The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand

My parents like to tell a story from my childhood. When I was a toddler they would put me in the backseat of the car in child’s car seat when they would take me somewhere like to the store or to a friend’s house. When we would drive down the highway, I would see golden arches through the car window and yell, “Donald’s!”

Now, I was only two or three years old at the time. I wasn’t old enough to read. I could barely see high enough to see through the car window. But when I saw those arches it meant something to me.

My parents would sometimes take me to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal. I would associate the burger and fries with the golden arches.

That is branding.

A brand is anything—a symbol, design, name, sound, reputation, emotion, employees, tone, and much more—that separates one thing from another. In the case of McDonald’s, the golden arches became part of the brand. Those arches separate their product from all other fast food restaurants and they’re a recognizable symbol even with kids.

Branding on a business-level is common, but today branding is becoming just as important on a personal level. After all, you might work for a business that works with other businesses, but it’s people working with people and that’s what makes business relationships valuable.

Why should you build your personal brand?

Building a recognizable personal brand opens professional opportunities.

Creating a vision for your future and implementing that vision can lead to:

• A better job
• Better contacts and clients for your company
• Industry recognition
• And more

If you’re looking for a better job, you want your potential boss at your ideal company to associate your personal brand with something that she needs on her team.

If you’re looking to grow the sales for a company, you want potential clients to associate your personal brand with a feeling of trust and long-term success and satisfaction.

This guide will take your through all the steps you need to take to create a your unique personal brand. In today’s job market and entrepreneurial landscape, there is no room for being another face in the crowd. You have to separate yourself from the competition. You have to be more appealing to your target audience and you can achieve it by creating a recognizable personal brand.

Not Everything In This Guide Will Apply To You

This is an advanced guide to building your personal brand. There is a lot of information covering many different steps you can take to build your personal brand.

However, not everything in this guide needs to be followed to reach your goals. Not everything in the guide applies to everyone so if you notice something that doesn’t fit your vision or your goals it’s okay.

The purpose of this guide is to cover as much as possible about the process of building a personal brand. In the final chapter, we discuss why it’s important to be yourself. You can take the information here as a guide, but use the information in your own way. Follow steps exactly or use certain information and create your own steps for finding success.

Expert Roundup: Quotes From Successful & Influential Individuals

For this guide we wanted to include quotes from well-known individuals in the online world. These are people that have been the reason for the success of some of the most successful brands in the world. They know what it takes to succeed and that includes their feelings on building a personal brand.

We asked three questions:

1. What one action, decision, or choice has had the single biggest impact in the growth of your personal brand?
2. If you were building an online presence from scratch today, what 3 things would you consider to provide the biggest ROI on your time and money?
3. For those looking to create a strong online brand, which 3 online influencers would you recommend they follow?

Throughout this guide you’ll find the answers along with actionable steps you can take to follow the advice of these experts.

How To Create Your Personal Brand Vision

Businesses create vision and mission statements. Creating a personal brand begins much the same way by creating a personal vision.

Only you can determine how you want your life to unfold. You can’t control every aspect of your life, but you can create a long-term vision and develop steps to achieve that vision.

Your life’s vision should include how you see yourself in 10, 20 and even 50 years. Consider the elements in life that would make you happy—a family, a beach house, a challenging corporate job?

There are no right or wrong answers and in this chapter we’ll guide you through the steps necessary to create your personal vision.

Create Personal Brand Vision

How To Define Your Target Audience

Once you have your vision, it’s time to determine who your target audience is. Most professionals are selling something to someone. If you’re looking for a job, you’re selling yourself to a potential employer. If you want to start your own business, you’re selling yourself to potential clients.

But your target audience goes beyond an employer and customer. You’re looking to build a community of people—employers, peers, influencers, etc.—who can all be assets in different ways.

In this chapter, we’ll show you how to define your target audience. Knowing the exact person you’re selling to makes it easier for you to communicate your brand message.

Define Your Target Audience

How To Build Up Your Online And Offline Assets

Thee are a number of assets that require attention when you’re building your personal brand. You’ll need to secure domain names and websites to help control your personal brand on search. You’ll need to secure social media accounts to control your personal brand on social networks.

And you’ll need to know how to build these assets so you can build your overall network. In this chapter, we’ll go over the most important online and offline assets for building your personal brand and give you step-by-step instructions for securing and building each up with a strong community.

Build Up Your Online And Offline Assets

How To Build Your Brand Through Outreach

When you start building your personal brand it’s difficult to get exposure. It’s necessary to get exposure in the places where your target audience is spending time.

In this chapter, we’re going to explain how you can gain exposure through earned media, advertising and a few other strategies. Following the steps in this chapter will give you formulas for creating content that is appealing to your target audience while establishing you as an authority.

