Between the title and the first line, I’ve shown why you want to read this article, and it only took 5 seconds. If you have no interest in what you’ve seen so far, it’s likely you’re ready to leave.
This is the basic premise of a pre-roll—those annoying ads that play before the video you actually want to watch. You have to endure them for at least 5 seconds until you’re allowed to skip through. Because they are so easy to skip, pre-rolls have the highest standard of quality, custom-tailored to engage and delight us in such a short time, right?
Well, maybe not. Think of the last time you didn’t skip a pre-roll. Every day, I see terrible ads that have no chance at winning my engagement. It’s not because pre-roll is a bad medium. It’s because most ads aren’t engaging.
So, what does a good pre-roll look like? Here’s my favorite example of all-time, especially because of how low-budget it looks.
Not impressed? 91% of viewers watched the ad to the end, 7.1% clicked through, and app downloads increased by 75% during the campaign. Not bad for text and spinning burgers.
These are the results you care about. Anyone can buy impressions to bulk up a monthly report. But what you really want is engagement and, by extension, business results. I chose the Eat 24 video as an example because it proves that you don’t need a massive budget or an elaborate premise to be successful. Instead, success comes from a deep understanding of your audience. As a video production studio, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure this out, and here are our top five insights.
Truth #1: Nobody wants pre-roll
We can all agree that, given a choice, we’d rather not watch pre-roll—or any commercials at all. Most ads lack any empathy on this point, enthusiastically getting in our faces and refusing to acknowledge that they’re forcibly invading our day. Pre-rolls are especially disruptive.
What to do about it: Focus on providing value, not copy
I know that sounds terribly cliché. But before you groan/close this article/burn my house down, look at the video above. It barely mentions anything about their actual service. Instead, it focuses on providing value—in this case, piquing our curiosity and entertaining us. It’s an ad that understands that people don’t like ads. The big question is not “How do I talk about myself?” It’s “How can I delight my audience in the short time I have?”
Truth #2: Pre-rolls are essentially 5 second videos
If you have a long, intricate message, pre-roll ads are not the place/time to share them. Years of terrible ads have trained us to immediately hammer that “skip” button.
What to do about it: Make 5-second videos
When creating your video, assume that you only have 5 seconds with your audience. Boil down and present the most basic version of your message, or entice the viewer to continue watching. We always recommend 15 seconds as the optimal length and strongly recommend against anything over 30 seconds.
Truth #3: Pre-rolls are not like TV ads
I see TV commercials run as pre-roll all the time, but the two mediums are completely different. When I’m watching TV, I’ve grown to expect 5-minute breaks every 15 minutes or so. But pre-roll ads can pop up at any time on any video, making them inherently more disruptive. My tolerance is much lower. I might sit through a 40-second ad on television, but I simply don’t have the same patience on my computer.
What to do about it: Never run traditional ads as pre-roll
This one is really simple. Rephrased, if you’re going to run pre-roll, make original pre-roll ads instead of recycling TV spots. Say what you want about “cross-platform promotion,” but traditional 30- or 60-second ads don’t work in this format.
Truth #4: Pre-roll is about generating a click, not an impression
One of the biggest advantages of pre-roll and digital campaigns is that your audience can directly interact with the ad by clicking. No need to list phone numbers or URLs. The next step is literally a finger tap away. Despite this massive advantage, too many pre-roll ads focus on long-form copy without a clear next step.
What to do about it: Focus your video on your call to action
Cut out all your messaging fat. Your pre-roll isn’t a presentation. It’s a tool to get people to click. Because you don’t have time for meaningful copy, everything about the video should be driving a CTA.
Truth #5: Pre-roll needs a supporting backend
After clicking a pre-roll, I’m amazed at how many times I’m dumped onto the company’s home page. Really? The pre-roll teased a free trial, and now I have to dig through the site to find the signup page? In most circumstances, I’ll balk at the extra effort and leave.
What to do about it: Build a complete pre-roll pathway
If pre-roll is the bait, then what comes after is the hook. Getting your audience to your domain is only the first step. Tailored landing pages are very important to turning clicks into conversions. Don’t waste a brilliant pre-roll by not having anything behind it.
