How to Put Eyes on Your Content on Day One

The day has finally arrived!

You’re ready to launch your site off into the endless expanse of the internet. You content is polished and beautiful, your site delivers an amazing user experience—after all, there’s no point in driving traffic to a site that no one will like!

You wait, ready to answer any comments, thank everyone who shares your content—and spend all day refreshing your site stats, as a tiny trickle of people come and go, with barely a word to say.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, everyone starts at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you must start at zero. There are ways to make sure your reach is as large as it can be from that first day—and the faster your start, generally, the faster your rise.

So how do we go about making sure your site has the absolute best debut it possibly can?

Assess Existing Assets

Starting Big

You probably recognize the name Neil Patel. If not, he cofounded Kissmetrics, and has since created several very successful blogs. He clearly works harder than most people, and he knows his trade, so chances are good he would have found success regardless of his base. That said, the name recognition, authority, and readership he gained from working here on Kissmetrics probably didn’t hurt, right?

Chances are your first article won’t generate 12,577 views the month you launch your site.

The bigger you want to build a skyscraper, the wider and deeper you have to design the base. Likewise, if you want to build a huge following quickly, the best thing to do is to start with as many people as possible looking at you.

Starting out, you probably don’t have a blog with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to pull from, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything at all.

Today, almost everyone is active on some sort of social media, and most of those who aren’t make up for it by having friends out there in the real world. It’s worth saying, don’t be obnoxious about it, but most of your friends and acquaintances well be happy to give you a boost if you ask them. Your primary goal out the gate is to get people signed up to your email list, because that will bring people back, and your secondary goal is to convince them to share your content, because that will bring new people in. Even a few dozen or hundred people will make a big difference in the short run. We’ll get into why in a minute, but for now let’s talk about how.

Where to Amass Followers

First off, if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of conversion, it would be a good idea to read up a bit. Your goal here is to create that wide base to build off of, so you get the most out of every post. Different networks offer different advantages, and you can certainly, if you don’t have time for setting up and growing all of them, mix and match to focus on those aspects you believe will be the most important to your specific situation.

Facebook Friends

Facebook is great for starting a site out, especially your first, because they let you invite people to join your business/fan page, where you’ll hopefully have a nice conversion button to take them to your site. User engagement with your posts is higher on some other platforms, but no one else lets you bug people in quite as direct and friendly a way as Facebook. Better yet, people are used to getting invited to random things, so they’re not going to hold it against you.

Likely you’ve already seen the big problem with this, though, which is the nature of your social network on Facebook. Simply put, your friends, family, and acquaintances are not likely to be your actual target market. That’s okay, because, hopefully, a few people in their networks are.

Don’t underestimate the value of joining Facebook groups in your target area, either. These are often very active, but overlooked and underutilized by major players, meaning you only have to compete with other little fish for attention. With any luck, you’ll make some new friends struggling with the same issues you are, and help each other grow into medium-sized fish.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is a fickle beast. Unless you’re very good or very lucky, you will probably see only a trickle of traffic from this site. Even tweets that do very well from a retweeting perspective tend to have low conversion.

Somewhat ironically, given that it’s such a large and impersonal site, what Twitter is best used for early on is building relationships. Follow and reach out to established authorities in your niche. Not only are you genuinely likely to have interests in common, but many are happy to offer advice and support, and a single share of your content from a known authority can open you up to dozens or hundreds of new connections.

To put it another way, your focus on Twitter isn’t bringing floods of people to your site, it’s about bringing a handful of the right people.

Google Plus

Google Plus is another oddball. It might be important for SEO rankings, you need a profile on it, but it’s so convoluted in some respects that it’s hard to grow yourself there. One particularly great thing about it is that anything you share on G+ is almost instantly indexed.

I don’t know entirely why Google Plus is such a mess. Part of it is no doubt the learning curve for G+; while most social media platforms have a clear and obvious thing they do, G+ is trying to be everything to everyone. They want to handle the comments on your blog, they want to merge with your YouTube channel, and so on, so it’s not clear entirely what you’re there for at first glance.

Most of the people who use it fall into one of two categories:

Power Users: These people really get a lot done with G+. They’ve taken the time to figure out how to take advantage of its strengths, and they’re reaching other experts. This, oddly, makes G+ a great place for interacting with other people who are serious about what they’re doing.

Jeff Bullas’ Google+ profile has almost thirty thousand followers and is closing in on four million views.

Autoposters: These people set their blogs to autopost to their G+ page and have never, ever, been back. This is almost everyone who could be described as a beginner, novice, or casual blogger.

In other words, most people either get a lot from it, or nothing at all. If you’d like to jump into getting the maximum from Google’s own take on the social network, start with the basics, and work out from there.

Pinterest and Instagram

This is a wildcard. If you are operating in a visually engaging niche, Pinterest and Instagram are both incredibly powerful. If you happen to be able to create small montages of eye-catching images, Instagram is possibly the easiest social media network to gain a big following on.

Pinterest doesn’t amass followers as quickly, but has been show to have a high conversion rate compared to most other social media platforms. In other words, if you can get people to look at your stuff on Pinterest, there’s a relatively high chance they’ll follow it to your site.