How To Build Your Brand Through Outreach

How To Get Free Press Coverage

Another way to gain exposure is to get free press coverage. There are a number of tools that make it easy to build connections with journalists, bloggers and moderators. Building these relationships and understanding what the press wants gives you the power to get free press.

How To Get Free Press Coverage

How To Connect With Mentors

One key to success is continued learning. Even the smartest people in the world can become smarter and more skilled in certain aspects of life.

Mentors are great assets for professionals looking to build a personal brand. You can learn how they became success or how they view the world and use the strategies to build your own success.

In this chapter, we’ll show you how to find mentors and how to approach them so they will help you with your personal brand.

How To Connect With Mentors

How To Monitor Your Brand

Once you’ve established what you want personal brand to be and you’re working to grow it you’ll need to monitor the growth and the perception. It’s important to see how your target audience associates you with your industry and how they feel about you in general.

In this chapter, we’ll share monitoring tools with you and we’ll show you how to use those tools so you know what your audience thinks about you.

How To Monitor Your Brand

Be Yourself Because Everyone Else Is Taken

We’re going to close the guide with an important chapter on being unique. You want to take influence from others including your mentors, but it’s important that you be yourself. That’s how you’ll separate yourself from the competition.

In this chapter we’ll give you steps for further identifying why you’re different and how to embrace differences to attract people to you in a positive way.

Be Yourself Because Everyone Else Is Taken

Are you ready to build your personal brand?

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/WaMA6R

The 12 Best Bank Promotions of 2019 (We’re Talking Cash Bonuses up to $750)

How to Find ClickBank Products to Promote

ClickBank is a minefield of shady offers and over-hyped information products.

But within the ebook jungle there are several world-class products that you can promote to your email list or website visitors.

I’ll you how to sift through the low-quality junk so that you can find top-notch products that you can make money from while adding value to your site’s community.

Your first step is actually to go to your own site to get an idea of what types of people tend to visit your site and read your content. For example at Quick Sprout, we obviously have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of small business owners, a lot of bloggers, a lot of social media professionals that tend to visit Quick Sprout most often. It’s just a good idea to go to your site and just think of the type of people that visit it, because that’s going to guide you when choosing your Clickbank products. Once you’ve done that, your next step is to create a simple but effective spreadsheet just to keep track of all the products that you’ll be looking at.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. We just want the product name, the gravity, which I’ll explain in a little bit, how much the product costs, and a link to the sales page. This is what you want, because what’s going to happen is when you head over to Clickbank and click on the Marketplace tab at the top of the homepage, there are dozens of potential products that you could promote on your site. Unless you have this spreadsheet, it’s really hard to keep track of what products you’ve seen, their price, their gravity, and all the other variables that go into choosing a Clickbank product that I’m going to go over in this video.

Once you’ve landed on the Marketplace and you have your spreadsheet setup, your next step is to take a look at the categories in the left-hand sidebar. For a site like Quick Sprout, it’s pretty straightforward: Business, investing, computers, internet, e-business, and e-marketing. Those are categories that would fit well with the audience at Quick Sprout. Depending on what your site is, you may have a category too that really jumps out at you. You don’t just want to stop at the categories that fit best, you want to look at other categories that might be in line with something else your target audience wants. Sometimes, you can find your best products using that. You definitely want to start with the categories that seem to make the most sense.

What we’re going to look at is one category, e-business and e-marketing. When you click on that category, Clickbank automatically sorts the results by popularity. Popularity is basically how many sales that product is getting. As an affiliate, you definitely want to sort the results by gravity. Click on this little dropdown menu and choose Gravity. Gravity is complicated, but it’s basically how many different affiliates are making sales from that product. That’s important for you as an affiliate, because the more different people are making money from that product, that really shows that it’s a proven winner.

Next, I’m going to walk you through the information that’s in this box, because this is a lot of information in this little box and it can get overwhelming if you don’t know what all these terms mean. The first thing you want to pay attention to is the average amount of money per sale. This is not how much the product costs; this is how much an affiliate makes on average for one sale of that product. When you look at the stats line, this basically drills that down into a little bit more detail. The initial sale is $20.65. Why does this go all the way up to $26.80? That’s because there’s a re-bill feature. What that is, is basically they buy the product, and then there’s an add-on or another option for that person to sign up to some membership site, and that’s how much they make on average from the re-bill. If you average everything together, this is how much the affiliate makes with everything considered.

The average percentage per sale is the average commission that you make. In this case, for every sale that they make, you get half, and it’s the same story with the average percentage of re-bill. No matter what; when you sell, you get 50%. Typically, the average percentage for a sale and the average percentage for a re-bill are exactly the same. The Gravity, again, is basically how many different affiliates are making sales, in this case over 300, which is very good.

