Ys Up! 85 Tips from the Trenches to Help You Succeed in Todays No-Guarantees Job Market

Editorial Reviews. Review. (T)he authors provide excellent insight into the mind of a Y's Up! 85 Tips from the Trenches to Help You Succeed in Today's No- . provides uncommon common sense tips to increase Gen Y's chances of success in the no-guarantees job market. . Would you like to tell us about a lower price?.
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She recently co-founded Mantis Research, a consultancy focused on educating and helping marketers publish and amplify credible original research. A successful digital marketing consultant, Shane Barker has worked with everyone from start-ups to celebrities and helped them hone their brand image and achieve their goals. Ahava Leibtag is the founder and president of Aha Media, a content strategy and marketing consultancy that specializes in content for complex industries like finance and healthcare.

Winning at Marketing on the Web , and has over 20 years of writing and marketing experience. Marsha Wright is an entrepreneur, influencer, business expert, and media personality. A marketer wearing many hats is nothing new, but Jo Gifford seemingly wears them all. John Jantsch is a marketing consultant for small businesses and the founder of Duct Tape Marketing. John White is an Inc. He heads up Social Marketing Solutions, a lead generation company, and is a branding and influencer marketing expert. Ryan Thompson is a social media marketer who regularly works with Fortune s. He focuses on driving growth and building partnerships in business, especially industries like tourism and talent.

Terry Green handles social media and marketing for speakers and coaches looking to turn their brand identity up more than a few notches. She runs BizEase Support Solutions to help eliminate marketing overwhelm. He has trained thousands of marketers and has been featured in publications like The Huffington Post and The Guardian. AE Marketing Group is all about elevating brands to new heights with marketing, digital storytelling, strategy, and brand building.

They have won multiple prestigious marketing awards, including ranking in the Inc. His company of the same name helps clients figure out their overarching strategy, then uses that blueprint to spread their individual brand story. Ardath Albee is a content marketing strategist with over 30 years of experience in business management and marketing. A digital marketing consultant, educator, and trainer, Ian Cleary founded Razor Social as well as OutreachPlus, an email marketing tool.

Small Business, VentureBeat, and more. As a video marketing strategist, Brandon Windsor helps businesses harness the potential and power of video marketing. Rohan Davidson is the founder of Content Consultant, a content marketing company based in Brisbane. He helps small and medium-sized businesses tailor their content for better results.

Steve Rayson is the Director of BuzzSumo, a social search tool. She contributes to the HubSpot Academy Blog and focuses on customer education. She has been featured by Inc. B2B Marketing Exchange is a top industry conference where marketers can come together, network, learn, and grow their businesses. It has grown to include over 70 sessions and expert speakers over 3 days. Ryan Robinson is a content marketing consultant with clients like Adobe and Zendesk who has been featured on publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Business Insider.

She is also a freelance content writer with a roster of clients in industries like business, education, tech, and data intelligence. You have to put out a lot to get anything back. You need to truly, authentically engage with your community and be active in the space. I hate to break it to you, but writing content is not as simple as sitting down in front of a word processor and scrounging up words off the top of your head. To earn return-on-investment , to be profitable , content needs so much more:.

Can you ostensibly create this kind of content on your own — not to mention consistently, at the highest levels of quality — and still have time to run your business? When should you start outsourcing your content? The estimated time it takes to complete each step is included.

You read that right: It takes nearly an entire day to crank out a blog post worthy of ROI. To publish these types of posts two times a week, it will take about 20 hours per week , and hours per month. It takes a lot of work. Look at all the activities that top-performing content marketers commit to, from that same CMI benchmark survey we already mentioned.

What could you do for your business in that time besides pulling your hair out over content creation? More importantly, could you repeat this exact same routine, ad-nauseum, to produce consistent results? In contrast, how much time and money do you need to hire a writer to take care of it all for you? Instead, delegating this task will free you up to focus on what you ARE good at, where your true expertise lies. B2Bs that were MORE successful overwhelmingly attributed their success to better, more efficient content creation. They spent more time on content, and many relied on outside expertise.

Growing a fledgling business is a full-time job. If you have to take care of the content creation, too, where does that leave you? It leaves you hassled, stressed, and exhausted.

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Wasted time , and content that staggers along for a while before dissolving into internet obscurity. Though they had a team of experts, including two copywriters on staff, their business was getting more writing work than they could handle alone. Rather than stretch their in-house writers thin, they hired us at Express Writers to handle their content strategy and blogging, and to step in for one of their clients with improved, optimized product descriptions.

Here are just a few of the results read the full case study here:. As a business owner, as a marketer, or whatever you do, you know that you could be spending your time in ways that are more productive. Instead of fumbling your way through content, delegate. Let experts do the heavy lifting. Read about our process , then request a client account to start moving forward in the right direction.

As of last year, 3. To begin implementing these marketing efforts, you must first fully comprehend them. Once you understand, then you can be the one chiming in to help others differentiate. Every minute, people scavenge the internet to search for, share and research content. It is the meetings between chefs, waiters, restaurant owners and staff to strategize and guide how they plan to successfully deliver food to their customers.