On the other hand, if your niche doesn’t lend itself to pretty pictures, these sites will be of somewhat diminished value to you. It’s also important to note that while both Instagram and Pinterest rely primarily on visual content, they are not created equal. Pinterest is a great place to share infographics and other more complex posts, while the structure and culture of Instagram reward collages and photographs more strongly. Including infographics in your articles is a great way to expand the reach of your content on that platform.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been making big, and very overdue changes lately with how they deliver content. It now functions as something of a hybrid of Facebook’s News Feed and Tumblr, where you have a feed delivering content generated or shared by people you follow, as well as items LinkedIn thinks you might like – or was paid to show you.

One aspect which has not yet been overhauled, but is hopefully on the list, is the groups feature of LinkedIn, which is reminiscent of the forums that have existed on the internet since nearly the beginning. Like-minded people can gather together, create topic threads, and discuss those topics, to their hearts’ content. It should be an extraordinary tool for outreach to your target market, but in its current iteration is just a kind of okay one. By posting often, and linking to good content (yours and others’) you can usually bring in a pretty steady trickle of new people, with a relatively high conversion rate to subscribers, since they’re already interested in what you’re talking about.

The good news is that LinkedIn is the absolute easiest network to grow your network on. Everybody is there to, digitally speaking, exchange business cards.

The first step to creating a big following is to contact people you actually know. LinkedIn will then help you out by importing your contact lists and so on. You want to get about one hundred followers, so you look like a real person rather than a bot. Of course, one hundred people is way too small a number to really expand the reach of your content, so you’ll want to acquire more followers.

What should you do next? Well . . . This is sort of bad form, so don’t tell anyone I told you to do this, but what you should do is use the “People you may know . . .” feature to send out invitations to connect to as many people as you can. Target peers in your field in and your target audience—you want shares from the former and clicks from the latter.

Once you have five hundred friends on LinkedIn, your count simply shows as 500+ and you never have to send out a request again to grow your network, because you’ll get a steady stream of requests indefinitely.

Is this abusing the system a bit? Absolutely. Is it the best way to get something valuable out of LinkedIn? As far as I’ve been able to tell.

Other Websites

One of your biggest assets isn’t social media at all. Do you have any friends with blogs or websites? Acquaintances? Cousins of friends of friends?

Ask them to link to your new site, even just a mention. This will help you rise through the SEO page rankings by growing your domain authority.

If they have a more popular site, this can really translate to a huge bump.

Guest Posts

Even better than a link, reach out to people and ask for a chance to guest post. Many sites will be happy to extend at least the opportunity, and if you do it far enough in advance, they’ll be happy schedule the articles for your site launch or soon after. This is a three-fold win for you. It raises your domain authority, and it sends people your way, which is great. The big thing it does, though, is give you an opportunity to interact with the users of the other site, answer their questions and create rapport.

In fact, commenting on other blogs and websites is another great way to gain followers!

Many of the people you interact with (assuming the interactions are positive) will check out your own site. Even if they don’t, though, they’ve got one more reason to remember your name. If you’re showing up on a number of sites, they’ll see you again and again, and they’ll start thinking of you as someone whose advice is sought. An authority. Someone to pay attention to and follow.

Just remember to write insightful comments. Generic comments like “hey great post” won’t help. Since a lot of commenting systems allow readers to rank (thumbs up/down) comments, it becomes even more crucial to write something that will get the attention of readers. If you have nothing to say, don’t write anything.

Here, a commenter makes an insightful comment on a post from Both Sides of the Table. Reading his comment, it’s clear that he read the post, understood the content, and was able to make a useful insight.

There is some debate over whether the value of guest posts is deteriorating, but they certainly remain invaluable to sites in their early stages.

Don’t be afraid to ask

How do you get guest posting opportunities? You ask. Ask on Twitter or through email. However works, but do ask. Most sites, even relatively low traffic ones, get many, many, requests for guest blogging opportunities, but if they know you’re a real person, and you can show them you’ll do a good job, then at least a few of them will likely acquiesce.

This isn’t about taking the internet by storm, it’s about opening a door. As your name recognition increases, you’ll get more opportunities—that’s a long term concern though, and we’re talking about putting eyes on the page on day one. What you’re doing by guest blogging is diverting a tiny portion of as many larger sites’ traffic as you’re able to towards your own site. Many small streams make a river.

It should probably go without saying (but won’t) that your social profiles should be polished. You want to be wearing the digital equivalent of a nice suit, so that you look professional. Perfect formatting and grammar are necessary. The picture you choose is also important – people will judge you by this. Choose a professional photo – something you’d put on a resume.

Why Leveraging These Platforms Matters

I did promise to tell you why all this matter. Well, in all honesty it’s not critical that this all happens on day one. That’s just what this article is about, and there’s no reason you can’t have it all ready to go, so why wouldn’t you?

Blog growth tends to be happen slowly, if the blog’s doing well. You have ten in month one, twenty in month two, forty in month three, and so on. Give or take, of course, there isn’t some industry-standard growth curve. That said, you’ll have some average rate of conversion of visitors, and the more visitors you convert, the more visitors there will be to convert, so things gain steam. In other words, if you’re going to grow at all, in two or three years it won’t really matter whether you started with one subscriber or one hundred, because you’ll have thousands. However, there’s a big difference between a three month growth curve starting with one, ten, and one hundred followers.