The other things you want to pay attention to are these little icons. If you hover over them, they actually explain them. It basically shows the language, whether it’s one-time billing, recurring billing, or both, so if you see both icons it’s both; whether they have a $1 trial, which is a feature that not all products in Clickbank have, whether there is PitchPlus, which is basically an up-sell, and finally, whether or not they have basically a separate HopLink target URL, which is your affiliate link that can bring people to a mobile-optimized page. You can have your regular HopLink which will take people to the general sales page, or if they have this special one, it means they have a link that will go directly to a page that’s designed for mobile devices. This isn’t really crucial unless you have a lot of people that use mobile devices, plus more and more sales pages are responsive, so you don’t really have to worry about this.

If this looks like a product that you might want to promote, you want to head over to your spreadsheet and enter all the information here in the different categories. Of course, you want to take a good look at the sales page to make sure that product is a good fit for your audience. To do that, click on the link at the top of the box. In this case, the sales page is a video, which is very common for Clickbank products. You just want to watch the video and see if it’s something that your audience would appreciate. If you get to the point where the product seems like a good fit, the sales page is a good fit, then you want to buy the product just to make sure. A lot of times on Clickbank, there are products with really great sales pages that make all these promises, and then when you buy the product, it’s actually not very good. Just to make sure you don’t burn any bridges with your audience, just buy the product. It’s usually pretty affordable, just to make sure that it’s something that they will appreciate if they end up investing in it.

The next thing you want to take a look at is the bottom of the page. At the bottom of almost every page for Clickbank products, whether it’s a video sales letter like this or more of a text-based sales letter like this, there’s usually a little affiliates link. Basically, that’s a link to a number of affiliate resources that help you promote the product. You want to look for that, and then click on the link if it’s there. You want to take a look at basically what they offer you; so whether it is some banners to help you out, whether it’s a dedicated affiliate manager. If they make you sign up, you usually don’t have to do that. They usually have this ‘Already a member? Click here’, and you can just click on that and get access to the resources right away. In some cases, they have contest like this, and a lot of times they actually offer you a lot of things that can help you, like swipes and banners. Just look for things like banners, or creatives as they’re often called, and just take a look at them and see if they would be a good fit for your site. If not, no big deal; you can always go to Fiverr and get a banner made pretty cheaply. In general, I’ve found the more stuff that they give you to help you promote their product, the better, especially because when you’re first stating out, you don’t really know whether or not this is going to go well. It helps if they give you a quick banner that you can just throw up on your site to test the waters and see how well it converts on your site. If you see that they give you a lot of support in terms of creatives, then that’s a good sign that they’re going to be helpful when you actually sign up as an affiliate. Even if you don’t see a lot of banners, it’s not a deal-breaker; it’s just something that helps make the process of promoting that product a bit easier.

That’s all there is to finding Clickbank products that are a good fit for you site. As you can see, the most important thing is to see whether or not it’s something that your audience would like, and then you want to check out the sales page and the product to make sure that it’s legit. See whether or not they offer a lot of affiliate support.

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2IBQgdp

How to Build Traffic Through Forums

Forum marketing might be the most underutilized traffic generation strategy on the planet.

Industry forums are a watering hole of potential leads and customers.

However, simply creating a signature and leaving generic posts isn’t going to get you a tidal wave of traffic. I’m going to show you how you can drive targeted traffic to your site using forum marketing.

Let me show you what I mean. In my Google Analytics, I checked my referral traffic for the month of May, which is a month where I did quite a bit of forum marketing. In the top ten of my referral traffic sources, Warrior Forum is number three. It brought me 387 visitors. In a different internet marketing forum, trafficplanet.com, brought me 121 targeted visitors.

Now, I’m going to teach you how you can do the same thing for your site, no matter what niche you’re in. The first step is to find forums in your niche that are active. This is the best search string you can probably use. You want to use your keyword in quotes plus forum.

Depending on your niche, sometimes this search string works really well, sometimes not so much, so I’m going to show you some other ones. This one obviously will bring up a ton of forum results. You can also use this search string, which is your keyword plus Powered by vBulletin and vBulletin is a forum software that a of people use for creating and managing forums. As you can see, this forum here, if you scroll to the bottom you can see it says “Powered by vBulletin”.

OK? This is a very common search string that you can use to find tons and tons of forums in almost any niche. You can also use this one, which is, baking plus this in quotes hot thread with new post, and this is another search string that a lot of forums tend to use at the bottom of their home page to show you which threads you want to check out.

These are three really, really good search strings and you can usually find plenty of forums in your niche, but if these aren’t bringing you enough results or you just want more, there’s another trick you can do to find more forums. What you want to do is, put in a niche specific keyword, so this is something only people in your niche would probably searching for.