How many waiters need to cover the floor? What type of ingredients should we use? What will attract our customers to our restaurant? Just like in a restaurant, content strategy is the framework you put in place to deliver the content to readers. It is the planning, preparation and methods you have come up with to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Or in other terms, implement your strategy through content marketing.

The food is the content that your audience consumes. The approach to effective content marketing is to create valuable, consistent and relatable content for the purpose of building a relationship with a targeted audience, which in turn, increases your profits. During your planning stages, you found that natural and unprocessed ingredients were of the highest importance to your customers content strategy.

You put this plan into action by designing a customized menu that informs your customers of the origins of their food content marketing. Due to your strategic planning, you knew how to build a relationship with your audience, the methods in which to reach them and the product that would best suit their needs. These customers are receiving valuable and useful information about a health conscious lifestyle directly through you. They will keep coming back. They will purchase more. Food analogy aside, clients, bosses and executives want you to answer one thing: In other words, what is the ROI of this type of marketing?

They may understand the need to develop content marketing, but be unsure of what they are getting in return. Unlike other traditional forms of promotion, content strategy and marketing are investments. They require more initial time to plan, implement and see return. However, once a profitable framework for content strategy is set in motion, you will see your business grow tremendously. Luckily, there are plenty of statistics to support it. Content has officially been crowned king and queen of marketing strategy. Custom content, while relating to your brand, is useful to consumers who prefer to seek it out rather than be bombarded with emails and television advertisements.

On the most basic level, the only real argument you need in favor of content marketing is this: Content strategy is all about increasing organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic is improved with SEO directly through content marketing. However, an effective strategy will NOT burn a hole in your pocket. Your company can invest in high quality content marketers as opposed to spending money on promotion, and see more success and ROI happen.

One of the main reasons companies have led successful content marketing campaigns is attributed to outsourcing. Content creation is much more than writing a blog here and there. For real results, content must be consistent, relevant and diverse. One of the many reasons for outsourcing is that most companies do not have the budget or resources to train an in-house team. Outsourcing to professional agencies, like our own here at Express Writers, will grow your business through organic content marketing efforts.

Even after reading through statistics, you need a valid method to document the ROI for your own company. This is a large oversight for companies investing in a content marketing strategy. So we developed an easier method to determine the ROI of content marketing. In one of our past blog posts, we created an infographic to explain the ROI of content strategy and tested our own numbers.

With this formula in hand, your company can predict and actually see how content marketing directly converted into sales. We tested the formula in a case study with our monthly traffic for January and were off by only 57 orders, which made sense after accounting for changes in our business plan. Starting with the fundamentals of your content strategy will set the pace for the rest of your marketing. What makes you different?

Answering these very first questions will help you develop and execute methods to connect to your audience and increase revenue. Or, get access to great content created just for your audience, with strategic content marketing in mind, by requesting a client account. Why should we care, as content marketers and business owners not located in the EU?

If you have customers in the EU, or operate at least in part there including collecting EU consumer data , you will be affected by this new legislation, which will go into effect on May 25, Since we live in a global, digital economy, this applies to most of us who operate online.

Then, to help you figure out what to do next, I talked to Richard Chapo , an internet lawyer I previously chatted with on The Write Podcast about copyrighting in content marketing. He has some advice about what to do in the face of GDPR. Specifically, GDPR stipulates that you are wholly responsible for the security and safety of the personal data you collect.

Above all, GDPR protects their rights. Here are the major points:. There are lots of other points in the legislation, but these are the top ones you should know about. Instead, what you need to worry about are tiered fines , which vary depending on the severity your infraction. To find out, I talked to Richard Chapo, an internet lawyer with 24 years of experience in topics like fair use and copyright law, licensing, and other legal issues that affect online business owners.

The purpose of the GDPR is not to generate massive fines. The purpose is to protect the personal data of subjects located in the EU. Make a good faith effort to comply, and you are unlikely to be wiped out by a GDPR fine. If the subject matter of your site is directed at kids — video games, education, etc. Many companies large and small will fail to meet the deadline. Second, get moving on compliance. If you receive an audit notice from an agency in the EU, providing evidence that you are in the process of complying will mitigate any penalties.

Smartblogger has some fantastic advice you can put into action right now for compliance. They recommend following 7 steps, including:. A little work now will go a long way toward your peace of mind concerning GDPR as it goes into effect. The key is to start A. Comments about the new legislation? Job opportunities are hopping, and roles are continuing to expand as businesses of all kinds start to truly understand the value of content. Just look at the diverse array of content marketing positions from a cursory search of Indeed.

Entry-level content marketing freelancers, on the other hand, have a yearly income that depends largely on dedication and location. Finally, according to Marketing Profs and Conductor, the average annual salary for a number of content marketing roles all look pretty darn good:. Of course, to become a savvy, skilled content marketer and nail that hot position or net desirable clients! To succeed in this industry, there are skills you need that remain constant, no matter your role or experience level. For example, the skills a content strategist needs closely intertwine with those of a content manager, content writer, and social media marketer.