Pre-roll can be tough. I’ve seen billion dollar companies completely fail to deliver effective content in this space. At the same time, we’re beginning to see improvement. Eat 24 saw massive success with a very small budget. What could you do with yours?
2017 Update:
While creating a good pre-roll ad is vitally important to getting eyes on your content, we’ve heard from a number of our readers that video quality isn’t the only defining factor of a good pre-roll ad. You also have to engage the right targeting options within YouTube to ensure your video is getting in front of the right audience as well!
AsConvince & Convert points out in this post, many users know their way around targeting their ads to geographic regions, demographics, and specific languages – those are the easy ones – but the real value can be found in YouTube’s other targeting opportunities.
Topics and interests are the real goldmine for targeting viewers, as these help define when your video is shown in relation to what your prospects are already watching. But they are a bit different from one another:
Topicsfocus on what your prospects are watching right now.So if you provide dog grooming services, you’ll want to target your Topics around dog grooming videos. That way if someone is watching a video on how to trim their poodle, they’ll see your video offering to do it for them!
Interestsare more broad, and allow you to target ads to users who are watching contentsimilar, but not exactly the same as what they’re watching now. To use our dog grooming analogy again, you may target Interests around professional dog shows. People who love watching pampered pooches paraded around stadiums probably care about how their own pooch looks! But you can take Interests further, and target dog walking videos, and dog training videos as well; interests your target market cares about, but that are not directly related to dog grooming.
The tips above are still spot-on recommendations for making your pre-roll video successful, but don’t forget to adjust your targeting settings. Knowing that you want to target men and women that are 18+ and live in North America just isn’t good enough to be sure that your advertising dollars are well spent. Go deeper, and start showing the right videos to the right audience at the right time!
Every CSM knows that change can be a big sticking point for customers, especially a change like a new customer success manager. That’s why, when Brian Jacklin, previous CSM at Vidyard, confirmed that he was changing roles within Vidyard he knew that he needed to do something special for his 61 accounts. Something that informed them of the situation and let them know that they’d be well taken care of.
That’s why he turned to video.
Brian recorded a webcam video explaining the transition for his accounts to their new CSM, Jarrett Ash, and even asked Jarrett to record his own video to say hello to his new accounts, too.
The communication was a huge success with an unheard of 100% open rate. His video had 51 unique views (of 61 unique people who received it), and retained more than 65% of viewers all the way to the end.
We figured we’d be selfish not to share how they did it – and no one likes selfish – so here we are! Keep reading to learn the distribution strategy, see the video, and learn about the program’s results.
The Email
The video was sent through email from Brian to all 61 accounts.
Brian included the thumbnail of his video in the email as an image (that linked out to the video player on a separate sharing page) so that customers would:
Check out the email template Brian used – and customized – for all 61 contacts:
The Videos
Both Brian and Jarrett recorded videos using their own webcam, computer audio, and Vidyard’s free tool calledViewedIt.
They recorded their videos separately and then added them as unique chapters within the same player in Vidyard. This way, viewers didn’t have to take any additional actions to watch the second video – the second chapter played automatically. It also gave viewers the option to skip Brian’s video (sorry Brian!) and meet Jarrett right away if they wanted!
You probably noticed that Brian included a note about the second video in the email copy as well to encourage viewership.
The videos were kept short: 47 seconds for Brian and 31 seconds for Jarrett for less than 90 seconds of total content. No one has any time for more than that these days!
Check out their videos below!
The Results
Most importantly, this communication outreach by Brian and Jarrett performed well and eased customers through the change with a personal touch. The program saw the following results.
63 views with 51 unique
A 100% open rate
Brian’s video (the first one) kept about 65% of viewers all the way to the end
Jarrett’s video (the second one) kept about 75% of viewers all the way to the end
Brian also received a number of responses and customers were happy to be kept in the loop with such a personal message
When people think of blogs they often think of the written content, but for those in the business it’s clear that there is a whole lot more to consider than just the copy. Including photos and/or videos in your blog can help its Google rankings, get more attention from readers, and engage with visitors in a more effective way. If you’re convinced that your blog needs photos and/or videos but don’t know how to go about picking them, you’ll enjoy reading through these tips on how to pick effective content.
