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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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9 Tactics to Fix Your User Retention

Retention is the act of getting your members to use your product in such a way that it becomes habitual. That’s why we call them users at this stage. if you retain them then they are literally using your product often. If you are a SaaS company then this means lowering your churn. If you are an ecommerce site then this means helping people become repeat buyers. If you are a content company then this means getting people to consume your content on a regular basis. You get the point. Many growth hackers actually consider retention the most important aspect of the funnel. There are a number of reasons for this:

If your retention is low then all of the ingenious growth hacks that you apply to your product are basically meaningless. Your members will leave your product at the 11th hour (the very end of your funnel). Leaky buckets don’t need more water. They need their holes fixed.

By the time someone has become an activated member then they’ve shown themselves to be extremely interested in your product. They are the most qualified people you have to work with. If you don’t focus on retaining them then you are neglecting the most high quality leads that you have.

Since all the stages of the funnel work together, sometimes retention can affect the bottom line more easily than getting new visitors.

Increasing your retention by 20% is the same as increasing your overall traffic by 20%. A 20% increase in traffic might cost more in time and tangible resources than increasing retention by 20%.

An increase in retention increases the lifetime value of the customer (LTV). This opens up the potential to try a number of push methods at the top of the funnel that might not have been possible before. Retention benefits the funnel as a whole more than we sometimes realize.

People that have been retained for long periods of time are more likely to evangelize for your product. If your product is built into their weekly routine then they are going to talk to their friends about it, take it into the workplace, and generally be an advocate for you.

Retention, like anything, is a skill set that can be learned. Here are the tactics that we recommend trying as you focus on retention:

1. Staged Traffic

When you look at the growth hacker funnel it might seem as if you should focus on getting traffic first, then activating members, then retaining users. However, in reality this is not the smartest way to work through the funnel if you want to make the most of your efforts. It’s better if you put some effort into getting traffic, then use those visitors to test the rest of your funnel before you decide to put more of your resources into getting traffic.

Imagine that you have a growth budget of $4,000. Let’s say you spend all of it in a couple weeks. You spend some on the production of a whitepaper for inbound leads (1k), you spend some on Google ads (2k), and some on a contest (1k). You probably feel good about what you’ve done, but what if you realize after a month or so that even though you effectively got traffic that your activation and retention methods were totally broken. You spent your budget and have very little to show for it.

It would be smarter to try a single tactic and use only some of your resources just so that you can track the progress of your traffic through your funnel. Then you can fix the obvious holes that were uncovered using this test traffic. Now when you spend more of your resources on traffic your product will be better optimized to capitalize on it. In essence, you test your funnel, including retention, when the stakes are low, so that when it’s time to accelerate growth you’ve done the requisite work that will allow your product to handle it. Early on, stage your traffic in order to master retention.

2. Speed to Aha

People come to your product and give you a chance because of the promises you’ve made to them. You’re going to save them X, provide them Y, and make Z much more simple. The moment that a visitor or member actually feels the truth of your promise, and sees the obvious benefit of your product, that’s what we call the “aha moment”. If you want to retain users then part of your task is to get them to the aha moment as quick as humanly possible.

When someone is new to your product then they are open to your promises. They are excited about the possibility that you will deliver on them. If you waste time getting them to the aha moment then they will not stay around. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you know what the aha moment for your product is? What are the actions which a member can take on your product which are leading indicators of their retention rate?

If it currently takes two days to get someone to the aha moment, can you make it two hours?

If you currently ask them to create an account to see the benefit of your product, is there a way to show them a sandboxed version of your product that allows them to have an aha moment before signing up?

Are there features which you promote in your product which don’t lead people to an aha moment, thereby cluttering your product and lowering the chances they will ever get to the aha moment?

Is there an email you can send to a new user which outlines exactly what the aha moment is? Can you give them a clear call to action to have that kind of moment?

Twitter realized that after you followed a certain number of people that your retention rate would increase drastically. So guess what they did? Yep, now they help you follow people as a part of the signup process. Retention is built into their registration flow because they knew the speed to aha matters.

3. Don’t Fear Email

Engineers and product purists have a hard understanding email. They actually think email is universally unwanted, and that most of it is borderline spam. This is just patently false. People opt-in to receive emails, and they opt-out when they no longer want them. Let people make their own decisions about the email they want or don’t want, and don’t preemptively decide for them, handicapping your product in the process. Email is a massively useful tactic for retaining users, and those who ignore this are at an instant disadvantage. There are a number of different kinds of emails that your product should send, and they each have their own purpose.

Drip Campaigns

A drip campaign is when you send people prewritten emails at preselected intervals. A new member might get an email on day 1, day 3, day 7, day 14, and day 21. You can use a drip campaign to introduce them to your product, share testimonials, give them case studies or other inspirational reasons to use your product, and many other things. A drip campaign burns your product into people’s minds when they are most impressionable, right after they’ve signed up. Every email sent is a chance to bring them back into your product and retain them. Fools ignore drip campaigns.

Event Based Notifications

Another category of emails are those which are based on specific event triggers. We are all familiar with these because of Facebook. Every time someone does anything which is remotely related to us on their social network then we get an email notifying us about it. Facebook has become very clever with their event based emails, and one of the things they do is force you to click through to their website to get the most out of their emails. They tell me that someone liked a photo I was in, but I have to click a call to action to see the photo. This is smart because once I’m back on their site then I’m sucked into the Facebook world again. What actions are people already taking in your product that could also warrant an email?

General Updates

The third kind of email is a general update. These are emails that update people about new product features, new staff additions, and other kinds of things that wouldn’t make sense in a drip campaign, but aren’t tied to specific events either. People love to see how other people work (it’s a weird obsession, I know), so use these emails to also give people a behind the scenes view of your company. Show them photos of your new workspace. Show them an image of your team next to the company logo. If people feel like they know you then they will be more likely to be retained by you.

4. Alerts and Notifications

If you are building a mobile app then in addition to email you have another avenue available to get people back into your product. You can also use alerts and notifications to help retain users. Are you currently using push notifications within your mobile app? Are you currently using badges to alert people to new features, or new updates, or anything else? The same hangup that some people have with email also carries over into alerts and notifications. Remember, people can turn off alerts and notifications within their settings. Let people manage their own life, and send them relevant updates.

5. Exit Interviews

Talking directly to customers can be very difficult. People aren’t afraid to tell you the truth, and the truth can hurt your ego. Well, get over it, because one of the best ways to learn is by dialoguing with your members. Recently, we’ve heard a lot in the startup world about customer development (the process of talking to customers early), but there is another kind of communication with customers that can be very beneficial as well, and that’s an exit interview.

When people cancel your service, or go long periods of time being inactive, or generally show themselves to not be retained, then you have an opportunity to learn from them. I would recommend emailing them and asking them the worst thing about your product that made them cancel (or whatever the appropriate verbiage is for your situation). Just cut to the chase and ask them what sucks the most. Have thick skin. You can use the responses of this exit interview to inform the product roadmap, and thereby increase future retention.

If you want to ask people to fill out a full survey at this point you can try it, but think about the situation first. They’ve already walked away from you. They probably won’t give you 10 more minutes of their time. They might shoot you back a quick response if you send them a short, one sentence email. Be wise about how much you ask for at this point.

An exit interview like this can also be a chance to bring them back into your product. You could offer them an exclusive discount. You could give them the option of choosing a less expensive package that isn’t advertised during signup. You’ve already lost them, so you might as well try something to bring them back.

6. The Red Carpet

One way to keep people from leaving your product is to roll out the red carpet for your most engaged users. Exit interviews are about getting the most out of a bad situation, but the red carpet is about avoiding a bad situation. Here some ways that you can give the red carpet treatment to your best users:

Send 100 shirts to your first 100 customers.

Give your best users a shout out in an email newsletter.

Keep a Twitter list of your best users and retweet them often.

Give your VIP users access to exclusive content.

Have a drawing for a free trip to a relevant conference, but only power users can enter.

Every product is different, but the point is to do something periodically that makes your primary users feel appreciated. Not only will this help prevent them from churning, but when someone feels like the center of attention, or unique, or important, then they will definitely share the experience on social networks and other places. Give your best users yet another reason to advertise for you by giving them a treat every once in awhile.

7. Increase Value

At the heart of any product is the value it provides. This means that keeping one eye on the value of your product is always going to help retention. Just because someone found value in your product on day 1 doesn’t mean they will necessarily find value in it on day 100. You have to always stay ahead of the value curve if you want to retain users. Here are a few generic ways to provide value:

Add Features If your product is lacking important features then adding them might lead to better retention. If two out of every three people tell you the same thing during the exit interview, and it pertains to something that you don’t currently provide, then it might make sense to just give them what they want. This isn’t about feature creep, it’s about giving people what they actually need to hang around as retained users.

Subtract Features It may seem odd to now discuss taking away features, but sometimes that’s also the way to increase value. Features that aren’t useful (or aren’t used), only serve one purpose. They keep people from finding out what actually is awesome about your product. People don’t stay around because of the number of features you have. They stay around because you have the right features that provide them value.

8. Community Building

A product is good, but a movement is better. A startup is good, but a family is better. Are there things you can do to actually make people feel like they are a part of something? This is community building. People who belong to something stay longer than people who subscribe to something. Here are some ways that you can build community around your product:

Customer Support

Great customer support can be the difference in a life long customer and someone who spreads the news of how horrible you are. We may not all be Zappos, but we can still up our game to the point that people feel like they belong to a community and they are not bothering us with their support requests.

Documentation

If your product needs documentation then providing it in the best possible way is actually a service to your community. Besides, if people don’t have the needed documentation to install or use your product then you’re not going to retain them.

Social Features

Is there a way that you can let your users interact with each other within your product. One of the best ways to retain users is by providing a way for them to connect to others. The other people may be the reason they stay around, even though they might have left if is was just about your product.