Whether you work for a company or for individual clients, they will all have the same goal: They want to see results from content marketing. They want that ROI pie-in-the-sky. However, most have no clear idea how to measure it. Every action you take has to reflect back on eventual return-on-investment, and you have to prove that connection. The ROI has to be quantifiable. If you want to be a top content marketer, get ready to hone your creative problem-solving skills. Good communication is an essential skill for success in most industries.

Content marketing is no different. You also need to be a skilled presenter, a good collaborator, and a team player. A huge part of being a content marketer is the content creation aspect. You have to understand how to tell stories that will win over a vast array of different audiences in different industries. Your job will be to define these audiences and tailor content just for them, using the right keywords, tone, language, and topics to get them interested and invested. Your storytelling skills will definitely come into play, here.

As a content marketer, you need to be internet-savvy to promote and distribute content as effectively as possible. You also need to understand techniques to get your content the widest possible audience. This means you have to:. You also have to do some legwork to position yourself as a desirable hire:. As we all know, we live in an interconnected age where our online social profiles often serve as our first introduction for potential employers, clients, and colleagues.

Hiring managers and clients may absolutely check out your LinkedIn profile or Facebook whether or not you provide links in your resume. If your profile is lacking, you may leave that person with a negative impression of you, which can spell disaster for your job chances. This just looks lazy and unprofessional.

If your profile looks like this, or if you have some inappropriate posts or pictures hanging out in your feed, make sure you do some housekeeping before applying for any jobs. These will affect your first impression. Lastly, make sure your profile is complete and optimized. You should include keywords for your industry in your summary, work experience, and skills sections, including keywords for the job you want. Instead, do some deeper digging in the right places to unearth more potential jobs or clients.

Dive into writing the cover letter from this perspective, and you should be much more persuasive. Your resume is a tool, one you should definitely refer to at key moments in your cover letter to better explain your experience or skills. Your cover letter could go into more detail, like: Read the application instructions carefully, including the fine print.

Questions?

Follow them to the letter. Many companies actually use this as a litmus test of sorts. Think of it this way: You have to make it easy for them to advance you to the next round, so to speak. So, carefully note what materials you need for each job application. Some want the whole kit and caboodle, including cover letter, resume, samples, and references. Content marketing is a wild and wily industry. Standards for success are constantly changing, and the lightning speed at which technology is developing has a huge role.

You have to keep learning, keep training, and keep leveling-up to stay relevant. The wonderful world of content marketing is opening up like never before. There are so many opportunities out there. Start up your content marketing training, and grab your place in this exciting atmosphere of incredible growth and possibilities. Note that it is much more than just a keyword report, or a topic calendar. Those were high-value leads: If brands get extremely effective at their content marketing, BIG things will happen for that brand.

Keyword research has now become more finely tuned and available in two variations: Keyword research for blogging, keyword research for web page topics. Content planning and content planning blocks has turned into Topic Research, for web or blog. Our topic headlines are highly-scored, and carefully analyzed by our Content Strategists. We use some of the best tools on the market: Our team Content Strategists are fully trained from my content strategy course cores on how to deliver keywords and high-ROI content topics.

This will help our clients understand how to use their keywords and topics in the best way for on-site ROI. Click here to book a call with one of our staff members to talk about your content strategy needs, or view the new product by clicking on the image below. Talk to our team today about your content needs. I brought Hannah, our Content Director, with me. And we had a blast. And it was awesome. Two new things I learned about Joe: He majored in rhetoric His favorite book: Success in marketing and life in general only takes three things: Record Repeat Remove These three things will make us successful.

They will also make our marketing successful. We need to serve our audience first. He recommends we clear all distractions to make an impact. Forget About Snackable Content: First, Andrew asks, have you heard this from marketers? Quit blaming the goldfish and focusing on the short 'attention span. One of the best examples Andrew brought up: Create tension to earn time from your audience. However, this success element can be used for good or evil.

Think like a reality TV editor. Learn to raise the stakes. Show the audience something they love and threaten it. The Know-it-all-Guide to Color Psychology: Your product needs to fit into your content. The softer your CTAs, the softer your sales. Have a direct connection. Connect your content to the value your company provides.

Orient your blog around one call to action. What about paid vs. Newsletters are the OG. Email is the only place where people, not algorithms, are in control. Reframe obstacles into opportunities. There is no one right answer. I took one point away from this talk that was critical. Build content that has meaning. Use social media great way to see what questions are being asked! Go to events like this and build connections.

Product details

Ready for the big reveal? But in content marketing and sales conversion, buckets are critical. SEO rankings Sales and connections Brand awareness This is the step that most brand strategists gloss over in a hurry to get out there and start creating content. But skipping the bucket step would be a mistake. Discover a new, engaging way of looking at how content marketing drives sales that is sure to help you achieve your marketing goals in today's blog via JuliaEMcCoy Click To Tweet Bucket 1: To do this, you can put a wide variety of things in this bucket, including: Brand Awareness This is one big bucket.

In a nutshell, LTV represents the amount of money generated by a customer over their lifetime. You start with the first calculation: Then build on it, for the final figure: You can increase loyalty through a number of tactics, including: Outstanding customer service and content that promotes it Rewards and loyalty programs Customer content marketing that focuses on trust-building A great example of a company that wows in the loyalty department is Apple. The 4 Fundamentals of the Content Marketing Funnel Sales and marketing are not only about crunching numbers and researching tactics.