Tap Into Your Creative Side
Perhaps you took the steps necessary to design a website. Once you’ve got the website up and running, it’s time to start bringing in visitors and one way to increase traffic is to start up a blog. Blogs offer you an excellent way to share helpful information with visitors, feature guest posts from industry experts, and build your own brand and reputation in the industry. They allow you an opportunity to tap into your creative side, even if you didn’t know it existed.
Why are Videos and Photos Necessary?
So now that you’ve gone to all the work to pen the perfect blog you may be asking why videos and photos are even necessary. Aren’t your words enough? The simple answer is no, words alone aren’t enough. It is a fact that by adding videos and photos it will drive more traffic to your blog, and in turn your website.
Some other reasons you’ll want to include a photo or video is the simple fact that it is visually appealing. It can really help to drive home the message in your blog. Photos and videos tend to be shared through social media a lot more often than text, and let’s not forget if someone is performing an image search on a search engine your blog will then come up.
Factors to Consider
When picking that right image or video there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. The most important should be whether or not it is legal to use the image. Finding images on Google does not give you permission to use them! Instead, look for royalty free images on platforms like Pixabay. It can’t be some randomly selected photo that you thought was cute or funny. And lastly you want to make sure the image is high quality. There is nothing worse than a pixelated photo, or one that is out of focus.
You can use all these same sorts of criteria when picking a video for your blog.
Your Visuals are Ready
Now that you understand why it’s so important to have visuals in your blog, and you’ve considered all the important criteria, you’re ready to go ahead and post them. Photos and videos are a fun and effective way to engage with your visitors, and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Sales has never been an easy job to automate. For every tool that pops up promising automatic follow-ups or additional data points for tracking engagement, there still needs to be a human element to the sales process. Remember, as Fast Company put it, “People don’t buy products – they buy better versions of themselves.” And for all the technology that’s available, the best way to help prospects connect the dots between your product and the person they want to be is a bona fide, living, breathing human being.
But sales teams aren’t working stacks of lead cards anymore either. The average marketing database is in the thousands, and grows by hundreds of leads every week, meaning that by the time the MQLs become SQLs, there is no shortage of prospects for salespeople to… well… prospect. And how salespeople choose to spend their time is one of the biggest conundrums for sales leaders. Each salesperson gets the same number of hours in a day – how can leaders make their teams more efficient? And if each salesperson is trying to juggle dozens of possibly-engaged leads, how can they best prioritize their time? Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to do this with video in sales!
Why Efficiency Matters
Most sales teams exist with a certain amount of automation. Salespeople send out templated emails all the time, and most cold-calls start with a script. But when it takes6 to 8 touchesto generate a really viable sales lead (up from3.7 in 2007) then knowing which prospects your team should be applying the efforts to is critical.
There are a number of factors that sales can use to determine a really engaged lead. Looking at content consumption is probably the biggest, as with most of the buying process happening before your sales team gets involved, prospects are taking discovery into their own hands.
Targeting Low-Hanging Fruit with Video in Sales
Knowing a prospect has downloaded a whitepaper is useful information, but you may never know if they actually read it. That’s where video is a game changer from an engagement perspective – not only will your salespeople know that a prospect has clicked play, but they can see exactly how long that prospect viewed the video. Powerful tools for separating the wheat from the chaff. Once your sales team decides to engage with a prospect, it’s still not easy to know whether or not the prospect really cares about what you’re saying. In other words: email open rates are great for knowing when a prospect has clicked on an email, but really don’t tell your salespeople anything about how engaged they are. Maybe they just deleted it right after!
And voicemails are even worse – you may never know if your prospect even listened to your voicemail, let alone whether they were excitedly jotting down a follow-up number to call you back.
That’s why high performing sales teams have beenmoving video into the prospecting process, and using it not only to drive more engagement, but to help prioritize the leads worth pursuing versus the tire kickers that aren’t really interested.
Case Study: Data-Backed Persistence Pays Off
Recently at Vidyard, one of our closed deals didn’t look like it was going anywhere on the surface. Nico, the rep here at Vidyard that had been working the deal, had diligently been sending out videos in his emails but receiving no response from the prospect. Under normal circumstances, Nico would have given up and moved on to another lead, but thanks to back-end analytics on the video, Nico’s prospect was revealing a very different story.