9. Make Them Happy

All retention comes down to one thing: happiness. If people are happy they will become habitual users. If people are unhappy then you won’t retain them. Don’t overthink retention. Just make people happy with your product.

http://www.quicksprout.com/user-retention/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/9-tactics-to-fix-your-user-retention.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Viral Hacking to Get Hypergrowth

The ability to use the product itself to get new visitors is one of the most exciting aspects of growth hacking. Pulling visitors into the top of your funnel is good, and so is pushing them in, but there is something magical about using the product itself to drive traffic. When done well, it can have a compounding effect which cannot be replicated with push and pull methods alone.

For instance, if you utilize the pull method of creating an infographic then you can expect to get traffic, but the inbound visitors to that infographic will decrease each day and eventually level out at a relatively low number. Compare that with some of the product tactics listed in this chapter. It’s possible, using the product itself, that each time someone comes to your site they bring their own network of relationships into your funnel as well. This is where the idea of viral loops come into play. If you are able to use a product tactic in such a way that for every visitor that enters your product, they bring along more than one other person into your product, then you’ve created a viral coefficient of over 1 (sometimes referred to as K). You’ve achieved exponential growth. You’ve gone viral.

However, I need to caution you at this point. Most products don’t go viral. If you are trying to growth hack a B2B enterprise product then I highly doubt that you will have a viral coefficient anywhere near 1. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because it’s just hard to use these tactics in certain markets. Even if you have a consumer facing product virality is still extremely difficult.

So how should you view these tactics? If it really is that hard to get a K factor of 1+ then should you just scrap the product as a strategy for getting visitors? Absolutely not. Any K factor above 0 will positively impact all of your other marketing efforts, even if it never approaches the illustrious 1+. Let me explain.

If you have a K of .5, then this essentially means that for every one new visitor to your product they bring half a person into your funnel. 10 new visitors actually becomes 15. This isn’t virality because it doesn’t keep going up and to the right exponentially, but you’re still bringing new people in that wouldn’t have seen your product. Consider the pull method of creating an infographic in this light. If you bring 500 people into your product this month because of an infographic then this actually becomes 750 people with a K of .5. You’ve amplified a pull tactic by using a product tactic. That’s how to think about product tactics. They amplify anything that comes into your funnel.

A K factor of .5 also means that if you’re using the push tactic of purchasing ads then you can spend less to get a certain number of visitors because every 10 ad clicks becomes 15 visitors. Saving money is obviously a good thing, but this also allows you to pay more per click, and possibly outbid competitors. Remember what we said in the last chapter. Ads are just a business model competition and your product tactics, which amplify your product activity, strengthen the efficiency of your business model.

Network Invitations

We now live in a world where many people have already compiled their social networks in various places. We have a group of friends on Facebook. We follow people on Twitter. We are connected to business relationships on LinkedIn. We have a list of email addresses in Gmail. We have the phone numbers of friends and family in our mobile phones. The first product tactic that we’ll discuss for getting visitors hinges on our ability to use pre-existing, pre-defined, networks of relationships to our advantage.

Phone Contacts

If you are building a mobile app then you are basically a few clicks away from permission to message their entire phone book about your app. We don’t usually think of a phone book as a social network, but it might be our most intimate network of relationships. Umano, a new service that provides the ability to listen to popular online articles, utilizes this tactic. They prompt you to share with friends after using their service a couple of times, or you can do so from the settings menu (below). Notice how they preselect everyone for you, and you have to either manually deselect people or “unselect all.” This is a common practice for many of the network invitation tactics. It is also worth noting that you can call or text with access to a phone number, so this gives you a few options on how to message people once you’ve gained permission. There might also be email addresses associated with a phone number that you can also access.

Email Contacts

Another network which people have already developed, that we can use to our advantage, is their email contacts. This was much more popular a few years ago, but variations of it are still possible. LinkedIn allowed you to import your email addresses, which they would subsequently message, and this jump started their initial traffic.

Social Contracts

Besides phone books and email contacts, the third kind of network that we can leverage is social contacts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more, are all networks where we’ve created a social graph. We have existing relationships which can be invited to a new product. It’s difficult to target every social network because people probably won’t give you access to all of them, but one can be enough. Focus also helps you make technical decisions about your own product. If you know that you are going to use Facebook as the primary social network for inviting new users into your product then this might cause you to use Facebook Connect as your product login. This means that it will be fewer clicks on the end user, and less friction, when you ask them to invite their Facebook friends later. Below is the example from the Facebook developer documentation of what a friend invitation screen looks like.

Social Sharing

Social sharing, as defined here, is not about explicitly inviting people into your product via their established connections or friends. This tactic is more about allowing anyone to talk about your product on their social network for whoever may be reading it. For instance, instead of asking someone to invite their Facebook friends to use your product, you instead allow them to easily post something to their Facebook feed about your product. If they have a public profile then this can be seen by anyone, not only their friends. The most prevalent example of this is seen in popular blogs. The Next Web prominently displays the ability to share each and every post with your social connections in various places.

Most social networks have code snippets that you can copy and paste into your product to make this kind of social sharing extremely easy. There are also solutions that combine all the popular social sharing options into a single interface.

Although it may not be obvious at first, another thing to keep in mind when implementing a social sharing strategy is to consider where your traffic naturally comes from. If you get most of your inbound traffic from Twitter, but you only allow people to share your product on Facebook then you are missing an easy opportunity. Make sure that people can share your product in the places that are most likely to bring you back more inbound visitors. This will have a compounding effect.

API Integrations

The next step, beyond social sharing, is to actually integrate your product with an existing social network at the API level. Instead of just asking them to share, you can actually bake sharing into the experience and make it happen in the background without forcing the user to give you permission each time. A great example of this is Spotify. It’s no secret that Spotify heavily used Facebook to grow their product, and they did so through an API integration. Once you login to Spotify using Facebook Connect and give Spotify the needed access, then your activity on their service is automatically published to your Facebook feed, and it’s also published inside of the Spotify app to anyone that you are connected with on Facebook. Below is a screenshot of the Spotify app, notifying me of new users who are also connected to me on Facebook, and another screenshot showing notifications within Facebook itself of my friend’s listening habits. These are done completely in the background, which creates frictionless sharing that can only really happen through an API integration.

Another example of this tactic is the Nike+ API integration with Path and Facebook. Everytime I go for a run and track it using the Nike+ app on my phone, then the data about my run is pushed to Path and Facebook, so that my friends can see my activity. Friends can even cheer me on from within Path or Facebook which will trigger an applause sound as I run. This is borderline genius. Below you can see my Nike+ app asking me to share on Path, and on the right you can see the results being published to my Path friends. Again, this it totally seamless. Once I set it up initially it does this automatically.

API integrations, despite their incredible upside, are not 100% stable. As certain products become extremely popular, and gain momentum on existing social network, then it is not entirely uncommon for exposure to be throttled. Facebook, for instance, has the incentive to give you access to their platform. This keeps them in a dominant position if many developers use them. However, Facebook does not have incentive to give you the complete social graph of their billion users. If you start to have too much success with an API integration then you can’t count on the rules staying the same for you.

On a similar note, API integrations are great as a way to growth hack your product, but the more you intertwine your product with a 3rd party service, the more at risk you are. Twitter is a great example of this. Many companies were built on the Twitter API, but then Twitter changed the number of API calls allowed. This left many Twitter clients without a backup plan. Use APIs to grow your product, but be wary that the API doesn’t become your product.

One of the first examples of product growth hacking actually used the powered by link tactic. When Hotmail first came out they did something that was simple, but which would drastically change their trajectory. They included a link at the bottom of emails that were sent using their service that said “Get your free email at Hotmail.” A viral loop was born.

This tactic is still being used to this day. A modern example is found in services that allow you to embed a popup on your website for various reasons. Widgets of any kind are good candidates for these powered by links.

Incentives

Certain products lend themselves easily to creating incentives for users to bring new people into the product. The classic example of this is Dropbox. They have a number of incentives that they offer users for various actions that they can take. This tactic works especially well if you have something which is of low cost to you, but of high value to users. In Dropbox’s case, they use storage space like a currency because the exchange rate is in their favor. Storage is not that expensive, but getting new users is very valuable to them. The user is in the opposite situation. Storage space is valuable to them, and their contacts don’t seem that valuable. This makes for a perfect storm.

It’s worth cautioning that many startups, in an attempt to imitate Dropbox, have been frustrated with their inability to pull off the incentive tactic. Their product might not have much intrinsically to offer their users as incentives. Also, notice that Dropbox goes beyond just giving away storage for friend invitations, but they also give away storage for actions that will help you understand their product. Educated users churn less.

Organic Viral Growth

As much as technology within the product can spread the product, there is something that can be even more effective, organic word of mouth. Organic word of mouth is when someone shares your product, online or offline, in ways that you didn’t orchestrate. They are compelled to tell people whether you incentivized them or not. Organic communication can’t be measured, and it can’t be controlled, but it can be a force that propels your product forward. You can’t make someone share your product organically with their coworkers or friends and family, but you can do certain things to make it more probable. These types of products all tend to spread organically:

Simple

Beautiful

Pain relieving

Products that make people look cool

Emotional

Fun

Unique

Surprising

You can’t be all these things, but you must be one of these things, or you probably don’t have a chance of spreading organically.

http://www.quicksprout.com/viral-hacking/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/viral-hacking-to-get-hypergrowth.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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The Growth Hacking Process to Supercharge Your Revenue

Every world-class growth hacker relies on a series of steps in their growth process.

We’ve broken down the six core steps below.

Define Actionable Goals

Everything begins by focusing on a narrow, actionable goal. This is important because a growth hacker can easily have a focus that is so broad it becomes meaningless. Yes, the overall goal is growth, but you don’t attain that kind of end-result without breaking it into smaller, achievable, tasks.