In a word, fun. As Pratik Dohlakiya of Copyblogger so aptly put it: There is no boring content, only boring content creators. The idea of creating content brings us to the very top of our funnel — the widest part. Don't rely on an outdated persona. Then — and only then — can you create marketing content that leads to sales. Examples of great content marketing formats for building brand awareness are: Blog posts Long-form content Guides Interactive content Videos Webinars Courses Email newsletters Want a real-world example of persona-centered marketing content? Besides, a brief customer success story with statistics can make a great mini-case study.

Put yourself in your customers' shoes and ask, what would make me buy this product or service? Remember, you can still be picking up cues regarding pain points at this point of the funnel. Now, the real fun begins! You finally get to make a direct pitch. Don't forget a clear CTA with a direct link to a clear action. Strong relationships with your customers are not only fun - they're profitable.

The more customers buy — the more they buy! And there are other things you can do at this stage to improve ROI. Examples of content that drives loyalty includes: This screenshot from Wordstream says it all: From Bucket to Funnel: Take these tips and individualize them to your process for best results! But how do we jumpstart these ideas in an effective, productive manner? Let me prove it to you. Ready to find out what they are? This way, you always know for sure that the content you create will lead to ROI. Every single piece of content I create should serve one of three purposes: Trash it and move on.

If your mind goes completely blank, however, use these techniques to find your starting point: This is the general workflow: Think about these things: Do you have anything new to add to the discussion? Is there any new research on the topic you can highlight? Is there an angle of the topic that remains largely forgotten or ignored? Can you write a better, more comprehensive post about the topic?

There are many ways to pick the brains of your audience members for ideas: On Answer the Public, I get even more great data, including visualization charts of related topics and terms: Cross it out and move on to the next. Instead, use a strategy that depends on real data and research to ideate topics. Start somewhere to get somewhere. Then, rinse and repeat. Evergreen content is magical. It never loses its green. Announcements and event summaries Blogs discussing trends in your industry News stories Holiday or season-centered posts with exceptions The information in these types of content has an expiration date.

A good mix of both is a healthy way to publish content on your website. Take a look at how Content Marketing Institute mixes up the two on their blog: How-To Blogs and Articles A good, evergreen how-to post teaches your readers a concept, idea, or skill that has lasting value. Curated Content Lists Curated content lists have a lasting value up to a point — they may include tools or tips that can lose relevancy. You can pull universal truths from them — strategies, techniques, or steps that others can learn from.

They tell a story. Our best tips to get started are right here: Write for Beginners When Building Your Topic For any type of content creation, you need to have an audience firmly in mind before you begin. Take, for example, a topic like World War II. Screenshot via Wikipedia Behemoth topics like this one are also harder for readers to immediately latch onto. Instead, dive deep and create content around a narrower facet of a topic.

Social media is the perfect place to give your evergreen content a good airing. Create evergreen content, then, as time goes by, dig back into your archives and share them with your followers again … And again. We regularly do so on ExpWriters Twitter account: Both teams and their team members had the opportunity to make the list. We think that industry teams that work hard as a whole, as well as the individual people that really get behind moving content marketing inside the team, both deserve recognition.

Fairness to both teams and individual marketers, as well as looking for leaders that have been recently active in content marketing, was important in building our new TopContentMarketers report. To earn return-on-investment , to be profitable , content needs so much more: Time Planning Effort Research SEO smarts Can you ostensibly create this kind of content on your own — not to mention consistently, at the highest levels of quality — and still have time to run your business?

Maybe if you give up a social life, relaxation time, and sleep. Enter the case for hiring a writer and outsourcing content. The answer is right now. Allow me to prove that to you. What is your time worth to you? Keyword research — Finding keyword opportunities to scoop up high-potential traffic minutes Planning — Ironing out a post topic that appeals to your target niche and uses your target keywords minutes Researching — Gathering relevant facts, stats, and supporting information you can link to and reference in your post minutes Outlining — Planning your argument, organizing your thoughts, laying out main points, and drafting headers and subheaders minutes Writing — Writing up the post, citing sources and linking to them, using SEO best-practices, adding visuals as needed, and finalizing your headers and subheaders hours [dependent on MANY factors, including inspiration, the quality of your research, and your motivation — could take much less or much more time] Editing — Checking your work for accuracy, proofreading for flow and tone of voice, checking for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors minutes Estimated time needed to craft ONE in-depth blog post: And those numbers are just an estimate!


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Finding and vetting a writer — At Express Writers, we handle writer vetting and match you with an expert who can write with authority about your industry topics. One of our content strategists can also do keyword and topic research for you. All you have to do is wait for your completed content, review it, and, if needed, ask for any revisions. It would be like having a part-time job on top of your full-time job. What are the major factors that contribute to high-ROI content?

You just might not be clear on what has to happen to create those types of assets. What do you end up with? How do you know when it's time to outsource your content creation? This post has three signs to watch out for! Click To Tweet Outsourcing Content: Real-Life Content Outsourcing Example: Marketing Labs A U. Here are just a few of the results read the full case study here: Your dollars are limited. Trust us at Express Writers for outsourcing your content — we can deliver. With statistics like these, the demand for content marketing and content strategy are clear. Funny how that works.