Let’s look at a very simplified growth rate of 10% per month for twelve months.

Starting with ten followers, you’ll end the first month with thirteen, and the year with thirty-three. Starting with three hundred thirty. The math on this isn’t exactly hard. At this arbitrary growth rate every subscriber you have at the start is an extra tenth of a follower each month.

Does it really work this way? Of course not! This example is simple, and reality doesn’t have time for simple. Your growth will probably follow something close to this pattern at first, after that, things get complicated. At some point you’ll hit plateaus or viral spikes, and there will be good months and bad.

The point is, the more people you start with, the faster you’re going to grow if you’re doing everything else right. And that’s why we care about starting strong.

Followers are just the start, though, because, “. . . if you’re doing everything else right,” is a very big if.

Test All Tech

You’re going to have some technical difficulties. It’s going to happen. Still, it’s better if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot at the start of the race.

Technical difficulties can break a launch, and often do

Make sure everything is working. I can’t give you a real checklist for this, because it’s a big, complex topic, and since there are so many ways to build, host, and run a site, anything specific I wrote would be 90% irrelevant to everyone who read this. That said, there are some basic items which should be in the forefront of your mind.

Make sure your site works for all major browsers

Even Internet Explorer. There are very few things more frustrating when designing a site than making something very cool and discovering that it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and . . . not Internet Explorer, because if one browser is messing up, it’s always Internet Explorer. IE is still the browser of choice for about 10% of the internet (which is millions of people). So, if you don’t support it, that’s ten percent of your potential market, poof, gone. Maybe that’s worth it to you, maybe it’s not, but be aware.

Ensure Everything Works Properly on Mobile

More and more people are visiting sites from mobile devices, so it’s very important to make sure your site renders properly on these devices. If they have to pinch and zoom or try to adjust your site so that it is readable, it will leave a bad impression and most visitors will likely leave and never come back again. Even worse, it hurts your SEO with Google. Use Google’s mobile friendly test to make sure your site works properly.

Get Open Graph Working Correctly

You know when people share an article on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and there’s a catchy image that appears? That’s no accident. Their Open Graph is working properly.

Make sure key features work

Like I said, I can’t really give you a definitive guide, but there are some critical growth opportunities that you’ll lose if you don’t have the following features working: comments, follow, share, and subscribe.

Fully Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Speaking of following and sharing, since you have gone to the trouble of growing your potential readership through social media from the outset, it would probably be a good idea to make sure your site can properly leverage these media. This is another good reason to grow your following in advance, as you’ll have to set up the various accounts to connect them to your site anyway.

Make sure all the buttons work. Seriously.

So speaks the voice of painful personal experience! Make sure every single button you have on the site actually does what it’s supposed to be doing. Don’t just assume it will.

Make it Easy For Users To Give You Their Email Address

Remember, the prize bit of user engagement (aside from actual sales) is the email subscription. You don’t want users to leave without giving you their email. Look at Kissmetrics. What’s the first thing you see in the top left, right where your eyes look when you start reading the page? A box for your email and name . . . and this is a site which is all about the science of conversion. What does that tell you about how important email subscriptions are?

Easy signup process

So make sure they can give you their email address! Any funnels you have for convincing people to give them to you are well constructed, but also don’t put up any barriers; if the user wants to skip your pitch and just commit, don’t force them to click through a million reasons why they should do exactly what they were already planning to do.

And make it clear what they’ll be getting when they sign up. An email every time a new post goes live on your blog? Will this be everyday, a few times a day, once a month, etc? Make it very clear before they signup. And, of course, tell them that you’ll never spam them (assuming you won’t).

Ensure all content is optimized to share easily

This is another tricky one, because “optimized to share” is different for different platforms, and, also, changes for each platform from time-to-time. While individual platforms change what sizes and types of content look best only rarely, with all the platforms out there, it’s a pretty constant trickle.

What you want to consider are the sizes of the images, the length and content of your excerpts, and the length and content of your titles. There are other aspects to consider, but basically you should put some real though into making people want to click on whatever stub you’re showing them.

Keeping track of those details is a huge headache, but luckily there are sites dedicated to doing just that.

Observe Some Simple Best Practices

There are a few more miscellaneous things you can do to really maximize your return on investment right at the start, simply by avoiding missteps.

Don’t include content which will anger people unless that’s what you’re going for.

Making people angry is actually a great way to make money, judging by the number of big sites which seem to specialize in it. That said, don’t do it accidentally. What a mess that is. Just think before you post.

Don’t get too fancy

Bells, whistles, buttons, video intros, etc. There is always a new next big thing, and it’s okay to indulge now and then, but you should, especially right at the start, be focusing on strong fundamentals. You look better sinking one from the free throw line than barely missing ten from the half court.

Don’t mislead

Honesty, honesty, honesty. If people don’t trust your brand, you are sunk. You’ll be shopping for office space on the lower deck of the Titanic. So don’t be sketchy. Even if it pays off immediately, it will hurt you in the long haul.