Let’s say you have a product and you want your DAU (daily active users) to increase, but that’s too broad of a goal. Then you decide to focus just on the retention of existing users since this will increase the DAU, but retention is still too broad. Then you decide to focus on helping current users create content because your numbers show that when someone becomes a content creator (and not just a consumer) within your product then their activity on the site is far greater. Content creation leads to retention which leads to increased DAU. Therefore, you decide to make the goal to increase content creation by 2x.

Too Broad: Increase daily active users Appropriate: Increase content creation by 2x

Many people have a hard time knowing when they’ve narrowed their goal enough. Here is a rule of thumb that I use. Think about your goals as nested hierarchies, and until you reach the “nest” where things can actually be marked off as individual tasks which can be completed once and for all, then you’re not narrow enough. In this case our hierarchy might look something like this:

Will there ever conceivably be a day when you can mark off “grow my startup” from a to-do list? No. The goal is too broad. Is there ever going to be a time when you can say that you’ve finished “increasing DAU.” No. Too broad. However, you can mark off that you’ve “educated members about content creation through an email.” When you find yourself at the part of the hierarchy that can be checked off as done, then you’ve narrowed your goal appropriately.

Implement Analytics to Track Your Goals

Now that you’ve decided to increase content creation by 2x, the next question is, are you in a position to know if you actually attain this goal? Are the appropriate analytics in place? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you currently track content creation metrics at all?

Do you track content creation by cohorts or just in aggregate?

Do you track metrics around the content itself (file size, length, views, shares, etc.)

Do you track the devices that are used to create and consume the content?

Do you track the referring URL’s which are most responsible for content creation?

Without analytics, goals are empty. If you can’t definitively say when a goal has been reached then you have not completed the requisite requirements before moving ahead. Furthermore, analytics will give you valuable data which can change your goals. Your analytics and your goals create a reflexive equilibrium, where they actual inform, refine, and shape each other.

As an example of a reflexive equilibrium, consider this. If your goal began as “increase content creation by 2x,” but then you realize that there is something more important than just content creation in general as it relates to retention, then you might restate your goal. If content over three minutes is the only kind of content which improves the retention of the creator and the consumer then your goal might need to be refined.

One of the great things about implementing specific analytics to track goal progress is the effect this has over time on your overall analytics. Once you’ve spent a few years on a startup, attacking one goal after the other, you’ll realize that the amount of historical data you have to work with has become very powerful. Eventually, when you create a new goal you might already have the relevant metrics being tracked, and now you have past data to look at which predates even the goal creation.

All growth hackers begin with a dull axe, but the edge gets sharper as a function of time. Just don’t give up.

Leverage Your Existing Strengths

Every startup has inherent strengths or assets that can be used as leverage. When there is something at your disposal which requires little energy, but can produce big results, then you’ve found a lever.

Continuing our example from above, you may be trying to decide if you should send out the educational email first, or if you should add a “what’s new” category first. If you have 200,000 emails on file, and you have a system of email distribution that is rock solid, and you can probably create the email in question within a day, then this looks like a promising lever.

If the “what’s new” category will require at least a few days of planning, a few days of design mockup revisions, a few days of programming, and your engineers are already completely stressed out about their to-do list, then this doesn’t look like a promising route. Especially, if you’re looking for low hanging fruit.

The law of leverage essentially makes the decision for you at this point. Send out the email. Your startup’s unique leverage comes from the size of your email list and your email distribution system, not the amount of engineering horsepower that you can throw at problems. A different startup might choose a different option, but only if their leverage takes a different form.

Plans, goals, and tasks, that are stack-ranked in a vacuum, without concern for leverage, are usually misordered. Plan your attack based on strengths. I would recommend reading chapters 3-6 of this book and then give each tactic that is mentioned a score based on your company’s specific leverage.

Execute the Experiment

You’ve already completed step 1, and you defined your goal as increasing content creation by 2x. You’ve already completed step 2, and now you are tracking the necessary data that will tell you if you’re successful in your goal. You’ve already completed step 3, and now you are going to focus on educating your members through an email blast, since this is where you possess leverage. Now it’s time to execute the experiment, which means actually sending an email in this case. Here are some things to keep in mind as you execute the experiment:

1. Write Down Your Hypothesis Before You Execute an Experiment

Before you actually run the experiment you should write down your best guesses at to what will happen. Do you think this email will have a higher or lower click through rate than the emails you already send? Why do you think this? How much do you think the email will increase content creation over the next month? Will it single handedly give you the 2x content creation goal you’re shooting for, or do you think it will get you part of the way there?

It may seem silly to write these kinds of things down when you can just send the email and find out what’s going to happen. If that’s your attitude then you’re missing the point. Hypotheses are accurate reflections of your assumption before you are given the chance to rewrite the past to make yourself look like a genius.

For instance, imagine that you write down the hypothesis that the click through rate will be lower because you already send users one email a week, and you think the second email will annoy them. Then you run the experiment and it has a higher click through rate. If there wasn’t proof of your wrong hypothesis you would be tempted to rewrite history, and you would tell the team members that this is what you expected to happen because you’re such a godsend to the startup world. Hypothesis keep you honest. Now, instead of trying to prove to everyone how smart you are, the discussion is about why your assumptions were wrong. You might come to realize that you underestimate the amount your users want to be in contact with you, and this insight has benefits which stretch far beyond email.

If the idea of forming a hypothesis makes this feel too much like science and less like the traditional culture of startups, that’s probably a good thing.

2.Do Not be Naive About the Resources Needed to Run the Experiment

Anytime you run experiments it is going to disrupt the normal flow of events in your startup. First, the entire team needs to be notified about upcoming experiments so that they can be ready for any mishaps that might occur. Second, know when your startup is already resource constrained, and be mindful of this when planning your experiments. If Tuesdays are when the server is already on the brink of failure, then don’t do something that will send 30% more traffic on that day if you can avoid it. Third, if you need a certain amount of time to finish the components of the experiment before it can be ran, then don’t overlook the time requirements needed. You would do well to remember Hofstadter’s Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

3.Do Not Get Discouraged by the Initial Results

There is a phenomenon which I have experienced countless times, and that is the ever-present belief that whatever experiment I’m working on right now is the one that will change everything for the better. The experiment that I’m currently devoted to seems to be the obvious answer to my company’s problems. If it’s worthy of my time then it must be the thing that will allow us to reach escape velocity. Oh, the joys of the entrepreneur’s disease.

Like we mentioned in the last chapter, most things fail. It’s ok to be optimistic (hey, it keeps me going too), but then you can’t be devastated every time an experiment produces mediocre results. That’s why a defined goal should be attacked from multiple angles. Most of the attacks simply won’t work.

4. Learn from Success and Failure from Success and Failure

Data is like publicity. There is no such thing as bad publicity and there is no such thing as bad data. Even if an experiment fails you will have undoubtedly gathered a lot of information about your product and your users that can be used in future experiments. Thomas Edison failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create his light bulb. When asked about it, Edison allegedly said, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.” You can learn from successes, and you can learn from failures. You only stop learning when you give up.

Optimize the Experiment

Experiments are meant to be optimized. Experiments are fluid. They are not things you do one time and then move on. You tweak experiments. You re-run experiments. You only give up on experiments when it’s appropriate to do so, not when you’ve grown tired of them.

Have a Control Group

You should always have a control group when you are able to because this will account for environmental changes that are hard to track. If you send out the email to only 80% of your users then you can track how much content creation goes up in that group as opposed to the control group. There might be an unforeseen reason, outside of your company’s control or knowledge, that has actually led to a widespread decrease in content creation on your site. Without a control group you might be led to think that the email actually decreased content creation, which would be far from the truth.

Utilize an A/B Test

A/B tests are championed by growth hackers for a reason. They’re magical! You may think you know what the subject line of an email should be to ensure it’s opened, but an A/B test will tell you the truth. You may think you know what landing page the email should send them to, so that they will start creating content, but an A/B will tell you the truth. There are very few tools that create such large gains overall.

Remember, if you are going to run A/B tests then you must decide this before you start running an experiment. Otherwise, in our example, you would have emailed everyone on your list and then there would be no one left to benefit from what you are learning.

When to Give Up on an Experiment

I usually will not give up on an experiment until my leverage has proven to be weaker than I initially thought, or I can’t logically conceive of the experiment yielding better results without an inordinate amount of resources dedicated to it.

Repeat

Now it’s time to select a new experiment, or an optimized version of a previous experiment, and move through these steps all over again. If you work the system that I’ve enumerated here, then success is more a byproduct of tenacity, and less a child of luck.

http://www.quicksprout.com/growth-process/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-growth-hacking-process-to.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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How to Activate Users

Now you have visitors to your product, but that’s the problem. They are just visitors. You’ve found a way to get them to come to your product, but if this is all you do then they will bounce at an incredibly high rate. Your goal is to activate them. Activation is the act of getting them to take an action in your product that you are guiding them toward. Activation is not just the act of them clicking around randomly and not bouncing. Activation is when they do something that you’ve decided beforehand that they should do, something which furthers your goals. Here are some possible activation goals:

Email address

Create an account

Read something

Comment on something

Share something

Buy something

Fill out something

Watch something

Interact with someone

Friend request someone

Some of these activation goals may seem silly, while others seem relevant, but your particular goals will depend entirely upon your product. If your product is a blog that makes money from advertising then you may want to focus on numbers 1, 3, 4, or 5. If you have an email address then you can message them in the future about new articles. If they read what is already on your site they will see the quality of your journalism and want to read more. If they comment on an article then they will be more apt to come back, especially if others respond to them. If they share your article on Twitter then it will get you more readers. All of these goals lead to eyeballs that will make you more money with advertisers. A different product will have completely different goals.