Ha, we know those conversations. Here are the major points: Consent must be crystal-clear. You must collect the minimum amount of information needed to achieve your objective. Consumers have the right to access and review the data you collect from them. This is relevant to mega international companies, but to you? What to Do Next: They recommend following 7 steps, including: Today, the interest and investment in content marketing are at an all-time high. Finally, according to Marketing Profs and Conductor, the average annual salary for a number of content marketing roles all look pretty darn good: Content Marketing Training Bootcamp: Hone These 5 Critical Content Wizard Skills To succeed in this industry, there are skills you need that remain constant, no matter your role or experience level.

Content Marketing Training Skill 1: A Relentless Drive for Results Whether you work for a company or for individual clients, they will all have the same goal: Content Marketing Training Skill 2: Creative Problem-Solving If you want to be a top content marketer, get ready to hone your creative problem-solving skills.

Content Marketing Training Skill 3: Thorough and Meticulous Communication Good communication is an essential skill for success in most industries. If you work as a freelancer, your clients may need some data-backed examples to get on board with what you propose for their content. If you work with a team and have a great idea for driving engagement forward for a brand, for instance, you have to be able to explain your vision. Content Marketing Training Skill 4: An Instinct for Audience Defining and Storytelling A huge part of being a content marketer is the content creation aspect.

This involves part instinct, part research, and part creativity. Content Marketing Training Skill 5: A Savvy Promoter As a content marketer, you need to be internet-savvy to promote and distribute content as effectively as possible. This means you have to: Know best-practices for posting to social channels, including optimal times, types of posts, word count, hashtags, and image types Understand how to speak to and target different audiences on social media, including the best platforms where the brunt of them hang out this can differ depending on the audience!

You also have to do some legwork to position yourself as a desirable hire: Market Research — Many businesses have competitors that are larger or dominant in their space. If you sell green widgets, and you know there is a huge player in the green widget industry — what are they doing to be that big player? The best way to increase lead generation depends on each particular business context. While there is a top way for a business, there is not a top way for all businesses. First , identify your target audience and personas.

You should understand their needs, wants, motivations, and questions as well as the typical demographic and job-related data. Your job is to deliver a powerful value proposition message with clarity and relevance, avoiding creating anxiety and distraction, and adding a sense of urgency. Second , create content that answers their questions and shows them how to meet their needs, wants, and motivations. Third , find out where they are and provide hooks to get them to your content. This could be through search marketing, social media, conferences, and even — gasp! Fourth , create powerful landing pages with the right content, offer, and messaging that deliver relevant content.

You may be surprised which messages and offers work best, which is why you should always test the most important elements of your pages. Surprisingly, in this case, request a quote worked better. The highest quality opportunities go directly to sales and the not-yet-qualified leads should go into a content-driven nurture campaign.

The ways that I was able to increase leads were through content marketing, content upgrades, and SEM — specifically remarketing. The first piece of the puzzle is to create a killer piece of content. In this case, I put together a roundup post where over experts revealed their 3 favorite social media management tools. While there are no shortage of roundup posts because they work so well , it helps to make it stand out more by doing something different.

For this roundup, I focused on offering the users the ability to filter results based on what tools were mentioned as well as the category the tool best fit into. Additionally, I created a custom template just for this post that would catch your eye because it is so different from just listing out each person and their answers.

Once published, I promoted this piece of content pretty well on social media. To date, it has over 2, social shares. Not too bad for a brand new site. Because the piece of content offered value to the reader, it easily helped drive leads to the page who ultimately gave up their email address through the use of an exit overlay.

For those unfamiliar with this term, it is basically a way for you to offer up something related to the blog post for the reader in exchange for their email address. For this blog post, I packaged up all of the social media tools mentioned into a downloadable PDF. This content upgrade was added towards the beginning of the blog post as well as the end. It is also part of the exit overlay. The third successful way I was able to generate leads was through the use of remarketing. Since I had a good feeling that this post was going to get a decent amount of social love, I set up a remarketing script for this page.

For this post, I used Facebook remarketing ads. I set it up like any other remarketing campaign. It tagged people who had visited the blog URL but who did not visit the thank you page visitors are sent to after a form submission. By stacking these 3 things together, I was able to generate a considerable amount of leads for a brand new website.


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Guest posting is a tried and true method that works extremely well if you line up the right opportunities. When you guest post on another blog, make sure to give a clear call to action with an offer in your author bio. Getting people to your website is only half the battle. The other challenge is converting visitors into subscribers. A lead magnet is simply an extra incentive for opting-in to your list. This can be an eBook, a whitepaper, a PDF guide, a toolkit, whatever makes sense.

If you want to really boost your opt-in rates, then create lead magnets for specific blog posts also known as a content upgrade. The more relevant the offer, the higher your opt-ins will be. Podcasts are a great way to get exposure for both your product and your brand. Just show up and be yourself for minutes. How to get featured on podcasts: The top three ways to generate leads for a business are organic search, content marketing, and strong, crisp calls to action that are closely married to the theme of the content and desires of the audience. Long term, nothing beats organic online marketing because the results are cumulative and is attention that you own, not rent.