Don’t Spam

People are trusting you with their time, their contact info, and their attention. Don’t abuse it, simple as that. Treat their time as your own. If you’re good about it almost all the time, most people will forgive you when you slip up.

Project Professionalism

This is sort of an extension of everything above. Perception is important. If you want to look like a business authority, maybe use an “about me” photo featuring yourself in a type of suit that doesn’t begin with any of the following words: swim, jump, gimp, or birthday.

An exception would be the word “space”. If you’re an astronaut, play that up.

Have a Post Bank Saved Up Prior to Launch

Start Your Organic Rise

Okay, let’s touch on the organic search results, because you should start building your domain authority right at the start. We’ve already mentioned how to position yourself to squeeze out lackluster competitors, but there are a few more things to consider.

Ensure your content is at or above the quality of top competitors in your niche.
I won’t go into this too deep, because everyone who’s even sort of an expert in internet marketing and SEO has already written an entire post on it, but the best way to rise in your niche rankings is to find searches where the top result is mediocre or worst, and answer the same question better.

Write several articles on topics related to your niche.

You want to have several articles, perhaps half a dozen, populating your site right at the word go. This way, anyone who arrives has few things to read or share—and, better yet, link back to. But take your time with writing. To write something truly insightful and useful is a lot of work. Quality over quantity.

Establish (and Keep) a Schedule.

One of the biggest predictors of whether or not a site will grow is whether or not someone keeps creating new content on a schedule. Now, this probably isn’t a perfect correlation, because the people who are busy creating content are also the people who are going to be working hard at all the other aspects of making a site fly.

Advertising

How much depends on your budget, but let’s be honest here, advertising is still an amazing way to bring people in, and expand your reach. Services like Outbrain are specialized for content.

Always Be Learning

Creating great content that gets shared and has great SEO is tough. It requires a lot of learning and practice. Don’t expect to know it all from the start. Begin with reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Read it and live it.

It’s also worth reading up on Bing’s guide to building quality content and even Wikipedia’s guide to writing.

Additionally, spend time learning why other sites rank well and are well-respected. What do the New York Times, The Atlantic, and even Pitchfork have that gets them the respect, authority, and traffic? Know what makes good content and what makes bad content.

Conclusion

This is all a lot of work, I know. Running a site is a lot of work.

Momentum takes awhile to accrue—that’s both the pleasure and the pain of it, but, generally speaking, if you follow these guidelines, you’ll have tilted the ground in your favor. All you have to do now is push as hard as you can, as long as you can, to take advantage of the friendly terrain. There’s no road to easy success, because, if the road is easy, you’re going to get lapped by all the people giving it their all.

What advice do you have to help people put eyes on their content from day one?

About the Author: Anja Skrba has been blogging for over five years. You can find her at FirstSiteGuide.com whereshe shares tips on blogging basics and trends.

How to Get More Customers in Your Sales Funnel with Engaging Lead Generation

In business and in marketing – it’s all about the leads. But today, with so many choices, options and research available, getting the average visitor to take action is a lot more challenging than it used to be.

The core concept of the sales funnel itself hasn’t changed much: you’ll always get more interested prospects at the top than at the bottom. But how you engage with those prospects at every step of the funnel has changed dramatically. Let’s take a closer look at how you can not only entice more users to take the first step, but also brainstorm new and innovative ideas to keep them interested as they make their way through to becoming loyal brand advocates.

The Big Top-of-Funnel Mistake that Nearly Everyone is Making

By far the biggest problem I see marketers and companies of every size and scope making with regards to filling the top of their funnel is this:

Mentioning your product.

“But Sherice!” I can hear you saying, “They need to be aware of the product before they can take action!”

I understand your concern – but let’s look at this from the customer’s perspective. Say I’m looking to invest in a system that provides scalable, cloud-based hosting for my website. Much to the impulsive marketer’s dismay, at this point in the funnel, I don’t want to download a white paper about “How XYZ Company Delivers Scalable Cloud Hosting Solutions”, yet that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s thrown at me from every website.

Educate at the Top of the Funnel First

Take a step back and look at ways to educate, rather than persuade the customer. At this point in the funnel, they’re not looking seriously at solutions. They’re involved in the discovery process – learning what’s out there and what options they have available. You need to prove you’re even worth listening to by illustrating your expertise in a way that’s helpful and knowledgeable, not pushy.

This means filling the top of the funnel with bite-sized, visually scan-able tidbits of content in the medium and format your users prefer. And don’t just wait for the prospect to be the first to act – make sure that your content is hosted anywhere they might go as part of their research and discovery track, whether that’s video, infographics, podcasts or slide shows. They shouldn’t have to go to your site in order to learn more.

Here again, the information you send them shouldn’t be talking about your company directly at all, but rather acting as a guide to help them solve whatever issue or question they have. Going back to my previous example about cloud-based hosting, I may want to know about things like:

• Which apps/services are supported?
• What type of platform is best for my needs?
• What are SaaS, IaaS and PaaS?
• How close is the server to my location?
• What options do I have for databases and storage?
• How much of the server can I control or access myself?