It is also important to recognize that the fewer goals you have, the more likely you are to achieve them. If you have 5 activation goals then it’s difficult to use the tactics in this chapter to achieve any of them effectively. At a minimum, for a given section of your product you should have one primary activation goal.

Landing Pages

When someone visits your website the use of a landing page can greatly increase your chances of activating them. A landing page is different than your homepage. It might have some of the same elements, but not all. A landing page is a page you create within your product that you can direct people toward for certain campaigns. For instance, if you are always tweeting about certain kinds of things from the company Twitter account then you might make your Twitter bio URL send them to a landing page that highlights those same topics. Here are some of the distinct characteristics of a landing page and why you would use one:

Limited Navigation If someone comes to a landing page from a specific campaign then this means that you can hide many of the navigational elements, since this will just distract people from completing the goal you have decided on. They’ve already shown interest by being on a landing page in the first place, so you can focus their attention.

Single Call To Action A landing page only needs one call to action for the same reason that you don’t need many navigational elements. If you give them options then you will lose them, and no one can end up on a landing page unless they came through a specific campaign, which means they are ripe for activation.

Congruous Language Since you know the source of a person that ends up on a particular landing page then you can tailor the experience for them. You should use language which will appeal to them, even if it doesn’t appeal to your visitors at large. The language, and even imagery, of your landing page should be congruous with their expectations based on the source they came from.

There is a specific kind of landing page which is becoming very popular, and it has some distinct characteristics, and that is the launch page, or coming soon page. A launch page is a landing page that you put up before your product is even public, and the goal is to collect email addresses of visitors so that you can inform them about your product when you do go live. Here are some things to understand about this kind of landing page:

Use it to Get Traffic, Not Just Activations

Before you actually launch is one of the best times to get traffic. You can tell people that they will be let into your product first if they share your launch page with others, or you can only let them sign up on your beta list if they tweet about you first. Get creative.

The Headline and Subhead is Everything

Since you haven’t launched yet you probably won’t have much detail to add to the launch page. This means that the headline and subhead become very important. If those few words don’t get someone’s attention then they will bounce.

Emotional Imagery is a Must

Besides the headline and subhead, you also need a very emotional image. A fullscreen background image is the common practice. Make them feel emotion, despite your lack of content.

Don’t Let the List Grow Cold

As you build a list of people that are interested in the launch of your product you must not let the list get cold. If you don’t email them for months, then suddenly tell them about your launch, your click through rate will be very low. Stay in touch with them through the process of building your product to keep them warm, or don’t even take email addresses until you are within a month (or less) of launch.

If you are trying to create landing pages quickly then you can use a service like unbounce.com, and if you are creating a launch page then you can use a service like Launchrock.

Copywriting

If you want people to take a certain action, and not bounce, then the words you use are more important than you realize. We spend so much time obsessing over visuals that copywriting sometimes takes a back seat. As important as visuals are, if you want someone to know something, or understand something, or do something, then you probably have to use words. Here are some insights around copywriting:

The Headline Should Mention Your Unique Value Proposition

Why is your product unique? What do you do that competitors don’t do, or can’t do. If you don’t tell people that you’re unique then visitors will assume you’re not.

The Subhead Should Further Explain Your Unique Value Proposition

The subhead is smaller text below your headline that further illustrates your unique value. It might give reasons why the headline is true. Use this to take away doubts or clarify the headline.

Long Copywriting is Good for Expensive Items

If you are selling something that costs $500 then you need lengthier copywriting. This will give you a chance to inform, answer objections, and just generally convince them to become activated members.

Short Copywriting is Good for Less Expensive Items

If you are selling something for $20 then long copywriting will bring up more objections than it answers. It will confuse people more than it helps people. For low cost products, short, precise, copy is better.

Different Audiences Will Respond to Different Kinds of Words

Don’t just imitate someone else’s copywriting style. Your words need to fit your audience. You should use jargon if you’re talking to doctors, but not if you’re talking to laymen. You can use slang if you’re targeting kids, but not if your audience is filled with grandmothers.

Use Customer Development to Inform Copywriting

By researching your audience online (message boards, surveys, etc.) you will start to see which words they already use. If you use their own words in your copywriting then you’ll be able to activate them much easier.

Social Proof is Copywriting

It would be wise to use testimonials within your product because humans behave with a herd mentality. If everyone else is doing something then so will I. Social proof is a form of copywriting that will help you activate visitors.

Don’t Forget the Microcopy

Microcopy is the short tooltips, hover boxes, or other text that helps a visitor navigate the interface. Little clues, at the right place, can help people navigate your UI. Confused visitors don’t usually do what you want.

Calls to Actions

We’ve already mentioned it a few times, but calls to action deserve their own section. The best way to get someone to do what you want is by giving them a clear call to action. Leave nothing to their imagination. Tell them where to click and make the button obvious. Tell them who to call and make the phone number prominent. Activate visitors by telling people, in the most explicit way you can, what you want them to do. Below are some examples of great call to actions.

Onboarding

When people arrive on your site it’s like they’ve been dumped in the middle of New York City without a map and no sense of direction. Your job is to give them orientation, and lead them to the places where you want them to go. One of the best ways to guide visitors is through onboarding. Onboarding can take the form of visual directions placed on top the screen, or a series of pages that lead visitors from one place to another. Think of onboarding like a digital tour guide for your product. An explanatory video could even be a part of your onboarding strategy.

Twitter has one of the most talked about onboarding experiences because they carefully guide people from creating an account to using an account, and it’s all through the onboarding. They know that an account that doesn’t follow anyone is kind of useless, so they make following others a part of the signup process.

Another great example of onboarding is InVision. They give you large, obvious, pop ups throughout their product that guide you and tell you what you need to know.

People are not patient, and they don’t care about your product enough to find out how to use it. If you want to activate visitors, making them take certain actions, then you must carefully craft your onboarding experience.

Gamification

There is something about gameplay that is hardwired into the human brain. We love progressing, getting awards, ranking on leaderboards, finishing tasks, leveling up, and having fun while we do it. Gamification is when you use game mechanics within your product, and this can be used to activate members. Gamification can cause someone to complete actions they normally wouldn’t complete. Here are some examples:

Progress

It is common within products to tell people that their profile is only a certain percentage complete. This prompts us to get to 100% because we hate not finishing something. Just by adding a progress bar with a percentage then we have gamified our product.

Awards

We are all still in little league baseball. Trophies matter, even if they are meaningless. If you can award something within your product then you will create a gamified incentive for people to take certain actions. Just think about Foursquare. It’s one big baseball game for adults with mayorships and badges instead of cheap trophies.

Leaderboards

Just by showing someone their rank you can prompt them to compete. If you let someone know that they are in 3rd place for most comments on your message board there is a good chance they’ll take actions to get in 2nd place. Leaderboards can activate people to take certain actions.

There are countless ways to gamify your product, but you have to think about your product as a game (even if it is a B2B app).

Pricing Strategies

Getting someone to make a purchase is really just a unique kind of activation. You are getting a visitor to take a certain action, that action just happens to be making a purchase. There are a number of best practices around activating people to make a purchase. They may not all apply to your situation, but some of them probably will.

Perfect Price Discrimination

Pricing is an important aspect of activating people to make a purchase. There is something called perfect price discrimination which is the act of creating a pricing structure that charges based on the consumer’s purchasing power. Ecquire does this well by making their lowest tier only support basic integrations. This is everything except Salesforce. They know if you are using Salesforce then you can afford to pay for an expensive plan.

Multiple Tiers

Another popular strategy to activate purchases is to have three pricing tiers. Just the fact that there is a more expensive option makes you feel like you’re not wasting money, and you are getting a good deal. Having a pricing tier below you can make you feel like you’re not a cheap person. Options give people confidence to buy.

Suggestive Tier Naming

If you name your pricing tiers something vague like gold, silver, and bronze, then you don’t really help people discover which tier is good for them. By naming the tiers things like “Starter,” “Professional,” or “Team,” you are giving people the confidence that they are in the correct tier.

Free Trials

People are afraid to make an irreversible mistake with their money. If you give them a money back guarantee, or a free trial of some kind, then you are taking the risk away from them and placing it on yourself.

Discount Codes

One of the most powerful forces, in terms of getting someone to make a purchase, is a discount code. But there is a trick that makes discount codes even more effective. If you include a time limit on the discount then you force people to make a decision. Udemy is a great example of this kind of activation tactic. They send out emails on a regular basis which include discount codes that are only valid for a limited time.

Bundling

Another way to get people to make a purchase is through bundling your product with other products. If you can overwhelm people with value then they are more willing to make a buying decision. Hacker Bundle is a good example of a service that uses this activation tactic.

http://www.quicksprout.com/user-activation/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-activate-users.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Pull Strategies for Getting More Visitors

So, you want to get new visitors to your site?

There are three fundamental ways to get traffic. No more. No less. You can pull people in, push people in, or you can use the product to get people in. These are the 3 p’s of getting traffic. What’s the difference in these methods? I’m glad you asked.

Pull The first way to get visitors to your site is to pull them in. This is where you give them a reason to come to you. You entice them, incentivize them, and draw them to you. This book is an example of the pull methodology. You were drawn to us. We didn’t have to go find you online, but rather, you found us.

Push As the name implies, this is a bit more aggressive than pulling. Instead of enticing people, you just go get them and push them onto your site. Someone may be wanting to watch a YouTube video, but not until they see your ad. They may want to do a Google search, but not until they see your paid result. You go out and find where they are online and you push them towards your product.

Product The third way that traffic can end up on your site is through the product itself. If you’ve ever invited your friends to a new social network, then you understand how a product can be used to get new traffic. Everyone that uses the product gets more people to use the product.