That puts organic at ends with paid media, that while faster, is an expense rather than an investment. With organic search, be thorough. Everybody knows a little SEO these days, but few bother to consider everything. With content, know the data behind your audience. Few realize that a lot of top publications are generating topics using algorithms now; but it can be as simple as following your Twitter engagement and Google Analytics, then putting your best foot forward with content resembling what does best.

And with calls to action, ask for little and give a lot. Getting nothing more than an e-mail address is usually enough, and the most effective places to be doing it right now are in-line with your content or in an exit intent pop-up. Entice with more content on the exact topic that interested them. The first is seminars. We hold events which teach local businesses owners how to show up in the search engines.

We fill these up by being active in the local business community and by partnering with larger agencies. They also charge a fortune and have the resources to net big clients. My third example is Local SEO. If you operate in an uncompetitive SEO environment leverage it anything tech related is competitive. One of our dog daycares sees over 60 dogs per day. If your organic traffic grows, your leads will grow, which will turn into sales and finally those sales bring in referrals.

Content marketing drives our business. We knew from the start that we would need to build traffic through content marketing, and therefore launched a blog straight away. This means writing great content, connecting with influencers to promote it, and then optimizing it to generate leads via emails, who eventually turn into customers. They have to be nurture over time. They follow a few blog posts, sign up fr the email, then eventually sign up for a trial, maybe hop on a call with us, and finally they turn into a customer.

A real winner for example has been our ultimate guide on traffic generation case studies. If you are diligent promoting other bloggers and their products and services, most people will return the favor. Assuming you have bloggers in mind you who will eventually want to connect with, take the time to sign up for their newsletter. We use Drip to fuel our marketing automation and keep us on top of leads, sign ups, and other interested subscribers.

Our strongest and best performing strategy is one we call Authority Content. This stage is about batching your content creation, capturing as much quality, in-depth, rich content as you can in the shortest possible time and in the most efficient manner. This stage is about packaging the content together into something valuable that people can easily access. The content is broken into logical chunks, transcribed and SEO optimized.

Typically speaking, this will take the form of a highly optimized helpful resource guide on your website. Not only will this increase your current conversion rate but it will also act as an SEO goldmine Google will love. The individual video pages look like this: The final stage is about further sharing your content around the web with the goal to have it seen by as many prospects as possible. This involves optimizing and uploading videos to YouTube, sharing the transcripts on PDF sharing sites, creating press releases, sharing the content via social media and boosting your best performing content.

This stage becomes the secret sauce by creating the perfect combination of SEO and content marketing. Authority Content lives in the sweet spot between the two. In short, we identify some of our best forming content as shared by the previous strategy — this is then promoted through a paid Facebook campaign. We will boost content through dark posts aimed directly to the target market. We cookie anyone who views or engages with the content, building our remarketing list.

This remarketing list is then hit with specific lead magnet offers through 3 networks — Facebook, Adwords Display Network and YouTube. We have found this process to be very cost effective competitive markets. Perhaps our best lead source of all is referral traffic. Time spent to first and foremost deliver a great product makes it easier for others to talk about you.

Like more tips like these? Download our 20 point Authority Website Checklist: It might be niche dependent, but based on my own experiences, networking with others in your niche is the best way to get more leads. For most of , the traffic source that got me the most leads was referral traffic, which was great. Of course, to do it successfully you have to be sincere and you have to really want to get to know these people. Being active in Facebook groups has been great for me too. When you share your insights with people, they end up asking for your help and trusting you.

Create free content, answers, and resources. Everybody who comes to my site and buys something from me either did it because of point 1 above, point 2 above, or because they loved my honest, helpful, content. Talk to people to see if they have any marketing needs for their business. People still like to connect a face or voice with a service to make them feel comfortable with a service purchase. When you are looking at lead generation for a business, the formula is essentially: That means that in order to increase the number of leads a business generates with their website, they need to work both on their traffic and their conversion rate.

It is important to note as well that since they multiply with each other, if one of these 2 factors performs really poorly, then inevitably, no matter how good the other is, the results will be bad. Create multiple lead magnets and content upgrades that are relevant to the page where the user lands. Run regular contests and giveaways to your audience to give them a reason to join your email list. Want to set appointments per day with highly-targeted prospects?

Cold calling is the way to do it. Rise and Grind — Wake up early, get your blood flowing and your brain working, and knock out an hour or two of cold calling first thing in the morning. My best hours are between 8: So much time was wasted when I should have just picked up the phone and dialed. Set the first meeting, and THEN research your prospect thoroughly.


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Anything else is just wasting time you could be using to land your next meeting. It almost always gives the gatekeeper a laugh and a smile, which opens the door just a little bit more for the next time you call. Mail a handwritten thank you card to standout gatekeepers. Send the prospect a helpful article related to their industry. The list goes on and on. You might end up a convert, just like me.

As long as you stick with it and commit to busting your butt, these are some of the few actions you can take TODAY to make huge strides toward your loftiest income goals. The only way to scale your business is to get down to the roots of selling your products or services and having qualified leads help you go just that much further. Make sure that you qualify your leads before interacting with them.