If you’re in the baking niche, you don’t want to put something like baking or baking cookies, you want to put something very specific, so in this case, almond flour baking. Then, here you want to click more and then choose discussions from the list and that brings up a list of forums and posts a lot of blog comments, but mostly forums. As you can see, we have [??] which is a Q&A site and some other forums are going to be listed here. This is another thing you can use, so if you’re in internet marketing or SEO, you wouldn’t want to put SEO, you’d want to put something like link building and choose discussions.

Once you’ve found a forum, you want to see if it’s even worth your time. The first thing you want to do is look at the latest post info and look at when the last post was posted. Basically, what you’re doing is seeing how often people are posting on this site and how active it is, because there is no way to see how many active users there are, so this is a proxy way to do that. Under posted you want to look at the date and in that case that is yesterday, so that’s pretty recent. This is also from yesterday, which is pretty recent. As long as you see that, it’s probably worth making an account.

Your next step is to register. Find wherever it says register, click that button. Then, you want to fill out the user name or screen name, depending on how they phrase it on that particular forum, very carefully. You want to make it your brand name or your personal name. If you’re Neil, you want to do something like Quick Sprout. You wouldn’t want to put something like Neil 1987, like that. You want something very memorable and branded. Ideally, you’d put your brand name or your site name as your username. That’s important because people are going to be seeing that and associating your content on the forum with your brand. If this is something that’s not your brand, it’s going to be harder for them to associate the content with the name of your business or the name of your website.

Once you have an account and it’s all set up, your next step is to create a signature. A forum signature is important because that’s actually how you’re going to drive traffic to your site. Let me show you an example. Here’s Warrior Forum, I have an account here. Most forums are set up the same way, they have quick links, and then you click on edit signature. In your signature, you just want to create some call to action, a benefit driven call to action.

Consider it a little ad-words ad on the forum. Here, I put Google Plus only link building tips and strategies, that’s the benefit, and then I put a call to action, “Add me on Google Plus right now.” and that’s my link. You don’t want to make the mistake that a lot of people make with forum marketing, which is to try to get some SEO value from this link and they put exact match anchor text. That is not smart because really Google doesn’t consider these links particularly valuable and that over-optimized anchor text can hurt you down the road. Just make sure to use some sort of call to action in your anchor text that isn’t just your keyword because this is actually how you’re going to drive traffic to your site from the forum.

Once you have your account set up and your signature ready to go, your next step is to actually participate in the forum. To do that, you want to head over to the main area of the forum and see where most people hang out. As you can see, like most forums, the Warrior Forum has different sections and you can see how many people are viewing each section at one time and that’s obviously where you want to participate most often because that’s going to get the most eyeballs on your forum signature, which is going to make sure you have the most clicks.

If you do have a special area of expertise, like there’s a social media marketing forum, even though less people participate here, if you have a special area of knowledge that matches up to a certain section, you can, of course, participate there as well.

The next thing you’ll want to do is click on one of the areas that either has a lot of people viewing or is an area of expertise or both and click on it. You want to click at the thread titles and see where you can add value. That’s really important because a lot of people, when they do forum marketing, they make the mistake of just responding to as many as possible. In my experience, it’s definitely quality over quantity. If you can maybe add one to two quality posts to a thread per day, you can get quite a bit of traffic from that.

For example, this has something about adsense payment this month, so this is maybe where you could click on it. The person’s confused and you could help them out if you know about that, but in this case, this is about Bing Pay-Per-Click. I personally don’t know almost anything about Pay-Per-Click, so I probably wouldn’t even click on that.

On the other hand, this Google keyword tool, I have a lot of experience using that, so I’d click on that and I would see what’s going on and they are saying how the Google keyword tool is going away and you can’t choose the exact keywords. This person is actually mistaken. This is where I would respond and say something like, “Actually, the Google keyword tool is just being folded into the Google keyword planner and you can still get exact match anchor text etcetera. ” so, I’d add value.

Let me show you an example of a time that I value and it got me quite a bit of traffic. This person said they do the forum and they’re going to start doing interviews and they want to know how to optimize the pages that they’re going to publish the interview on. As you can see, I was right there, the second one, so everyone who views this thread, pretty much, is going to see my response and that’s not the case if you’re way down the list.

You definitely want to be early on and that’s why when you look at the forum section, you want to stick to the top as much as possible and not scroll down too much because then when you participate you’re going to be towards the bottom of the thread and not as many people are going to see you. I just gave a very brief, it doesn’t have to be that in depth, just exactly what I would do in his situation. I would include the keyword in the interview and in the title. That’s it. I gave him a helpful response and then I participated again because he asked a different question and I came back and responded.

This particular person, wholesaleblogger, is now a fan of me and he’s more likely to click through, and then everyone who sees this sees me as a helpful expert and they’re more likely to click through, and that was from two very, very brief posts, so it doesn’t have to be so in depth.