Pull and push tactics are examples of growth hacking which hinge on the redefinition of distribution. If you know how people flow online then you can accurately entice them or strong arm them onto your site, but if you don’t understand where people congregate and what causes them to travel to other places (digitally), then you can’t effectively push or pull them on onto your site. The third P (product) doesn’t rely on a redefinition of distribution (like pull and push), but it relies on the redefinition of what a product is. Like we said in the first chapter, now products can play a role in their own customer acquisition, which is a very radical concept in the history of the world.

It is important to realize that all three P’s work really well in the right context, when executed by the right person. As you were reading about the differences you probably assumed that one method was better than the other, but they all have their place in the growth hacker’s arsenal. Many products actually employ a combination of push, pull, and product methodologies. This isn’t the time to get on a soapbox for a certain camp. Growth hackers are about growth, not just a certain kind of narrowly defined growth for a priori reasons.

The Fundamentals of a Pull Strategy

A great pull strategy is based on two fundamentals:

The cost of these tactics are usually measured in time or personnel, but you are not directly paying to get visitors.

These tactics revolve around providing something of value that entices people to visit your site. If you stop providing value then you’ll stop pulling them in.

Blogging

One of the tried and true ways of getting traffic to your product is through blogging or guest blogging. Blog posts are suited perfectly to send you traffic for a number of reasons.

Blog posts are keyword rich, and are easily indexed by Google, which aides an overall SEO strategy.

Blog posts have a compounding effect. The more you write, the more total chances you’ll have of pulling people towards your product over time.

Blogs are usually based around specific niches, so if you are guest blogging then you can tap into large swaths of your market with a single post.

Blogs are usually disseminated through RSS readers, so there is an inbuilt mechanism to deliver your thoughts to others.

Blog posts are great at educating people, and people that are informed about your product are more likely to move through your funnel.

Blog posts can position you as a thought leader, and people would rather use a product that has been created by an expert rather than a nobody.

Blog owners are always looking for new guests post, which makes this low hanging fruit in many cases.

Blogging is a no brainer. The only decision you have to make is whether to start your own blog or guest blog for others. The main reason to guest blog is that you don’t have to create the audience. You only have to create the post. Trust me, it’s easier to create a post than to gather the people together that are willing to read it. However, the main benefit to starting your own blog is your ability to have full control. If you build your own audience you have more flexibility over the content. You might choose to get more aggressive in the future with sending traffic to your product from the blog, but if someone else owns all your content then you don’t have this possibility. Neither answer is wrong as long as you choose for strategic reasons. Remember, you can always do both. Maybe you start by guest blogging but then transition to your own blog.

Whichever route you choose you must not make your blog posts an extended pitch for your product. You’re gently pulling people in, not begging them to visit your site. If you get too overt about your intentions it will turn people away. With a little creativity you can easily get click throughs without making your post feel like an ad. Always start a new post with a bio that links to your product (no one will begrudge you this), and try to link to your product once within the post, but only when it’s relevant to what you’re saying.

Also, the blog posts that get read and shared are the ones that tap into something emotional, trendy, educational, enjoyable, or surprising (amongst others). Take note of the kinds of posts that get your attention, and then reverse engineer them to inform your own writing.

Podcasting

Podcasting is another great pull tactic because audio has inherent inbound qualities. When you hear someone speak then you are given a window into their mind that is different, and sometimes even better, than reading their thoughts. Like blogs, podcasts have inbuilt distribution mechanisms (podcast listening apps), but there are differences between blogging and podcasting when viewed through the lens of getting traffic:

Podcasts are not easily indexed by search engines.

It’s easy to click a link in a blog post, but it’s hard to visit a site that is mentioned in a podcast.

Podcasts are fewer in number, and tend to have smaller audiences.

It is highly unlikely that a podcast will be a viable channel for traffic, unless you think very creatively about it. Here are some twists that you could try:

Whatever you do, go niche. You probably don’t have the production experience or the budget to compete with general interests podcasts. Instead, select a very narrow niche, and dominate it.

Don’t start a podcast with a goal of doing an episode every week. Rather, set a goal of 10 episodes total and make it more like an educational course on a certain topic that your market would love to learn. With beautiful album art and a great audio intro, people will find you in the podcast directories and get curious. Never promise more episodes, and tell them upfront in the first episode what your intention is.

Go on a few podcasts as a guest, and then use those episodes as a part of a drip email campaign in order to inform your email list about your product further, via audio, to increase conversions. Note: the same thing can be done with blog posts also.

Of course, it is possible to go the traditional route by creating a podcast that publishes new episodes every week, but there is something you must know. Podcasts require a lot of time to do well, and low quality offerings will not gain enough traffic to matter. Therefore, get creative and think like a growth hacker, not like a podcaster. Use their medium, but not their methods.

Ebooks, Guides, and Whitepapers

Part of creating an effective pull strategy is to use the unique makeup of your team to inform which tactics you try. Some people love the idea of doing little things on a very regular basis (like blogging, or maybe podcasting). Others would rather invest large chunks of energy at spread out intervals, and produce things that are a bit more monumental. This is a valid tactic, and large written documents have a number of advantages in terms of getting traffic:

Ebooks, guides, and whitepapers have a certain draw to them. It’s somewhat easy to ignore a new blog post, but when there is a new hefty document on a niche subject you care about, it’s hard to ignore.

Ebooks, guides, and whitepapers have a high perceived value, and you can ask for an email address in exchange for downloading them. It feels like a fair trade, and it helps you build an email list that you will eventually work through your funnel.

Ebook, guides, and whitepapers spread through social media very effectively when they are executed well. As an author (even a self-published one) you are a thought leader of sorts, and people will want to use the product you’ve created.

Ebook, guides, and whitepapers can be written to specifically educate people about your product. Informed visitors are more likely to become members and users.

MailChimp has a number of guides which they publish for all the reasons listed above.

Infographics

Infographics can entice people to your product because they simultaneously display expertise and aesthetic taste. Visualizations are powerful tools, and they are spread using social media extremely easily. Adam Breckler, of Visual.ly, provides the following advice when creating an infographic:

Select a Good Topic

Pick something that is clever, exciting, noteworthy, or that stands out for some other reason. Just don’t be boring or irrelevant.

Find the Right Data

People sometimes assume that they have to create the data themselves, but often a simple Google search will uncover data sets that have already been compiled.

Analyze the Data

Look at the data that you have with journalistic integrity. Don’t bend the data to suit your needs.

Build the Narrative

Brainstorm what story the data should tell. You need to transform the numbers into a coherent narrative, and not just present them as a collection of facts.

Come Up With a Design Concept

Now it’s time to consider ways to tell your narrative visually.

Polish and Refine the Design

Put on the finishing touches and make sure everything is as high quality as it needs to be to gain the public’s attention.

Distribute the Infographic

You can distribute it using your own audience (email list, social media, etc.), or you can use services like Visual.ly which is a marketplace for browsing inforgraphics.

Everlane produced a couple of controversial infographics that created a firestorm online. Their infographics showed the typical markups that department stores charge for t-shirts. Since Everlane sells similar quality shirts at lower prices it’s easy to see how this infographic brought them the right kind of visitors.

Webinars

The offline world has seminars, but the online world has webinars. These are very successful channels at bringing in new visitors for a few reasons:

Webinars are usually live, so people are forced to put them in their schedule, and view it as an event. A YouTube video can be watched anytime, but people must “attend” a webinar. When something is in their calendar they tend to take it seriously, and they take the information shared during the webinar seriously.

Webinars usually have limited seats, and this faux scarcity makes people feel like the content is exclusive and important. If you are important in someone’s mind then they are likely to move through your funnel more efficiently.

Webinars allow for interaction, and if someone gets to interact with you then they will have a connection to you and your product that will carry over into activity on your product.

Webinars educate people, and the more you give away in terms of educational value the more visitors will reciprocate in different ways.

A webinar can end with a special promotion of some kind for your product and this can drive traffic to your product.

A webinar can be done in conjunction with another company so that you can benefit from their audience learning about your product for maybe the first time.

Unbounce hosts something called “unwebinars.” Above is one they did with Joanna Wiebe in order to benefit from her expertise and her audience.

Speaking at Conferences

Conferences may feel like a very non-growth-hacker way to get traffic, but that’s just because you’re not thinking of it creatively enough. A conference presentation may pull in a few more visitors to your product, but not many, and the amount of preparation required is very high. However, a conference presentation creates a number of by-products which can be used to pull in visitors more effectively.

Slide Deck

If you’re presenting at a conference then you probably have a slide deck. This deck can be uploaded to slideshare.com and now you have a left over piece of collateral that can easily be shared, and it will bring people into you product for the foreseeable future. Sildeshare.com is a social network in it’s own right, and you would do well to invest in it.

Video/Audio

Many conferences will record your presentation, and this will allow you to put it on your company blog, upload it to YouTube, place it in email signatures, or use it during a drip email campaign.

Besides the by-products of a presentation, here are some other things to keep in mind:

Instant Retweets

I once spoke at a conference, and I ended my presentation by telling the audience that if they retweeted my last tweet that I would give them a discount to my product. I created a social media tornado in a matter of seconds.

Persuasion

Why did Steve Jobs do presentations? Because they’re are powerful. If you have the gift of gab, and can command an audience, then sometimes a few moments on stage can create a number of traffic sources for your product. Remember, growth hackers are right-brained and left-brained. Sometimes the ROI is fuzzy, but that doesn’t mean it is non-existent.

Rand Fishkin, the former CEO of Moz, has over 60 slideshares, and they have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, creating countless new visitors for his product at Moz.com.

SEO

In a sense, all the tactics we’ve covered so far are incredible from an SEO point of view. As you create content of various kinds (blogs, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, guides, infographics, webinars, slide decks, video/audio presentations) then the search engines are going to realize that you are an authority on your topic of choice, and you’ll rank high for certain keywords. However, there are really two kinds of SEO strategies. I call them content and code.

Content By virtue of creating content, even if you don’t know how SEO works, you will be optimizing for it. Just keep producing and you’ll be using SEO to your advantage even if you don’t know what an algorithm is.