Look into your respective market and identify your ideal customer, create a targeted campaign towards that customer and provide them with something valuable that only you would be able to provide. Free trial, free software, free product and swap their contact information for the opportunity to receive your gift.

Now you have a potential customer on the books. Set a good example for your team members, help them develop their skill sets and harness their ambition for growth towards scaling your business. Quantify their rewards by offering commissions on top of their current salaries. Not only will they innovate to find more leads, but even their personal networks would be up for grabs. Ask your customers for referrals. Word of mouth is still the biggest motivator when it comes to selling products. Word of something good on the street spreads like wildfire, especially because of the ample amount of social platform we have.

Make sure your customer service is exceptional, make sure your service does what it says it does. Make sure your product delivers the results you promise it does and lastly, remember that customers are gold, treat them that way. The first way to increase leads for business is simply fix PPC advertising campaigns. Negative keywords, not using geolocation and neglecting the correlation between the ad copy and the landing pages ALL destroy your conversions — which means your leads drop. Understand that negative keywords gives you the focus on your primary keywords.

Set the targets for your campaigns to target by the region to target those people.

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Create ad copy, your 3 second sales pitch, and correlate it with the destination of your ad to get the most strength and best opportunity for lead acquisition from ads. The second way to increase leads for business involves traffic already coming into your website. A lot of businesses have long, lengthy, crazy book-size forms for potential customers to fill out. Instead, businesses should focus on two things when it comes to lead generation: You want a name with each of these, but getting an email means you have a warm lead. Getting a phone number from them means a really warm lead not to mention an SMS marketing point.

Whenever you mention your phone number, make it a link or a button that links to your phone number.

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Getting leads calling, means getting leads converting. The last method for business to increase leads encompasses both of these previous tips. There are literally a thousand ways you can acquire traffic; social media, SEO, print, email, media buys, radio…the list goes on. Once you have that, you can then ramp up your traffic. Content, links, and social media. Content consists of all the information including meta information on your website, including its level of optimization from an organic search perspective.

Links refer to inbound links to your website from other websites, which act as votes of authority, trust, and relevance for your website, in the eyes of search engines. Social media plays a number of roles in SEO , while largely serving as a content amplifier. Focus on these 3 areas, and your business leads will increase organically — that is, without paying directly for them as with PPC or SEM. By speaking to prospective clients on the phone, you get their contact info, help them out immediately and have a really good chance to invite them for a consultation or visit your place of business.

Unless you sell on the phone, the best way best referring to balancing cost and return is attracting website visitors to an email newsletter. Moreover, emails can be sent almost instantaneously. I pay for the pro version so I can customize it, which I believe helps conversions quite a bit.

The telephone for local business leads and perhaps high-end digital product sales. Having run marketing campaigns for lead generation businesses since , the ones that have worked really well for our clients are targeted search campaigns in Adwords and SEO. Here you can see one of the many adwords campaign that worked really well. Content Marketing — If you need a consistent flow of traffic there is almost no option in my opinion that is better than reliably producing quality content that helps your target audience. In whatever form that takes is less important than the usefulness and consistency of the content.

For me, this would be the first place I go to start grabbing leads. By hosting a webinar and being SUPER helpful with the content you share is a very powerful way to get more leads. Video, if done right can be a great place to let people see you and hear from you making it easier for them to trust you. Once you gain trust, it will be MUCH easier to then bring those people in as new leads.

Fish in a well stocked pond. The best place to find a lead is to visit the places where your ideal client is already hanging out. This exposes you to your ideal prospect while simultaneously allowing you to maximize your advertising spend. Seek to be guilty by association. Third party validation expands your list by giving you visibility to a wider audience. Find shining stars in your niche who already have a large following and collaborate with them. Connect with groups that either are your target audience, or work directly with your target audience, and then network with them in person.

In doing so, they connected with multiple mainstream crafters who had large, established, online followings. They gave each crafter a gift basket filled with their crafting products and then asked them to share their honest opinions socially. Their products are great, so the opinions were equally great, and the face to face meetings translated into sales-generating, social sharing gold.

These are three ways I would go in order to increase the traffic to a website and the number of leads I am getting for a business:. Have great content to attract people to your website. You need to publish content of value. Have a marketing strategy to get the word out about your quality content to relevant people through social media, popular blogs and websites, and influencers in your field. Without this you will be losing out on the potential of getting large traffic.

Here are examples of places where I go to promote my content. Have a great and relevant offer within your content to entice visitors to signup for your mailing list, take a trial of your software, or buy your product or services. No reason to have any flashy banners, pop-ups and ads like that. Optimise your conversion funnel by aligning relevant offers to individual content pieces to drive new leads. Test different methods for building your email list through different CTAs. For example, exit popups, inline CTAs, scroll boxes, etc.

Focus on driving more organic traffic to individual lead capture landing pages by optimizing them against relevant keywords and improving internal linking to them. Geo-Targeted Landing Pages The first lead generation technique I ever used was creating geo-targeted landing pages. I still use it to this day. Then you need to get geo-relevant backlinks to the page geo-targeted directories, geo-targeted blogs.