And so on. Even at this “Awareness/Interest stage of the funnel, it’s best to educate and guide rather than push for a sale. Once the interest is piqued, the question then becomes, how can you carry over more of your prospects to the next level of the funnel?

In short, how do you tie this education and guidance to your brand without pushing the consumer away?

Going from Prospect to Purchase

This is the point at which many marketers jump ravenously on the sale, but too often, the pressure is too much, too soon. Remember, they’re considering your offer among many likely competitors so how you differentiate yourself (in a way that’s meaningful to the consumer) is what’s going to warrant them giving you even more serious consideration.

This is where you put your email marketing muscle into action – reach out and learn what your prospect’s biggest concerns are. What do they specifically have questions about? Then set your content and marketing teams about forging relevant, personalized drip campaigns that answer those questions in such a way as to position your product heads and shoulders above the rest.

Common techniques that work best at this time are things like feature lists, comparison charts and pricing breakdowns. Once the consumer sees exactly what they’ll get, what it costs and what it includes, it’s time for the sales team to make their move and reach out to the customer to start planting those “loyalty seeds”.

Things like a free, one-on-one demonstration of the product, a fully featured trial account and tutorials can go a long way in showing the customer that you’ve got their best interests at heart. If you’ve got new features lined up for release, invite them to be one of the first to see how these new updates will benefit their business and how to use them effectively!

Follow Up After the Sale

After the sale may feel like the time to celebrate – but resting on your laurels at this point just makes it easier for competitors to swoop in and convince your newly hard-earned customer that your product or service isn’t the best choice for them. This is why every customer should be looked at more as an ally rather than another notch on your sales belt.

Always be looking for ways where you can create the kind of experience that the customer just can’t help but talk about. It sounds cliché to talk about delivering a phenomenal customer experience, but doing so at every stage of the process – from the website to the technical support to the newsletter and every outreach avenue and touch-point in between is what creates unbreakable loyalty.

Here, things like reward/referral programs, loyalty exclusives, how-to newsletters, social media coupons and other incentives can solidify that loyalty. Don’t just throw sale after sale notification at them – make them an integral part of your brand, and your brand a part of their lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling shoes or scalable hosting.

Always be looking for ways to add value – not what you think is valuable, but what the customer finds valuable. Every marketing initiative at each stage in the funnel should continually ask “what can we do to make this even better?”

By asking the right kinds of questions at the right points throughout the sale funnel process, you’ll not only win over more prospects, but you’ll be creating an iron-clad foundation of loyalty and communication that people (even your competition!) can’t help but admire and try to duplicate. Always look for ways to refine your funnel at any point where you find “leaks”. Seek out disconnects where the message doesn’t match the intent or where the content isn’t meeting the reader’s needs. An engaging sales funnel isn’t made of stone: it’s a fluid, ever-changing and adapting product that demonstrates precisely how you put customers first.

Have you created some unique, engaging or compelling content for your sales funnel that customers just can’t stop talking about? Tell us more about it in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

How Your Keyword Strategy is Failing You (And How to Fix It)

One day very soon, we’re all going to stop worrying about “keywords”.

And then we can all rejoice.

via GIPHY

But until that happens, whenever “SEO” comes up, the next phrase muttered usually involves “keywords” and “rankings”.

This unhealthy obsession with “keyword + rankings” (that was a search operator joke) has long been misleading.

Historically, keywords gave us a fairly reliable way to measure progress in the otherwise abstract and confusing world of SEO. (Not to mention, the very real danger of cheap SEO providers.)

The problem is that today, keyword rankings are basically useless. Which means the way we’ve traditionally optimized and measured for them is basically useless as well.

Here’s why.

Why Your 2005 Keyword Strategy Doesn’t Work in 2015

Rightfully (or wrongfully), keyword rankings have been SEO KPI #1 for over a decade.

And back in the day, this made sense.

Search engines were more-or-less one dimensional, which made SEO a very straightforward process. Everyone, no matter who you were or where in the world you were searching from, would largely see the same exact search engine result pages (SERPs) when looking for a specific keyword.

In this environment, keyword rankings (as a metric) were very simple, reliable, and (I can’t believe I’m going to say this when referencing Google) transparent.

On top of that, analytics programs freely passed keyword referral data back to webmasters. Meaning you could see exactly which terms people used to arrive at your site.

By matching keyword positions or rankings with the referral data you were seeing in analytics, you could easily see the $money keywords – or which ones were driving success (in terms of traffic and conversions).

Unfortunately, none of this is true anymore.

So good thing you scanned over the last ~165 words anyway. :)

Something About Personalization

Today, everyone’s search engine result pages (SERPs) are being personalized based on your:

1. Past browsing history
2. Physical location
3. Social media connections

Just to name a few. :/

That means the keyword rankings you’re seeing, instead of being static and universal like the good-ol-days, are completely personalized to you as an individual.

For example, look up a traditionally head (or super popular) keyphrase like, “Pizza” and you now get this:

Modern SERP’s pull from a variety of different sources (here you’ll see the huge prevalence and opportunity of local search emphasized), with traditional “organic” results pushed off a bit.