While they weren’t replying to his emails, Nico’s prospect was watching the videos he was sending. All of them – and often. Better yet? Nico’s videos had multiple views from inside the organization. So not only was the prospect watching the videos, but they were sending them out to others. And those other people were watching them too. From start to finish.
So Nico pressed on, and long-story-short, that prospect became an opportunity, and that opportunity became a closed deal.
Simply sending out engaging content wasn’t enough – Nico needed the back-end data to prioritize a lead that looked like it was going nowhere on the surface to a lead that was really engaged, just not ready to start up a conversation. Data he couldn’t get if he was only sending out text-based emails, or text-based attachments like PDFs or PowerPoint presentations.
Without that data, Nico would have moved on and missed the opportunity.
What Sales Leaders Can Do For Their Teams
It’s a fairly accepted truth in sales that most customers don’t know what they’re looking for. There’s the old cliche that if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. But much like most accepted truths, there’s a lot of myth attached to that too.
The same goes for prospecting. Every lead may look like the next six-figure deal, but most teams know prioritization is the real key to success. In the fast-paced world of modern sales, it’s not worth dwelling on leads that aren’t showing any indication that they’re interested in starting up a conversation, let alone making a purchase. There are plenty of fish in the sea and it’s worth fishing where the fish are biting.
Early adopter sales leaders learned early on that video is a powerful tool for prospecting – it’s engaging, and it can help drive better response rates,even for cold leads. It can alsoincrease the click-through rateon the emails your reps are sending out by 50%. But what we also learned is that video is an excellent tool for helping our salespeople prioritize leads, and better decide where to spend their precious time.
Not every lead is going to be a winner, and seeing what leads have engaged with your marketing content is a big step towards predicting whether a lead is even worth a sales follow-up. But it’s important as sales leaders to teach your team to apply the same methodology to their prospecting. If you’re sending out your 6 to 8 touches, and not seeing a response, it may mean that the prospect isn’t interested, but it also may mean that the prospect is still feeling out whether or not your solution is right based on the information you’re sending them. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew which one it was?
The power of video doesn’t just lie in its ability to engage with prospects – it’s also one of the most powerful qualification tools your team can use to prioritize leads and become more efficient salespeople. If a lead is watching every video you send them, but hasn’t emailed you back yet, then you may find yourself in Nico’s shoes. Giving up on that lead would have meant giving up on one of the biggest deals he closed all year. And without video, he likely would have looked like just another dead lead.
First, I wanted to take SlideShare for a ride around the block…
So, naturally, I asked Mauro to create a SlideShare presentation for me!
…what was he going to do?… say no? ?
Two weeks later, I had “my” first SlideShare deck published.
Mauro did a fabulous job… and I reaped all the benefits.
? ?
3,500 views? Impressive!
I was IN.
The SlideShare muse graced me the very next weekend: the Super Bowl, Colin Kaepernick, my husband's keen sense of humor plus his love for the San Francisco 49ers…
…and my first presentation was born.
Not too shabby for my first time, if I may say so myself.
Here's the thing: even when you use Creative Commons images, you don't really know the origins of an image.
What if someone finds a cool image somewhere online, uploads it to their Flickr account, and lo and behold, the image shows up under Creative Commons, yet it was copyrighted by the original creator?
My philosophy on this: don't overanalyze it.
If you can't create your own images from scratch, do your best to find Creative Commons images and always give credit to image sources in your SlideShare description.
Or you can attach a disclaimer to your presentation, like the guys from SlidesThatRock.com did it here:
By the way, SlidesThatRock.com is another great place to learn more about creating killer SlideShare presentations. Browse through their portfolio to see how they do it and do it like that, just better. ?
If someone does end up complaining about you using their image, C'est la vie; you'll fix it and move on.
6. Add a Call to Action
A SlideShare presentation is no different from any other piece of content you create.
It needs to move your viewers to take an action as a result of watching it.
What is it that you want your viewers to do after they are done with your presentation?
It actually has 3 calls to action (CTAs), which is 2 too many, but the one that matters – Pay with a Tweet to download the presentation – is a great one.
Social Media Sharing
Here's another one from Mauro's 9 Steps to Make Great Presentations Faster.
Did you know you can embed live links into SlideShare presentations?
And not just naked URLs, mind you (like http://ift.tt/HytLhb), but URLs with anchor text, clickable images, etc.