Coder There are also things you can do at the code level which enable a solid SEO strategy. Are your links seo optimized with keywords? Are H1 tags properly labeled. Do you use Schema.org tags for specific kinds of content? Do you have an up-to-date site map?

If you can use both content and code to your advantage then this is obviously the best case scenario. However, even if you can’t do both, you should do at least one or the other. Search engines are still the primary way we navigate the internet, and to ignore this simple truth is very unwise. SEO is important, and for many businesses it’s the primary way they gain traffic at the top of their funnel.

Social Media

One of the ways to gain traffic at the top of your funnel is through social media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.). There are actually so many spammy ways to do this that first I feel the need to tell you what not to do.

Don’t follow and unfollow people on a social network just to get their attention if you don’t intend to actually have some kind of relationship with them.

Don’t buy followers of any kind. They aren’t your market. They can’t amplify your message. They are a waste of money.

Don’t bother people. Ask yourself what kind of pings you would like to receive if you were in their shoes.

Here are some tips to help you bring in traffic to the top of your funnel using social media:

Engage with people who might actually use your product. Know your demographic.

Provide value at every chance. Answer questions. Give advice. Help them in some way. Don’t just take, but also be a giver.

Become a hub of interesting content, whether you produce it or not. If you gain a reputation as a great curator of content then people will pay attention to your posts and tweets simply because of your track record (even though you actually didn’t produce anything yourself).

Social media is a marathon, not a sprint. Social media usually will not give you massive traffic instantly. In fact, you should actually underestimate what follower counts and like counts represent. Even if someone with 100k followers retweets you it probably won’t give you much new traffic unless your demographics are perfectly aligned (but even then I’d be skeptical).

Social media is as much about customer support as anything else. Surprisingly, this can be a tool for new traffic. As people watch your stellar customer support happening in public then they will be more apt to try your product themselves.

Use social media to amplify all the content you created in tactics 1-8. Social media works great in conjunction with other tactics.

Like everything, creativity can open up new possibilities. Skittles once made their entire homepage a Twitter feed of a search for the word Skittles. They received countless mentions of Skittles on Twitter that day, and the internet collectively paid attention to their ingenious ploy.

Contests

Contests are an awesome way to drive new traffic to your product. A lot of people are actually unaware of how well contests work. Ever heard of AppSumo? Want to know how they grew an email list to over 700k emails? They started with contests. Ever heard of AirBNB? Want to know what they started doing this week to drive new traffic to their product? They started promoting a contest. Contests are good for small companies and big companies alike, so here are a few of things to remember as you create a contest:

Give away prizes that are meaningful to your audience. Every contest shouldn’t include a free iPad. Give them something that represents you. As an example, if you are AirBNB then give away free housing (which they are). This is important because if you are capturing their email address as a part of the giveaway then you don’t want a junk list that doesn’t represent your demographic. Just giving away iPads will give you an unqualified list, and you will have difficulty moving them through your funnel.

Giveaway experiences, not just goods and services. What do you think someone will remember more, an iPad or a trip to some awesome destination to see their favorite band? They might cost about the same, but the impact could be drastically different.

As an example, if you work for Uber, then giveaway a ride with some celebrity in an Uber cab. Now that’s an experience. Have prizes for at least first, second, and third place. People want to feel like they have a chance of winning, and if you only have a grand prize then they might not play along.

Give them more entries to win the contest based on how much they give you in exchange. For an email address they get one entry. If they share a friend’s email address with you they get two more entries. For a retweet they might get three more entries. You get the point. Help them increase their chances of winning the more they grow your list and promote your product.

Run the contest long enough to gain some traction. Consider running it for a month. Anything less and you might not get enough entries to make the ROI work.

Make a big deal when you announce the winner and use this occasion as another event that generates noise online, and potentially traffic.

AppSumo ran a ton of contests over the years. They found something that worked so why should they stop? Also, notice how experiential their prize is.

App Marketplace

One of the channels for gaining new visitors which has arisen in the past few years is marketplaces. The Apple App Store is a marketplace. The Google Play Store is a marketplace. There are actually two kinds of app marketplaces, and they are different.

B2C App Marketplaces

If your company made an app for a consumer then you’ll probably be in a B2C app store like the Apple App Store. Here are some things to keep in mind if you are trying to get new users through this method:

Reviews matter immensely. Do whatever is necessary to not get bad reviews in the first place, and try to get people to change their reviews after they’ve left a bad one.

Screenshots are a window into your app so make them perfect. If you don’t visually entice people you can’t pull them in.

Think about your app’s name carefully. Will it be easy to search for and easy to find.

You cannot rely on the marketplaces alone for new traffic. There are simply too many apps now and you are a needle in a haystack. You must use the other tactics in this book also.

B2B App Marketplaces

If your product can be used for businesses then you might consider this relatively new kind of marketplace. Companies like Salesforce or Mailchimp now have their own marketplace for apps that integrate with their product. Here are some helpful tips concerning B2B app marketplaces.

These marketplaces are less crowded so they are easier to stand out in.

B2B marketplaces are apt to promote your product on their blog, in an email blast, or other ways, if you just ask them.

Sometimes B2B marketplaces will even pay you to build an integration with their product. Shopify recently had a fund that they used for this very purpose.

As with consumer marketplaces, reviews and screenshots matter, so don’t skimp on these.

You can include a “coming soon” in your description on these marketplaces which will list upcoming products that you will also integrate with. This is a great way to be found more easily on the B2B search engine since you will have a number of products listed in your description as keywords (this was one of the tactics that Wishery used, and they were eventually purchased).

The AppExchange is Salesforce’s B2B app marketplace.

Deal Sites

In the aftermath of Groupon’s rise (and slow demise) there have been a number of deal sites created in their wake. For many niches there is a deal site which has a substantial email list and is willing to promote your product. The arrangement with these companies is usually pretty straight forward. You provide a discount to their audience, and in exchange they provide you with distribution. This is a quick way to get traffic, and given how easy it is to set up this kind of relationship it’s worth trying. Another unexpected side benefit of these deal sites is the number of people who will purchase your product at full price even though they came from the deal site. The internet is a strange place and this will happen more than you would guess.

Mighty Deals is a niche deal site that serves designers. It would be worth it to see if you can find a deal site for your niche.

Leverage Other Peoples Audience (LOPA)

Although this is built into many of the tactics already covered I still wanted to talk about LOPA explicitly. Basically, building an audience is incredibly hard. So if you can find any way to leverage someone else’s audience then you will be taking advantage of a traffic shortcut. Guest blogging is a form of LOPA. Guest podcasting is a form of LOPA. Even marketplaces are a form of LOPA. Here are some other ways that you can take advantage of LOPA:

Create a giveaway for a specific blog that has your demographic as their audience.

Reach out to group leaders on Meetup.com that run communities that could use your product, and ask them if they’d tell their group about you.

Offer free accounts to thought leaders in your industry and if they have a great experience they will share it with their audience.

There are literally too many possibilities of LOPA to even begin listing them all. If you are creative enough you will always have new opportunities for LOPA.

http://www.quicksprout.com/pull-strategy/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/pull-strategies-for-getting-more.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales

There’s a little growth hack that every ecommerce site should be using.

It’s the easiest hack… it doesn’t require money, you don’t need a following, and it works instantly.

But you know what? No one is using it.

Can you guess what it is?

Well, I’ll give you hint… just look at the image above.

It’s not related to SEO, paid ads, or anything else you are used to reading about here on the blog.

The beautiful part about it is no one is leveraging it, which means it works roughly 100% of the time. 🙂

A simple way to get more ecommerce sales

Alright, do you want to know what it is? Well, I’ll give you one more hint before spilling the beans.

If you watched a video like this on YouTube about the best makeup products, what do you think would happen?

youtube

There’s a good chance you’ll buy one of the products recommended. And if you don’t, someone else will.

The issue is, it only works if you generate enough video views.

And I have a lot of articles breaking down how to get more YouTube traffic like:

YouTube for E-Commerce: The Art of Selling Without Selling

Is YouTube Worth It? 7.6 Million Views Later, Here’s What I Learned

How to Hack YouTube SEO – 26 Tactics for Gaining Top Results

How to Get More YouTube Views

There is one big problem… there is no guarantee that your video will rank on YouTube or get enough views.

But what if I told you that there is a channel that is highly relevant to ecommerce and you can easily get 20,000 plus views per video?

Best of all, there is no competition and you can do it every single time, without even having a following!

How to get 29,090 video views on Amazon

You already know about YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live… and you may even know about LinkedIn Live.

But did you know about Amazon Live?

Just like all of the other live platforms, it works similarly, but the whole purpose is to show off and promote your products so you can drive more brand awareness and sales.

The video above is by Skincare by Alana. Alana presented tips in the video about how to reduce puffiness around your eyes and how to make them brighter.

Can you guess how many views that video received in the first week it aired?

Well, based on the headline above you are probably going to guess 29,090. That is correct. 😉

And all Alana spent was $200 to boost the video.

It’s not just Alana who is seeing massive success… I know 2 other people that are getting similar results, but they won’t let me share their stats as they are white labeling other people’s products and don’t want more competition. 🙁

So how do you get thousands of views from Amazon Live?

Well, there is a simple process… let’s break down how you can do it step by step.

Now before we get into that, I need to be transparent: You are going to find it a bit awkward at first. But after you do it a few times, you’ll find that it is easy and fast.

Step #1: Download the Amazon Live app

You probably have an iPhone or an Andriod device. Log into your app store and download the Amazon Live app.

Although you can view Amazon Live on your desktop computer, you can’t post a video unless you do it from your phone.

When you install the app, make sure you allow Amazon to access everything on your phone. This will come in handy later when you try to upload your slate image. I will get into what a slate image is later on…

Step #2: Open the app

Now open up the app. Once it’s opened it will look something like this other than the fact that you won’t have any videos.