(This also means the role of “SEO” has evolved to include influential satellites like AdWords and Yelp. But that’s a topic for another day.)

The concept of keywords having one specific rank, and then benchmarking efforts against it, is today at best worthless, and at worst misleading.

But wait, there’s more!

Dude, Where’s My Keywords?

The second part of the keyword ranking equation was using referral data from your analytics to see how and where people are coming from.

With this info, then you could at least get an idea of (a) how people are looking for you and (b) how to use that information to do a better job of optimizing your site.

So even if keyword rankings are losing value, this referral data was extremely helpful in giving you clues to influential topics and keyphrases.

Now, SEO encompasses much more than just Google Search. Hoooooweeevverrr… Google Search is a virtual monopoly, meaning they can pretty much do whatever they’d like. Starting with, taking away almost all keyword referral data that gets passed to webmasters and site owners.

A few years ago, they moved to make all searches secure (except for ad clicks). Now in your analytics program, where you used to see the specific keywords sending you traffic under “organic”, you now see a [not provided] placeholder that accounts for the majority (~70-90%).

That means you can no longer see what keywords are sending you traffic from organic search….

… due to “privacy reasons”…

… but you can, however, pay them for it via AdWords.

How ironic. And convenient.

Keyphrases are still very important. Trouble is, we now have to infer or assume what keyphrases are popular and how to best optimize with huge gaps in verifiable data (and you know what they say about when you assume).

One of the easiest ways, is to simply alter our strategy a bit and focus on what we can control (our website) instead of what we can’t (keyword rankings).

The Simple Change to Update Your Strategy

If (a) keyword rankings are unreliable, and (b) keyword referral data is nonexistent, then… something needs to give.

Going forward, it’s easier to shift focus away from keywords (directly), to the performance of your landing and content pages instead (so you can indirectly assess topic performance).

Then reverse-engineer success based on topic – i.e. a broad set of long-tail keyphrases – instead of only one specific keyphrase. It’s messy, but practically easier (unless you’re interested in getting your PhD in SEO and analytics).

For example, one simple way is to take a look at your most popular content in Google Analytics from organic search:

Then cross-reference this information with some (remaining) query data in Google’s Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools):

And you can kinda get an idea of the long-tail keyphrases sending this page traffic (along with some position-related info – but let’s not over-emphasize this now, shall we?).

You can also use some paid tools, like Moz, to help track a certain number of keyphrases against specific landing pages:

In a way, this backwards process should actually benefit you by ensuring extra attention-to-detail when strategizing the information architecture of a site’s pages (and their respective keyphrases) in the first place.

The Holistic Future of Search Optimization

In today’s dynamic marketing landscape, SEO isn’t “SEO”.

Instead, SEO now takes a multi-faceted approach where you’re involving different disciplines (i.e. content, email, advertising, social), building a brand (i.e. investing in intangibles, not just conversions), and competing on multiple fronts (i.e. paid search positions, review & aggregation sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, beefing up your local listings, and more) – all at the same time.

Needless to say, this requires a lot of time, man (or woman – can’t accuse me of discrimination!) power, and sufficient investment.

The days of competing solely on (and overprioritizing) SEO are numbered.

But that’s not to say it’s any less important. In fact, search is only becoming more important and more influential in the buying process of customers.

Finding what you’re specifically looking for will always be priority #1 online. And that means search will be omnipresent and omnipotent because it’s so valuable (and profitable).

The trick will be to remain holistic and nimble as trends and platforms evolve.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the author of a BS-free SEO guide that shows you how to fix common mistakes while avoiding algorithm chasing. He’s a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital marketing firm digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences.

Triggered Email: The Killer Conversion App

Marketers have been using “spray and pray” tactics for decades. The email equivalents are often called “blasts.” The idea: purchase a large list, push your message to the masses and hope some buckshot hits the target.

This form of email marketing is outdated and ineffective. It can backfire. Sending spam can tarnish your reputation and sever more relationships than it builds.

Email marketing that delivers results today reaches the right person with the right message to solve their immediate problem.

You aim more carefully. When a specific event or behavior occurs, a marketing automation system pulls the trigger and fires off an email. Conveniently, the practice has come to be known as “triggered” email.

An Epsilon study from 2014 reveals triggered email messages average 74.9% higher open rates and 161.9% higher click-through rates than traditional bulk messages. (Image Source)

More automation… a more personal touch?

Marketing experts claim you can achieve new levels of personalization through automation. It sounds ironic. A robotic approach increases the personal touch?

The reason it’s true is you don’t simply automate the process. You use automation to understand buyer intent and engage with prospects based on their interests.

Your database is the engine room. The more data you put in it the more personalization you’re able to extract. Your objective is to perpetually update individual records with preferences, demographic, and behavioral information.

One approach is to ask for the information. You encourage prospects to update their records. Subsequent interactions employ prepopulated or progressive forms where users can update and add to the information you’ve collected.

Another approach is to gather behavioral data automatically. Your marketing automation platform will track who did what so you can respond accordingly with email.

Each touch point can become increasingly relevant to the individual’s journey to make your marketing dramatically more timely.