So keep that in mind when creating your SlideShare presentations.
It's good for link building (since Google can crawl PDF files and follow links within them), but even more importantly, it's great for traffic from SlideShare.
Good Samaritan reminder: don't spam. Just because you can include live links in your SlideShare presentations, doesn't mean you should stuff them with links.
If you do, your account could be suspended or even deleted without warning. It's happened.
How many outgoing links are you allowed? Once again, it's not defined anywhere, so be safe than sorry.
SLIDESHARE PRO TIP
SlideShare doesn't allow live links in the first three slides of your presentation, so create your presentation accordingly.
Put it all together
It's not rocket science, I promise.
I'd NEVER used PowerPoint or Keynote before I created my first SlideShare.
I played around with it, figured out how it worked, and now creating a SlideShare presentation has become a piece of cake.
Let me share some very specific tips on how to make the most of your SlideShare exposure.
More SlideShare “Good-to-Knows”
Presentation size
Your SlideShare presentation will look its best if created in 4:3 ratio.
However, if you are planning on turning your SlideShare presentation into a video, which I highly recommend you do, I suggest you create your presentation in 16:9 aspect ratio.
SIDE NOTE: I am a strong proponent of content repurposing – taking one piece of content and turning it into several formats to reach your audience on various platforms.
You'll hear me talk about it ALL the time, because it's THAT good – one of the best ways to drive traffic, bar none.
You can watch me repurpose a SlideShare presentation into a video in this YouTube mini-series:
Re-Upload
Unlike YouTube, SlideShare allows you to re-upload your presentations after they went live.
The feature is great in case:
You notice a mis-spelling (or, more likely, someone will kindly point it out to you);
You want to change your call to action;
The information becomes outdated, but the SlideShare presentation is still driving traffic;
etc.
And the best part?
When you re-upload the presentation, you keep everything: the original slug, views, comments – everything.
4 Ways to Get Traffic from SlideShare
It's all nice, Ana, but who's got the time to make SlideShare presentations?
Is SlideShare really worth it?
YES.
If I haven't convinced you by now, here's my last shot: how to get traffic from SlideShare.
1. Get on SlideShare Homepage
This is something Mauro discussed in his guest post at TGC as well, but he and I learned a few things since then.
There are three ways to get on the SlideShare homepage.
The first one takes the least effort, but won't yield as much traffic.
The last one is unpredictable, but results in killer traffic.
1. Get Featured in “Trending in Social Media” Section
This is the bottom third section of SlideShare homepage.
It features presentations that are currently hot on either Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or all four.
I do not know the exact number of shares required to be featured in this section.
From my experience, if I get a lot of shares on any one of these platforms (I find Google+ to be the easiest one for me, since I've established a good presence there), the other three will catch up.
So share away!
If you want to learn how to promote the heck out of your SlideShare presentations, I highly recommend you pick up Kristi Hines' Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide.
By the way, why LinkedIn?
SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn.
2. Get Featured in “Featured SlideShares”
“Featured SlideShares” is the middle section on SlideShare homepage.
How do you get featured there?
Read the section below.
3. Get Featured in the “Today's Top SlideShares”
“Today's Top SlideShares” is the top above-fold section of SlideShare homepage.
This is PRIME web real-estate.
This is where you want your SlideShare presentation to end up.
How do you do that?
Mauro and I have been watching the homepage like hawks for days and weeks, trying to figure out how SlideShare algorithm works.
Our initial assumption was that the amount of views was what did the trick.
Yet, we saw plenty of presentations with a lot fewer views than others make it to the “Today's Top SlideShares” section.
So what was the secret?
The secret is that there's no algorithm to become a “Today's Top SlideShares“.
We’d like to correct an assumption made in another recent blog post (Mauro's guest post at Traffic Generation Café) and referenced by Mauro.
The “Trending in Social Media” sections reflect the traffic and activity of presentations on the various social platforms.
But the “Featured” and “Today's Top SlideShares” presentations are hand-curated every day by the SlideShare editorial team.
In order to be featured on the SlideShare home page, keep creating well-designed, useful, relevant presentations.
Your content and design will catch the team’s attention.
That's it.
Those sections are hand-curated.
That's the good news and the bad news.