If you want to get a ton of traffic from forum marketing, you need to be actually creating your own thread. Participating in threads is great, but you also want to create your own threads. This right here, this particular post that I made at Warrior Forum, which is 17 untapped backlink sources, is literally copied and pasted from my site. I just copied the content and pasted it here. You can do the same thing. It doesn’t have to be original for a forum. Make sure it’s indexed on your site and once Google indexes it, you can head over to your forum of choice and then give them, maybe, a different version that’s a little shorter or more brief or maybe add something to it that’s exclusive for the forum, so it’s not really just copying pasting. For the most part, this is essentially copied and pasted and this particular thread, just this thread alone, has brought me hundreds and hundreds of targeted visitors and as you can see over 75 people have thanked me and that’s really important. That’s another reason why you want to provide quality in your responses and not just try to respond as many times as possible, because when people evaluate you, they’re going to be looking at how many post you have and how many times you’ve been thanked. If you have 620 posts like this and you’ve been thanked five times, it doesn’t look like you’re a very valuable member of the community, but if you’ve been thanked a lot, that’s going to increase your perception of expertise in the forum and increase the likelihood that people are going to click through.

That’s really all there is. You want to create an account that has your brand name as the user name. You want to participate as often as possible, but make sure you’re providing value every single time you participate in a thread. Then, when you publish something great on your site, wait for it to get indexed and then head to the form and then paste it there and maybe make some modifications and that’s going to get you some really, really great traffic.

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2IvJxSa

Build Audience Connections with Content Marketing

You’ve heard the term tossed around a million times. Content marketing. The phrase seems simple enough, but what exactly is it?

Content marketing is just what it sounds like. It’s the process of engaging and growing your customer base through high quality content.

Content marketing is an investment.

It’s part of a larger marketing framework.

It requires strategic insight.

It targets users across the entire conversion funnel.

It should be held accountable to a standard set of success metrics.

Content marketing is NOT social media, an intern’s job, or limited to a company blog. Like any other marketing practice, it requires commitment to systems and standards. It should be held accountable to measurable results.

Now that consumers are totally in control of the buying process, you are seeing enterprise brands working to adapt to that. The whole movement to get found in search, or drive online leads or create business opportunities with social media starts and ends with a content marketing strategy.

In order for any of that to work, enterprise brands have to have something meaningful to say that, in some way, links to their marketing and business objectives.

Joe Pulizzi, Founder and CEO at The Content Marketing Institute via
The Content Strategist

Content Marketing Is a
Relationship-Building Tool

Content marketing is more than just the creation and distribution of content. It’s a tool that, when executed properly, positions your brand as an influencer.

Content marketing is the art of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The Content Marketing Institute

It starts with storytelling around the concepts that your customers value most.

Good storytelling can feel challenging, especially if you’re a marketer or business owner who comes from a sales background. With content marketing, you absolutely cannot and should not sell. Rather than pitching your services upfront, focus on driving awareness about your brand and thought leadership in your area of expertise. Think about moving prospects through the conversion funnel. Sales will happen as a natural byproduct of this relationship that you’re building with your customers and prospects.

Take a look at Qualcomm’s Spark platform as an example. This enterprise company is creating innovating content to keep readers engaged. And what aren’t they doing? Selling.

Rather than producing content from a team of marketers, the company hires journalists, business leaders, and tech bloggers. To the best extent possible, the brand tries to remove itself from the equation. They don’t talk about themselves. Instead, they cover topics that their audiences truly care about.

Focus on More than Just Blogging

Content marketing is more than just writing. There are a variety of channels that your brand can leverage to connect with prospective customers. These include:

Videos

These can be entertaining or educational videos produced on behalf of your brand. Focus on a specific topic that is related to your product or service.

Dollar Shave Club, a Santa Monica startup, was able to kickstart its user acquisition through the production of a hilarious video. It went viral and generated over 12,000 user sign-ups within days of launching.

Videos can range in cost from several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars. If you are looking to produce a video and need a quote, check out SmartShoot.

Content Portals & Microsites

These are content hubs designed to engage and educate audiences about topics that they care about. Qualcomm Spark is one example of a content portal.

For another example, check out LearnVest’s Life and Money platform, a resource committed to educating consumers about their personal finance choices. This content portal collects stories and actionable tactics from people learning to make the most of their money.

Articles for content portals tend to cost $200-$1,000 to produce.

Ebooks

These are longer-pieces of content, designed for the purpose of education. These can be self-published through Amazon or hosted on your website. For a great example, check out the 2013 Careers Guide from Wealthfront. Wealthfront is investment management software that provides online financial advice. So why do careers matter? Because young professionals have money to invest too. The company’s leadership team consists of highly seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (they helped to build LinkedIn). They understand how to navigate Silicon Valley better than anyone.