77% of online shoppers say they’re more likely to buy from a retailer when its
emails are personal. 82% of web shoppers say they’d likely buy more items from a retailer if its emails were more personally relevant.

Source: Listrak-sponsored Harris Interactive survey

Throughout the rest of this post, I’ll present a variety of ways to use triggered email programs and show you examples of each.

The idea is to nurture your leads

A very small percentage of first-time visitors to your website will make a purchase, but if you offer something of value, they may reward you with their email address. Essentially, you gain permission to market to them.

Of course, if you proceed to try to slay them with a hard sell, they’re likely to unsubscribe immediately. The better approach is to nurture the lead.

Email lead nurture programs give you opportunities to remain on your prospects’ radar and potentially convert them to customers. The approach tends to work best when you’re gentle. In most cases, you’ll aim to educate prospects by making offers and/or delivering useful content to help increase interest.

With lead nurturing, you have a variety of options for personalization and/or segmentation. A basic approach might simply include sending a pre-scripted series of emails.

I recently put a new autoresponder series in place. New subscribers get a simple 6-part introduction to some of the most important elements of digital marketing. They’re invited to download free resources for deeper dives and learn a little more about my content marketing consulting and copywriting services.

A more data-driven approach might prescribe a set of emails based on the prospect’s behavior. For example, a visitor who watched a video might be sent a piece of content that makes for a practical sequel.

It’s conceivable a prospect spent a large amount of time in a specific section of your site indicating interest in a product line. Your nurturing sequence might deliver a special offer for the product or some form of “Did you know…?”

There’s nothing real fancy about this example, but note how Chris (the sender) is wise to my behavior on his company’s blog. His data shows him I’ve checked out a specific post, so he responded with a few offers: give Vero a try or watch a 25-minute demo.

Lead nurturing of the “help get started” variety can be an effective tactic. The marketer’s hypothesis: when prospects understand how easy it is to use the service, they are likely to try it.

Abandonment follow-up email

When you nearly make a sale on an ecommerce site it can unfold into a successful outcome. The scenario in play here: a known contact clicks into a form, places a product in the cart, or nearly completes some desired action. In other words, the prospect stopped short of buying.

Thanks to marketing automation and integration with tracking systems, you can respond via email. The message will be based on actions your prospect did or didn’t take.

Messages triggered by cart or form abandonment may work to strengthen engagement and inspire the recipient to make another move. Email in situations such as cart abandonment should employ a friendly tone and offer helpful assistance.

For example, if someone abandons a white paper sign-up, you might send a message offering related pieces of content or offer similar content in different formats (e.g., a video or slideshow).

Note: (1) the fun tone and its attempt to be emotional, (2) the reminder that shipping is free and (3) the proactive call to action or “suggestive close.”

This abandonment email suggests some urgency and includes an additional discount. Photos of the nearly purchased items attempt to create abandoner’s remorse.

Adidas cleverly toys with the customer’s competitive spirit: he hates to lose. Clearly, they’d like Andrew (the recipient) to come back or call. See, he also has the option to order by phone 24/7. Smart.

Welcome program email

New subscribers are more likely to open your emails. Sending personalized welcome emails creates a connection with first-timers, and hopefully, goodwill. Handled adeptly, welcome emails help establish a relationship and build trust.

Your emails might educate recipients about your value proposition, ask them to tell you more about themselves, and provide resources and helpful information personalized to address their interests.

Depending on the business, many savvy marketers are even moving beyond welcome messages to activation or onboarding programs that guide the prospect or new customer going forward.

Say you offer a free product trial. Inevitably, some prospects will sign up but not start their trial. In this scenario, you might set up an email to trigger after “X” days. Its messages could be, “We noticed you haven’t done (desired action) yet,” and then:

• Here are the reasons you should try this out
• Here is a great resource to make it easy to get started
• Here’s a link if you want someone to call and assist you

When a new customer opts-in at RealAge, a welcome email introduces him or her to their services. This email reminds the recipient he hasn’t completed the RealAge test and then offers a library of resources.

Made delivers a welcome gift and tries its hand at a form of “cause” marketing by writing, “We’re thrilled you’ve joined our fight for great furniture design at affordable prices.”

Reviews and testimonials email

Asking for reviews is a nurturing tactic—and then some. When it works, you can collect content, which may prove valuable in marketing programs outside of email. Of course, this type of “ask” could have a psychological appeal too, demonstrating to customers you care about their opinions (and perhaps you’re confident they’ll like your products).

As you collect positive reviews, you might include them in your content to help drive conversions. Also, with help from your marketing automation platform, you can use dynamic content to populate emails with testimonials in line with the prospect’s interest.

Reviews aren’t always easy to get, so don’t be boring with your request. Inject personality into the email. You might also attempt to be helpful with links to: customer service information, how-tos, FAQs and so forth.

A smart play from The Body Shop: while soliciting reviews, they (1) provide an incentive for doing so and (2) showcase reviews from other customers.

Special occasion email

Special occasions are ideal triggers for sending email. Of course, you can look at special occasions two ways.

The first and most obvious are your customers’ special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or important milestones in their lives. Second, the occasion being celebrated could be your own—an anniversary for your company or for the customer’s use of your products and services.