The good news: it's a level playing field. Whether you are a blogging superstar or a newcomer, you are equal (in theory anyway) in SlideShare teams' eyes.
The only thing that matters is how great your presentation is.
And that's the bad news.
It HAS to be great.
But then again, anything worth doing is worth doing right.
2. Get Embedded on other blogs
Another way to bring SlideShare traffic back to your blog is by getting your presentation embedded on other sites.
Embeds bring traffic. You saw it from the screenshots above.
How do you get your SlideShare presentation embedded on other blogs?
Two ways:
Either by getting featured on the home page and catching attention from other SlideShare users or
by embedding the SlideShare presentation on your blog and encouraging your readers to do the same.
Making it easy goes a long way.
3. Get ranked on Google
We've talked about adding on-page SEO elements to your presentations above – that's the gist of your SlideShare SEO.
The other piece of the puzzle would external links pointing to either your SlideShare profile (builds overall authority) or specific presentations (through embeds or traditional links) – just like any piece of content you'd publish on your own website.
To learn more about SEO for non-SEOs (same principles will work for ANY page you want to rank – whether it's a post on your blog or a presentation on SlideShare.net), take a look at this guide:
Once again, it's much easier to create a powerful SlideShare presentation around competitive keywords and rank it on Google than wait for your own site to gain enough authority to compete with 800-pound gorillas.
Your call to action should do the rest.
By the way, am I concerned that my SlideShare presentations will outrank my blog posts on Google?
That's the kind of question that deserves an in-depth answer in a post of its own.
You might not even know that it's the SlideShare presentation that's making the impact on your rising traffic numbers, but trust me: if your presentations are good, your website traffic WILL increase.
SlideShare: Free or Pro?
Yes, SlideShare has a premium option.
Update August 2014:SlideShare is NOT currently accepting new PRO members.
As you can see below, I don't think it's a big loss – I wouldn't have recommended signing up for it anyway.
Let's see if they come up with better features in the future.
The plans vary from $19/month to “?” (the sky is the limit?).
I could certainly make good use out of some of the features:
Uploading larger files (although so far, I haven't had a problem with my presentations the way they are);
Uploading videos (although you can still embed YouTube videos in your existing presentations);
Live links in descriptions (available with $49/month plans and up – although I think you can get more traffic with a great call to action within your SlideShare presentation);
Collecting leads (although you can get only up to 30 leads with no geo targeting at $19/month, 75 at $49/month – imagine how many leads you can collect if you simply direct your SlideShare traffic to an opt-in page?).
In other words, I'll remain a free member.
The choice is yours, of course.
You can learn more about paid plans and PRO features here.
More SlideShare Features
With a site as extensive as SlideShare, there bound to be more features than can be covered in one post, right?
Here are the ones that I recommend you check out:
Add YouTube video
When in “Edit” mode of an already uploaded video, one of the options you'll see is “Add YouTube Video“.
Add Audio
The “Add Audio” tab is right next to the video feature.
You can upload an mp3 audio file from your computer to go with your SlideShare presentation.
It can't be a music file; only recordings of a presenter talking are allowed.
Here's an example of a SlideShare presentation with an audio added:
Browse
Another way to get in front of SlideShare users, as well as see what kind of content works best on SlideShare, I highly recommend you use the “Browse” feature.
Learn more about SlideShare
The best way to learn more about SlideShare and how to use it best for your business is SlideShare blog.
See some of the best-performing SlideShare presentations in action; follow us on SlideShare:
It might sound like I am blowing my own trumpet here, but it's true: when it comes down to sharing my best traffic generating information, I am generous to a fault.
I don't know how to hold back or charge money for holding back.
Thus, you get the best, most timely and in-depth advice on how to increase website traffic – either here at Traffic Generation Cafe or in your inbox through my Bite-Size Traffic Hacks newsletter.
If you were to actually use these tips, you would be unstoppable.
Then I'd have to compete with you for traffic, which is really too much of a headache.
So I am sharing these superb Slideshare traffic generation tips quietly hoping that you won't do much about them and let me continue dominating Slideshare.
Like this (this screenshot was taken a couple of weeks after the one at the top of the post – 2 weeks +77K views):
Of course, in the end the choice is yours.
Are you going to let me have all the fun and Slideshare traffic?