Clarity, a platform that connects advice seekers with experienced business leaders and subject matter experts, recently produced an e-book with stories on entrepreneurship. The resource, “Straight Up Startup Advices” shares stories on starting, growing, and launching a business. This topic make sense for Clarity’s audience of business leaders and new entrepreneurs.

Depending on length, Ebooks cost between $1,000 and $10,000 to write. Hiring a designer to supplement the writing can also cost up to $10,000 or more.

Infographics

These are storytelling tools and visual representations of data. Infographics are focused on a general topic like The Biggest Tax Dodgers in History or The Good and Bad Habits of Smart People. The key is to tell your story visually. Break down complex information into a simple, easy-to-follow form.

Here is an infographic (about infographics) from Customer Magnetism.

Depending on the level of sophistication, Infographics cost between $1,000 and $5,000 to produce. Expect to pay between $500 and several thousand dollars for promotion and distribution.

Online (or in person) Classes

One way to build a relationship with your audience is to teach a class in your area of expertise. You can teach this class through e-mail, videos hosted on your website, or in your physical store. Online platforms like Udemy also provide resources to help you produce, host, share, and monetize your videos.

Here are some examples:

QuickSprout offers a free course to help website owners boost their traffic:

Erica Swallow, a startup PR expert, teachers a class in her area of expertise (via Udemy):

Onboardly teaches a class on acquiring customers through blogging:

Ritika teaches and co-teaches in-person classes via General Assembly:

Both Michael’s (an art supply store) and Lululemon (women’s running and yoga gear) host in-store events:

Webinars

One valuable way to build your audience is to host a webinar: an online version of a seminar. These can be free to low-cost. The beauty of webinars is that they are scalable to accommodate as many people as you want, from anywhere in the world. KISSmetrics frequently hosts webinars to help customers and prospects develop their website analytics strategies.

Typically, the cost of your webinar will be the software you use to host it (unless you want to hire an expert to come give the presentation). GoToWebinar and Mezzanine let you host and record webinars.

When well-executed, all forms of content are valuable, so don’t feel pressured to drop $100K on an enterprise microsite if you don’t have the budget handy. Remember that ROI is contingent on your brand’s comfort level to spend.

Whatever you do, do it well. There is always room to produce more content as your company grows.

Content Marketing Can Be a
Major Referral Traffic Driver

KISSmetrics, CrazyEgg, and QuickSprout have always built their organic search traffic through content marketing. It’s inexpensive and provides fast results.

Through blogging and creating infographics, KISSmetrics was able to to get over 100,000 monthly organic visitors in less than a year. Same with QuickSprout — Google drives close to 100,000 per month to the blog.

CrazyEgg has been going through a similar process.

It is a great tool for improving the conversion of a website. We launched our blog, The Daily Egg, during the first week of November 2011, so the blog is only over one year old. In our first year, we had half a million visitors. Traffic growth has been on average 10 to 15 percent month over month, and subscriber growth really picked up at the six month mark.

Russ Henneberry, former Blog Manager at CrazyEgg via
The Content Strategist

Here are some key lessons learned from the three websites:

• Be detailed and consistent. Short blog posts tend to get fewer links than longer pieces of content. Don’t feel pressured to churn out massive amounts of content each day. Prioritize quality over quantity.
• Make content digestible by using visuals. Information overload is the norm online. Make information as simple to digest as possible, and your readers will love you… which means that they’ll share your content.
• Be consistent. If you can’t publish content on a regular basis, it will be tough to get ROI. Make sure that you publish regularly.
• Write awesome headlines. If your headlines are boring, nobody will want to read your content. You need to be compelling, edgy, and speak to your audience’s exact needs. Your headlines are the first chance to make a strong first impression.On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your post, explains CopyBlogger.Headlines should be short, sweet, and enticing.

Make Content a Part of the
Referral Traffic Ecosystem

Production is only 20% of the content marketing formula. The rest is distribution. In addition to creating high-quality content, you need to make an active effort to recruit eyeballs.

One way to bring visitors to your website is through email marketing. If you have a blog, make sure that there is a clear place for users to sign up to be a part of your email list. If you publish an ebook? Same thing. Collect leads. Make sign-ups the first step to download.

When you publish a new blog post, video, or ebook, tell your subscribers about it. Send them an email every time a new story is produced. Don’t worry about turning this into a promotional newsletter. Make it a short, attention-grabbing, and compelling personal note.