Of course, you need to put notices such as these into proper perspective. The one-year anniversary of a customer running your software may not be perceived as special. Your challenge is to make it special.

Be creative. Commemorate the occasion in a special way with a gift or offer that is perceived to be worthy of celebration.

Have fun with emails such as these taking care to make the extra touch points complement your nurturing and retention efforts.

At the six-month mark, ModCloth tells its customers they’re loved more than ever, marks the quasi-event with a coupon offer and encourages them to share the savings with friends via Facebook and Twitter.

Known for going “extra miles” in creative ways, Virgin Atlantic not only recognizes your birthday, it offers to help you “take the revelry to new heights.” I don’t know where you land by clicking the “Let’s Have a Look” button, but I’m guessing it’s high above an exotic destination.

You may have to ask for a date

In some cases, the nature of the business may make it simple for you collect birthdays and other special occasions. In others, you may have to ask for it. Consider trying:

• A progressive form approach
• A special request in welcome or nurture emails
• A survey

When asking for a birthdate or any type of personal information, explain to the subscriber they’ll be rewarded for complying.

Re-ordering email

Do you have a large product line or offer a multitude of optional services? Will customers need to replenish supplies at regular intervals or order per season?

If so, automating email appropriately can inspire additional sales, thereby increasing lifetime customer value. Consider some of the following ideas:

• Delivering new product updates to business clients (e.g. software)
• Seasonal product order reminders (e.g. calendars)
• Updates for items that were out of supply (e.g. clothing)
• Refill orders (e.g. foods, ink cartridges)

Sending seasonal messages enables you to maintain a more continuous dialogue with customers without creating additional work for sales people. It also provides a convenient opportunity to thank patrons for their business.

Low on toner? Here, we’re not talking about laser printers, but a product from Annemarie Gianni. They claim if the toner spray has become a part of your everyday aromatherapy routine, your supply may need replenishment.

This re-order email from Prevagen is sent 10 days before the item purchased is scheduled to run out. If the order is not placed, they send a reminder email 10 days later.

Smart ideas for more effective reminders

• Build replenishment emails around a standard purchase cycle
• Go a step further in personalization by calculating your customer’s average re-order timeframe
• A simple reminder may be effective for loyal customers
• Consider discounts if the customer does not re-order
• Includes details of what they purchased previously, a product image, reviews, and a URL for re-ordering
• If your product itself isn’t consumable, there may be parts or accessories that are
• Send your frequent buyers incentives to refer friends
• Deliver content to help readers understand the benefits of continuing to use your products
• Offer related products
• Personalize the messages creatively and in useful ways

Transactional email

Ecommerce or otherwise, you gathered an email address based on a transaction—even if customers merely traded their email for a document.

Savvy email marketers follow-up on transactions of every sort, be they order status receipts, service request updates, shipping notices or confirmations.

Understand, the timing of the delivery is critical. Your customer should never have to wait. The good news is your marketing automation platform enables you to trigger the emails immediately.

Don’t settle simply for a branded transaction message. Share some love in the form of content that delivers value, such as:

• Product usage tips
• Answers to frequently asked questions
• Delivery tracking information
• Links to community forums
• Invitations to connect via social networks
• Requests for feedback

Of course, you should focus on the transaction first, but you can also use the emails to cross-sell and upsell products and services. Set up your application to populate the emails with information specifically related to the buyer’s purchase and/or preferences.

Home Depot packs a lot of resources they believe to helpful in this thank you email including product suggestions, links to FAQs, a low price guarantee, a how-to community, and an invitation to download their mobile app.

Threadless treats an email for new subscribers as an opportunity to promote product, community stuff and “amazing newsletter only deals.”

The transaction here was merely a free trial. ProsperWorks is wise to recognize this and sent me a welcome email highlighting tools to help get me get going with their CRM solution.

Lifecycle email

Customers need different content at different times in the buying cycle. Consider segmenting campaigns relative to phases in the relationship with email based on the individual’s history with your company.

Messaging might change throughout a customer lifecycle.

• Interested prospects are sent welcome messages, educational content, or incentives to buy.
• Engaged prospects are sent invitations to events, targeted content based on website activity, price information, customer case studies.
• Lapsed or disengaged prospects are sent surveys, incentives to revisit website, promotions.

Dropbox encourages users to install Dropbox on more computers and also lists the benefits you get by doing so.

BuzzSprout sent this email aiming to drive inactive users into action by informing them about design updates.

It may be time to pull the trigger

Triggered email continues to make-up a low percentage of overall email volume.
But even at a relatively low volume, well-conceived programs can make a significant mark on sales generated from email marketing.

Triggered campaigns can run on autopilot and continue to generate revenue over long periods of time. While you’ll need to invest in the initial setup of each email, once automated, triggered emails generate new levels of ROI.

About the Author: Barry Feldman operates Feldman Creative and provides clients content marketing strategies that rock and creative that rolls. Barry has recently been named a Top 40 Digital Strategist by Online Marketing Institute and one of 25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know by LinkedIn. Visit Feldman Creative and his blog, The Point.