These pages will rank well if you wrote a strong piece of content and you get enough backlinks. Bringing me to my next point…. Every company should focus on creating content around a specific keyword. You have to think about how to solve your prospects problems at all stages of the sales funnel.

To find keywords and content ideas begin by using the Google Keyword Planner. If you are serious about driving a sickening amount of leads to your site, then you need to hustle. At the same time, you need promote your content like a savage. Then, reach out and give incredible value in your emails. That means optimizing your website for more than just search engines, but for conversions. For some reason, a lot of marketers ignore this. A lot of business owners are missing out on one of the most powerful and highest converting source of leads.

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With a strong retention program, your company increases the average customer value because you increase the average time your customer remains a customer! You just need to make sure you have a strong retention program in place. Lead nurturing is goes hand in hand with retention, same concept but targeted at different areas of your sales funnel. More and more companies are getting online and fighting for their share of the market. Google Adwords is probably the most prestigious and definitely most common among business owners but can end up being very expensive!

Facebook ads, Bing ads, and other sources often are cheaper and provide a much better return on investment. If you have strong on-the-phone sales skills, then you may want to invest in Pay-Per-Call campaigns with Google Ads. Just make sure to limit your campaign to show only during the hours you can answer, otherwise it is money down the drain! While these are 3 things I can confidently recommend to everyone in business, never underestimate the power of traditional offline methods. As more people switch their marketing budgets to reflect more of a presence with digital marketing, there will still be opportunities offline.

Solicit feedback on social media. Getting people engaged is a great lead generator. For instance, if you are a consumer products company, you can have these at retail and trade shows. Buy lists or use tools like salesforce. You can also partner with organizations that might already have affiliations with the targets.

Been traveling the world full-time since in a financially sustainable way. Engaging with others increases your sphere of influence, and conversely introduces new potential customers to your service. Engaging online can take the form of the following:. Having a website with regular updates and fresh content keeps new people coming in and increases your searchability. Again this can be very effective in developing relationships as well as increasing your web presence.

But it also takes a lot of time to read other websites and provide thoughtful comments, so should be approached judiciously. But in my experience, the strongest online relationships have stemmed from offline connections. In my business, whether it is meeting with editors or colleagues, my in-person connections have fostered the most and best business leads. One of the easiest ways to get leads is by referral, since people will be more willing to become a customer if they know somebody who is already a happy customer. So ask your customers to share your business with other people who might be in need of your services.

A happy customer will gladly do this, but not always of their own accord; sometimes they need a little nudge. The whole Outbound Sales process is about establishing relationships with potential customers, that show initial interest in your product. No calling, no database buying and paying for telemarketing.

You generate a customer base by yourself, then you contact the customers and build relationships with those who are worth your time and attention. For us a prospect means a detailed description of a potential customer. Each time we launched new sales campaign with a new target audience, we gathered with our team to conduct an in-depth analysis of our potential customer.

Every day when you generate a sufficient numer of prospects, your task at the end of the day will be to launch a Cold Mail campaign aimed at generating as many leads as possible. This way replaces the method of Cold Calling which is mainly about calling different companies and trying to reach out to a person in charge.

For more details about my strategy, click here. Attending industry events is a great way to meet people and put faces to names. Meeting in person puts an entirely different complexion on any relationship you previously had with the person in question, and puts you in a much stronger position to do business with them.

In this online world we find ourselves in, we forget that sometimes the most effective way to do business is to simply pick up the phone and speak to someone. It makes for a more human connection and you can much more quickly ascertain whether the other person is truly interested in doing business with you.

Whatever you do, keep perservering and work hard. I can at least give examples of what works for one of my projects, Dicey Goblin, which is a game related ecommerce site:. One of our best sources of sales is very out of the box, however works wonders for our space — hosting gaming tournaments. Having that face to face time with them, gives them a connection to us personally, which also makes them more likely to purchase from us and talk about us. Giveaways typically do well for ecommerce sites, however our audience tends to be more frugal than normal. We made an email opt-in a requirement to enter the giveaway, which allowed us to build our lists for email campaigns as well, so it was a win win.

Lastly, we also checked the domains of their email handles to see if they owned any blogs. This made it easier to request a guest posting opportunity with them, since they were already familiar with our brand. One final thing that worked better for us than expected, is just having a good design. Other sites in our space are very traditional crappy. Their design is poor, their navigation is sloppy, their product descriptions are scraped, they have no customer service, etc. We took advantage of these weak points and did the opposite, which has gotten us repeat customers, quickly.

We also ask our customers how they hear about us and one of our top sources is word of mouth from their friends. Demand Generation — boosting brand awareness and product exposure through paid channels, SEO, and inbound marketing tactics. Customer Advocacy — maintaining a strong brand reputation, delighting customers, providing value and establishing ourselves as a reliable resource for business owners, and leveraging loyal brand advocates to drive more organic referrals.

We send handwritten thank you cards to every new customer that signs up to use our app to schedule and communicate with their employees:. Product Development — constantly listening to customers, growing our development team, and making improvements to our products in an effort to continue positioning ourselves as the top solution in our industry and best solution available to our target audience.

We regularly add new features to the product that help our users save even more time on scheduling and communicating with their teams.