Here is how it’s done for QuickSprout:

Here is how LearnVest does it:

Some General Tips:

1. Title your emails with compelling headlines, which can be titles of your newest or most compelling blog posts.
2. Be extremely personal and personable. Make it clear that there are real people on the other sides of your company’s computer screens.
3. Don’t be spammy about your emails. Let your users know how often you’ll be emailing them when they opt-in to your mailing list.
4. Send emails once or twice a week, max!
5. Monitor unsubscribe rates closely. Use these numbers to guide how often you should send your emails.
6. Once your subscriber list is large enough, A/B test subject headlines on a portion of your subscribers to see which inspire the most opens. An important metric to monitor are open rates (the proportion of emails opened compared to the number sent.)

But we’ll talk about email marketing again later in chapter 8.

Whatever you do, don’t try to sell!

One of the core purposes of content marketing is to build a community around your brand. Marketers and business leaders get that. But for some reason, brands feel like all of the content needs to come from them. That’s the wrong approach to your content marketing. You should only produce a portion of your content in-house. Hire writers and content producers. Here’s why:

• Professional writers and subject matter experts frequently have their own audiences. Reputable writers will help you kickstart or amplify your audiences.
• Professional writers tend to work with multiple clients. Smart writers will cross-promote posts between clients.
• Great writers leave footprints all over the web.
• People want to learn from their peers in the community. If your CEO uses your company blog like a megaphone to blast corporate messaging, you’ll instantly scare your readers away. Hire writers to neutralize your sales pitch.
• Writers can write faster than you can. You don’t have time to spend hours on a blog post that your writers can knock out in an hour. Spend your time building your product, and leave it to your freelancers to produce greatw content.

Take a look at some of the most popular blogs on the Internet. Typically, these folks will collect insight from multiple writers. This is the approach that KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg have taken. It’s an invaluable way to amplify your network and build a community around your brand — leverage the community that others have build around their own brands.

(Here is a screenshot from the Unbounce Blog. Look how many shares they’ve received! These are all guest writers who are in no-way affiliated with Unbounce as employees.)

Success Metrics to Watch

Content marketing is valuable for connecting with users at all stages of the conversion funnel. Make sure that you’re monitoring the right metrics to optimize your content marketing program’s performance:

Engagement

These metrics quantify the relationship you’re building with your prospects and customers. Pay attention to the following metrics to capture this important concept:

• Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed on your website in a given time period.
• Average visit duration: How long visitors are spending on your site.
• Return visits: The number of total visits from users who have visited your website before.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of users who visit your website and then immediately leave.
• Average pages viewed per visit: The number of website pages viewed, on average, in a given time period.

Virality

This concept captures the influence, distribution, and reach of your content. It’s an indicator of whether audiences find value in what you produce. The following metrics will help you quantify this concept:

• Social media shares: Shares through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest give your content a higher probability of gaining visibility.
• Unique visitors: The total number of distinct visitors who come your website in a given time period.

Leads and Conversions

A marketer’s most important job is to drive leads and conversions. Content marketing should align with these goals.

• Leads: The number of leads that can be directly and indirectly attributable to content marketing.
• Conversions: The number of sales / orders that funnel in through your content.
• Sign-ups and inquiries: The number of people who express interest in doing business with your organization after consuming a piece (or multiple pieces of) content.

It is important to understand how leads are interacting with your brand throughout the purchase funnel. Depending on your company and business model, it usually takes a series of steps to ultimately convert into a lead or paying customer. Content marketing should help your customers through this purchase funnel. The process should be emotionally engaging, fun, and frictionless.

Revenue

How much of your bottom line does your content program drive? To measure this, you need to be able to connect your sales to your content marketing efforts.

• Recurring Revenue: Quantify the revenue that your content program drives over a specified time interval. Look for the percentage of revenue derived from content marketing as well as revenue from tangentially related marketing efforts.

Lifetime value & Customer acquisition costs

How much does it cost to acquire each user through content marketing? On average, how much value will customers drive over a lifetime? These metrics will help you craft an intelligent budget for your content marketing strategy — to make sure that you’re ROI positive and not losing money from your investment.

Content Marketing Through Webinars:
Unbounce’s Story

Unbounce is an example that we’ve featured throughout this guide, but in case you’ve missed the discussion — they’re an awesome company and are generating phenomenal thought leadership in the marketing community. Their company specializes in software that helps marketers create high-performing landing pages without web designers or IT. Not to mention, they have a strong content marketing presence with high quality writers and passionate readers.

They were wonderful enough to submit a case study for us about their recent “Unwebinar.” Here is a breakdown from Unbounce’s Director of Marketing, Georgiana Laudi.

What was the problem that Unbounce’s webinar was trying to solve?

Ritika

Unbounce launched its multi-client and multi-user capabilities last fall. Within a couple of weeks it became obvious that some of our customers weren’t sure how best to use the new features and that communication on our website wasn’t doing enough to show the value. Up to our necks with typical startup fury, Ryan (Director of Customer Success) and I set out to find a solution, we called them “Unwebinars”.