On the bottom left you will see a “Streams” navigational option and that will show you all of the videos you have aired.

On the bottom right you will see a “More” navigational option that shows you all the preferences and options you have.

And to get started, you would click the “+” button at the bottom.

Step #3: Getting started

When you click the “+” button at the bottom, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Amazon Live has a cool practice mode feature. I highly recommend you start off with a practice run or two.

Once you get the hang of it, create a real live video. But before you do you’ll want to add products that you want to promote. You can select one or multiple.

As for video source, your phone camera will be the easiest. There are other options as well such as an encoder and other things for video ninjas, but I would just use your phone camera (also known as phone cam) as it’s simple and works well.

You’ll also have to name your live stream. This is where you enter the title of the video.

This is very important because if your title sucks, you won’t get as many views. If you don’t know how to write amazing headlines, check out these posts:

The Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Powerful Headlines

How to Write Headlines People Can’t Help but Click [Formulas Inside]

The Definitive Guide to Writing a Headline that Doesn’t Suck (Tips, Tactics & Tools Included)

How to Boost Your Social Shares Through These 10 Headline Formulas

How to Fail-Proof Your Ad Campaigns with These 7 Headline Formulas

Step #4: Boost your video

It doesn’t take much money to get thousands of views. Technically, you will get thousands of views without spending a dollar. But if you want to spend a few hundred dollars it will go a very long way.

Again, this tactic works without spending any money, but a few dollars can help you get a lot more traction.

Step #5: Schedule or post your video

You’ll have 2 options when it comes to posting your video. You can go live and post right away, or you can schedule your video to go out.

If you haven’t filmed your video during peak hours, I recommend that you schedule it. The last thing you want to do is publish a video in the middle of the night or too early in the morning.

Step #6: Add a slate image

A slate image is a cover image. This is what people see when browsing Amazon Live. Here’s an example of a slate image:

Remember how I said you’ll want to allow the app access to files on your phone? You’ll want to do that so you can upload a slate image.

Step #7: Show a banner

You need to show a banner. It will change the number of sales you generate.

You have 2 options when it comes to showing a banner. The first is to share a promotion with the views, and the second is to share a custom message.

When you select the “share a promotion” option, your promotion will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. Customers can click on the banner to apply the promotion to their account.

And when you select the “share a custom message” option, your custom message will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. People can hide the message at any point.

You can test both options, but I recommend that you at least “share a promotion” so it makes it easier for people to get a discount with just a click.

Step #8: Watch the sales roll in

Alana only generated one sale on her first video, but that’s because she didn’t push too hard. She already knows how to drastically improve that number and, in a bit, I will go over how to generate hundreds of sales through Amazon Live.

The other accounts I have access to have generated hundreds of sales through Live. One has generated 391 sales so far from 2 videos and the other has generated 328 sales from 3 videos. And I will share below why they were able to generate sales and why Alana wasn’t.

How to maximize your sales from Amazon Live

Here’s how to get more sales:

Buy equipment – if using your phone, get an awesome ring light and a vertical phone holder. It will NOT record horizontally. This will help improve the quality of your video.

Sell, sell, sell – Amazon wants this feature to sell, sell, and then sell some more. This is the big mistake Alana made and she knows it and will fix this during her next live video. If you don’t sell, don’t expect sales.

Offer a discount – Pick an awesome product, and a deep discount. If you don’t offer a discount you won’t generate over 100 dollars in sales from your live video. If you generate more sales, you’ll typically get more video views because when you sell Amazon makes more money. I know I have talked in the past about how giving discounts is a bad long-term strategy for your brand. I still stand by that. However, live videos are a much different way to sell in the short term and offering discounts will drive many sales and more awareness quickly. Because the offer is only accessible during the Live and nowhere else, this is one of the situations where not only do I think discounts are acceptable but necessary.

Be careful – if you are sending tons of traffic to a product and you don’t generate any sales, you will hurt your Amazon organic rankings. For that reason, you really have to sell. If you aren’t willing to sell hard, Amazon Live may not be for you. If you perform well, it can help with your organic rankings.

Create a sign – hold a sign at the beginning of the video that says “UNMUTE ME” or something like that. Amazon appears to track how many people actually listen to your video, and how long they listen. This should help you get more views and sales.

Hook viewers – making bold statements that are true or telling people what you are going to cover later in the video is a great way to keep people engaged longer. Poor engagement will lead to very little video views.

Build authority – although I told you to sell hard, you need to provide amazing information and tips at the same time. This will help you become an authority and it should boost your sales in the long run. Selling without providing value will make you look bad.

It really isn’t that complicated. As long as you follow the tips above, it shouldn’t be hard for you to generate dozens of sales from each Amazon Live video.

Conclusion

Just like every other video platform, the reach will eventually be limited, and it will be harder to get results. And sadly, there is nothing you can do about it.

For the time being, though, you need to jump on the Amazon Live bandwagon and create as many videos as you can. Once you get the process down right and you are seeing sales, I would create 1 video each and every day.

I can’t create videos on Amazon Live as I don’t sell ecommerce products myself, but you can. That’s a requirement that I can’t get around.

So, what do you think about Amazon Live? If you aren’t jumping to create a video after reading this, you are missing out.

The post One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/one-simple-hack-thatll-boost-your.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/pointrank-review-bonus.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Restaurant Local SEO: The Google Characteristics of America’s Top-Ranked Eateries

Posted by MiriamEllis

“A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.” - Wolfgang Puck

I like this quote. It makes me hear phones ringing at your local search marketing agency, with aspiring chefs and restaurateurs on the other end of the line, ready to bring experts aboard in the “sometimes difficult” quest for online visibility.

Is your team ready for these clients? How comfortable do you feel talking restaurant Local SEO when such calls come in? When was the last time you took a broad survey of what’s really ranking in this specialized industry?

Allow me to be your prep cook today, and I’ll dice up “best restaurant” local packs for major cities in all 50 US states. We’ll julienne Google Posts usage, rough chop DA, make chiffonade of reviews, owner responses, categories, and a host of other ingredients to determine which characteristics are shared by establishments winning this most superlative of local search phrases.

The finished dish should make us conversant with what it takes these days to be deemed “best” by diners and by Google, empowering your agency to answer those phones with all the breezy confidence of Julia Child.

Methodology

I looked at the 3 businesses in the local pack for “best restaurants (city)” in a major city in each of the 50 states, examining 11 elements for each entry, yielding 4,950 data points. I set aside the food processor for this one and did everything manually. I wanted to avoid the influence of proximity, so I didn’t search for any city in which I was physically located. The results, then, are what a traveler would see when searching for top restaurants in destination cities.

Restaurant results

Now, let’s look at each of the 11 data points together and see what we learn. Take a seat at the table!

Categories prove no barrier to entry

Which restaurant categories make up the dominant percentage of local pack entries for our search?

You might think that a business trying to rank locally for “best restaurants” would want to choose just “restaurant” as their primary Google category as a close match. Or, you might think that since we’re looking at best restaurants, something like “fine dining restaurants” or the historically popular “French restaurants” might top the charts.

Instead, what we’ve discovered is that restaurants of every category can make it into the top 3. Fifty-one percent of the ranking restaurants hailed from highly diverse categories, including Pacific Northwest Restaurant, Pacific Rim Restaurant, Organic, Southern, Polish, Lebanese, Eclectic and just about every imaginable designation. American Restaurant is winning out in bulk with 26 percent of the take, and an additional 7 percent for New American Restaurant. I find this an interesting commentary on the nation’s present gustatory aesthetic as it may indicate a shift away from what might be deemed fancy fare to familiar, homier plates.

Overall, though, we see the celebrated American “melting pot” perfectly represented when searchers seek the best restaurant in any given city. Your client’s food niche, however specialized, should prove no barrier to entry in the local packs.

High prices don’t automatically equal “best”

Do Google’s picks for “best restaurants” share a pricing structure?

It will cost you more than $1000 per head to dine at Urasawa, the nation’s most expensive eatery, and one study estimates that the average cost of a restaurant meal in the US is $12.75. When we look at the price attribute on Google listings, we find that the designation “best” is most common for establishments with charges that fall somewhere in between the economical and the extravagant.

Fifty-eight percent of the top ranked restaurants for our search have the $$ designation and another 25 percent have the $$$. We don’t know Google’s exact monetary value behind these symbols, but for context, a Taco Bell with its $1–$2 entrees would typically be marked as $, while the fabled French Laundry gets $$$$ with its $400–$500 plates. In our study, the cheapest and the costliest restaurants make up only a small percentage of what gets deemed “best.”

There isn’t much information out there about Google’s pricing designations, but it’s generally believed that they stem at least in part from the attribute questions Google sends to searchers. So, this element of your clients’ listings is likely to be influenced by subjective public sentiment. For instance, Californians’ conceptions of priciness may be quite different from North Dakotans’. Nevertheless, on the national average, mid-priced restaurants are most likely to be deemed “best.”

Of anecdotal interest: The only locale in which all 3 top-ranked restaurants were designated at $$$$ was NYC, while in Trenton, NJ, the #1 spot in the local pack belongs to Rozmaryn, serving Polish cuisine at $ prices. It’s interesting to consider how regional economics may contribute to expectations, and your smartest restaurant clients will carefully study what their local market can bear. Meanwhile, 7 of the 150 restaurants we surveyed had no pricing information at all, indicating that Google’s lack of adequate information about this element doesn’t bar an establishment from ranking.

Less than 5 stars is no reason to despair

Is perfection a prerequisite for “best”?

Negative reviews are the stuff of indigestion for restaurateurs, and I’m sincerely hoping this study will provide some welcome relief. The average star rating of the 150 “best” restaurants we surveyed is 4.5. Read that again: 4.5. And the number of perfect 5-star joints in our study? Exactly zero. Time for your agency to spend a moment doing deep breathing with clients.