It was the first time we’d ever hosted a live online event (even though in marketing, we’d been guests on quite a few webinars). It was an experiment to say the least. We decided not to limit attendance to customers, giving non-customers a peak inside Unbounce. This MVP version wouldn’t last long though.

Georgiana

What were your goals?

Ritika

The goal of the first Unwebinar was 2-fold, 1) Communicate what was new (multi-user and multi-client capability) and 2) Gather feedback which would help us do a better job with our product, with our customers and communicating to leads. And, since we knew people less familiar with Unbounce would attend, we wanted to briefly introduce ourselves as well.

Georgiana

What important steps did you take?

Ritika

We built a fort of sleeping bags, stuck a desk in the middle with 2 mics and 3 computers (one for Ryan, one for Rick our CEO, and one for me to moderate). We put up a landing page (duh) and signed up for the de facto standard, GoToWebinar. We then sent an email to our customers and leads and also pushed out invites through our social channels.

We then nervously held the 30 minute webinar, and proceeded to high-five on a job well done. Anyone who has ever held a webinar knows though, the work does not end there. We then converted the recording and slides, gathered a list of resources that came up during the recording, and sent out our follow-up email, also asking for feedback. Emails and tweets were overwhelmingly positive, throw in some more high-fives, and we were off to plan our next one.

Georgiana

What was the outcome?

Ritika

Throughout the Q&A, it quickly became obvious that attendees had tons of questions about landing pages and A/B testing itself. We knew we had to switch things up; We were now going to focus on content to help marketers be more effective, primarily and almost entirely. We knew there was a place for demoing Unbounce itself, but marketers were desperate for tactical advice, so we set out to be as useful as possible.

Georgiana

At any point, did you need to change directions? Why or why not?

Ritika

By our 2nd Unwebinar, we’d convinced stage/camera/audio shy Oli Gardner (Mr. Landing Page) that his knowledge was in high demand in this format too (Oli launched our blog and writes 90% of our ebooks). It worked, Oli and Ryan not only answered peoples’ questions about Landing Page Optimization, but were pretty entertaining too. Feedback again, was overwhelmingly positive.

We’d found our winning Unwebinar format; Invite experts (like Anna Sawyer, Joanna Weibe, Chris Goward, Peep Laja) to come and talk about topics related to conversion rate optimization and give attendees a platform to ask questions in real-time.

We still do demo Unbounce after every webinar, but now we give people fair warning and they’re welcome to opt-out. Much to our delight, about ? of attendees stick around for it.

Even better, as a result of our Unwebinars being more content focused, our Customer Success team continue to offer super useful weekly demos for people wanting to learn more about Unbounce itself.

Georgiana

What were some key takeaways that you learned?

Ritika

Our first webinar made it really obvious that while there is a place for demoing our product, marketers are hungry for great content and actionable learning.

Here’s how our registration and attendance have looked since we started:

Webinar Topiac	Landing Page Registration	GoToWebinar Attendees
Anable Steps to Client Management in Unbounce	190	50
Landing Page Optimization with Oli Gardner	476	178
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About AdWords with Anna Sawyer	1021	471
Copywriting for Conversion with Joanna Weibe	2282	627
A/B Testing Essentials with Michael Aagaard	1938	449
Designing for Conversion with Oli Gardner	2523	589
Multiply Your Conversion Rates with Chris Goward	2066	426
10 Landing Page Mistakes and How to Fix Them with Peep Laja	3265	610

Not only were our webinars themselves improving but we started to do what we do best, test dedicated landing pages. Through our integration with Zapier, on our 2nd webinar we were able to use Unbounce landing pages for our registration pages. Not only are they prettier than the standard stark format of GoToWebinar, we’re able to test to see which messaging works best, all while sending registrants directly through to GTW automatically. It was a game changer. Conversion rates on our registration pages have gone from 26% on our 2nd webinar to 65% on our latest, that’s an increase of 150%!

Speaking of our latest, this month’s Unwebinar is with Rand Fishkin, he’s gonna talk about Big Picture CRO and we couldn’t be more excited to have him.

Georgiana

Key Takeaways

• Content marketing is more than just blogging. Get creative about the types of content you’re producing.
• Hold your content marketing program accountable by monitoring success through metrics that translate into revenue for your company.
• Focus on engagement, not self-promotion. Write about topics that your readers care about, and don’t be overly promotional about your brand. Let sales be a natural byproduct of your content marketing strategy.
• Integrate your content marketing with a bigger-picture marketing strategy.
• Focus on moving customers and prospects through your sales conversion funnel. Make the experience fun, engaging, and frictionless for them. Prioritize relationships above transactions.
• Be relentless about quality. Your content should be amazing. Readers won’t care about a sub-par experience, as there is plenty of other content out there.

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2GbuQAI