The highest rating for any restaurant in our data set is 4.8, and only three establishments rated so highly. The lowest is sitting at 4.1. Every other business falls somewhere in-between. These ratings stem from customer reviews, and the 4.5 average proves that perfection is simply not necessary to be “best.”

Breaking down a single dining spot with 73 reviews, a 4.6 star rating was achieved with fifty-six 5-star reviews, four 4-star reviews, three 3-star reviews, two 2-star reviews, and three 1-star reviews. 23 percent of diners in this small review set had a less-than-ideal experience, but the restaurant is still achieving top rankings. Practically speaking for your clients, the odd night when the pho was gummy and the paella was burnt can be tossed onto the compost heap of forgivable mistakes.

Review counts matter, but differ significantly

How many reviews do the best restaurants have?

It’s folk wisdom that any business looking to win local rankings needs to compete on native Google review counts. I agree with that, but was struck by the great variation in review counts across the nation and within given packs. Consider:

The greatest number of reviews in our study was earned by Hattie B’s Hot Chicken in Nashville, TN, coming in at a whopping 4,537!

Meanwhile, Park Heights Restaurant in Tupelo, MS is managing a 3-pack ranking with just 72 reviews, the lowest in our data set.

35 percent of “best”-ranked restaurants have between 100–499 reviews and another 31 percent have between 500–999 reviews. Taken together that’s 66 percent of contenders having yet to break 1,000 reviews.

A restaurant with less than 100 reviews has only a 1 percent chance of ranking for this type of search.

Anecdotally, I don’t know how much data you would have to analyze to be able to find a truly reliable pattern regarding winning review counts. Consider the city of Dallas, where the #1 spot has 3,365 review, but spots #2 and #3 each have just over 300. Compare that to Tallahassee, where a business with 590 reviews is coming in at #1 above a competitor with twice that many. Everybody ranking in Boise has well over 1,000 reviews, but nobody in Bangor is even breaking into the 200s.

The takeaways from this data point is that the national average review count is 893 for our “best” search, but that there is no average magic threshold you can tell a restaurant client they need to cross to get into the pack. Totals vary so much from city to city that your best plan of action is to study the client’s market and strongly urge full review management without making any promise that hitting 1,000 reviews will ensure them beating out that mysterious competitor who is sweeping up with just 400 pieces of consumer sentiment. Remember, no local ranking factor stands in isolation.

Best restaurants aren’t best at owner responses

How many of America’s top chophouses have replied to reviews in the last 60 days?

With a hat tip to Jason Brown at the Local Search Forum for this example of a memorable owner response to a negative review, I’m sorry to say I have some disappointing news. Only 29 percent of the restaurants ranked best in all 50 states had responded to their reviews in the 60 days leading up to my study. There were tributes of lavish praise, cries for understanding, and seething remarks from diners, but less than one-third of owners appeared to be paying the slightest bit of attention.

On the one hand, this indicates that review responsiveness is not a prerequisite for ranking for our desirable search term, but let’s go a step further. In my view, whatever time restaurant owners may be gaining back via unresponsiveness is utterly offset by what they stand to lose if they make a habit of overlooking complaints. Review neglect has been cited as a possible cause of business closure. As my friends David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal always say:“Your brand is its reviews” and mastering the customer service ecosystem is your surest way to build a restaurant brand that lasts.

For your clients, I would look at any local pack with neglected reviews as representative of a weakness. Algorithmically, your client’s active management of the owner response function could become a strength others lack. But I’ll even go beyond that: Restaurants ignoring how large segments of customer service have moved onto the web are showing a deficit of commitment to the long haul. It’s true that some eateries are famous for thriving despite offhand treatment of patrons, but in the average city, a superior commitment to responsiveness could increase many restaurants’ repeat business, revenue and rankings.

Critic reviews nice but not essential

I’ve always wanted to investigate critic reviews for restaurants, as Google gives them a great deal of screen space in the listings:

How many times were critic reviews cited in the Google listings of America’s best restaurants and how does an establishment earn this type of publicity?

With 57 appearances, Lonely Planet is the leading source of professional reviews for our search term, with Zagat and 10Best making strong showings, too. It’s worth noting that 70/150 businesses I investigated surfaced no critic reviews at all. They’re clearly not a requirement for being considered “best”, but most restaurants will benefit from the press. Unfortunately, there are few options for prompting a professional review. To wit:

Lonely Planet — Founded in 1972, Lonely Planet is a travel guide publisher headquartered in Australia. Critic reviews like this one are written for their website and guidebooks simultaneously. You can submit a business for review consideration via this form, but the company makes no guarantees about inclusion.

Zagat — Founded in 1979, Zagat began as a vehicle for aggregating diner reviews. It was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold off to The Infatuation in 2018. Restaurants can’t request Zagat reviews. Instead, the company conducts its own surveys and selects businesses to be rated and reviewed, like this.

10Best — Owned by USA Today Travel Media Group, 10Best employs local writers/travelers to review restaurants and other destinations. Restaurants cannot request a review.

The Infatuation — Founded in 2009 and headquartered in NY, The Infatuation employs diner-writers to create reviews like this one based on multiple anonymous dining experiences that are then published via their app. The also have a SMS-based restaurant recommendation system. They do not accept request from restaurants hoping to be reviewed.

AFAR — Founded in 2009, AFAR is a travel publication with a website, magazine, and app which publishes reviews like this one. There is no form for requesting a review.

Michelin — Founded as a tire company in 1889 in France, Michelin’s subsidiary ViaMichelin is a digital mapping service that houses the reviews Google is pulling. In my study, Chicago, NYC and San Francisco were the only three cities that yielded Michelin reviews like this one and one article states that only 165 US restaurants have qualified for a coveted star rating. The company offers this guide to dining establishments.

As you can see, the surest way to earn a professional review is to become notable enough on the dining scene to gain the unsolicited notice of a critic.

Google Posts hardly get a seat at best restaurant tables

How many picks for best restaurants are using the Google Posts microblogging feature?

As it turns out, only a meager 16 percent of America’s “best” restaurants in my survey have made any use of Google Posts. In fact, most of the usage I saw wasn’t even current. I had to click the “view previous posts on Google” link to surface past efforts. This statistic is much worse than what Ben Fisher found when he took a broader look at Google Posts utilization and found that 42 percent of local businesses had at least experimented with the feature at some point.

For whatever reason, the eateries in my study are largely neglecting this influential feature, and this knowledge could encompass a competitive advantage for your restaurant clients.

Do you have a restaurateur who is trying to move up the ranks? There is some evidence that devoting a few minutes a week to this form of microblogging could help them get a leg up on lazier competitors.

Google Posts are a natural match for restaurants because they always have something to tout, some appetizing food shot to share, some new menu item to celebrate. As the local SEO on the job, you should be recommending an embrace of this element for its valuable screen real estate in the Google Business Profile, local finder, and maybe even in local packs.

Waiter, there’s some Q&A in my soup

What is the average number of questions top restaurants are receiving on their Google Business Profiles?

Commander’s Palace in New Orleans is absolutely stealing the show in my survey with 56 questions asked via the Q&A feature of the Google Business Profile. Only four restaurants had zero questions. The average number of questions across the board was eight.

As I began looking at the data, I decided not to re-do this earlier study of mine to find out how many questions were actually receiving responses from owners, because I was winding up with the same story. Time and again, answers were being left up to the public, resulting in consumer relations like these:

Takeaway: As I mentioned in a previous post, Greg Gifford found that 40 percent of his clients’ Google Questions were leads. To leave those leads up to the vagaries of the public, including a variety of wags and jokesters, is to leave money on the table. If a potential guest is asking about dietary restrictions, dress codes, gift cards, average prices, parking availability, or ADA compliance, can your restaurant clients really afford to allow a public “maybe” to be the only answer given?

I’d suggest that a dedication to answering questions promptly could increase bookings, cumulatively build the kind of reputation that builds rankings, and possibly even directly impact rankings as a result of being a signal of activity.

A moderate PA & DA gets you into the game

What is the average Page Authority and Domain Authority of restaurants ranking as “best’?

Looking at both the landing page that Google listings are pointing to and the overall authority of each restaurant’s domain, I found that:

The average PA is 36, with a high of 56 and a low of zero being represented by one restaurant with no website link and one restaurant appearing to have no website at all.

The average DA is 41, with a high of 88, one business lacking a website link while actually having a DA of 56 and another one having no apparent website at all. The lowest linked DA I saw was 6.

PA/DA do not = rankings. Within the 50 local packs I surveyed, 32 of them exhibited the #1 restaurant having a lower DA than the establishments sitting at #2 or #3. In one extreme case, a restaurant with a DA of 7 was outranking a website with a DA of 32, and there were the two businesses with the missing website link or missing website. But, for the most part, knowing the range of PA/DA in a pack you are targeting will help you create a baseline for competing.

While pack DA/PA differs significantly from city to city, the average numbers we’ve discovered shouldn’t be out-of-reach for established businesses. If your client’s restaurant is brand new, it’s going to take some serious work to get up market averages, of course.

Local Search Ranking Factors 2019 found that DA was the 9th most important local pack ranking signal, with PA sitting at factor #20. Once you’ve established a range of DA/PA for a local SERP you are trying to move a client up into, your best bet for making improvements will include improving content so that it earns links and powering up your outreach for local links and linktations.

Google’s Local Finder “web results” show where to focus management

Which websites does Google trust enough to cite as references for restaurants?

As it turns out, that trust is limited to a handful of sources:

As the above pie chart shows:

The restaurant’s website was listed as a reference for 99 percent of the candidates in our survey. More proof that you still need a website in 2019, for the very good reason that it feeds data to Google.

Yelp is highly trusted at 76 percent and TripAdvisor is going strong at 43 percent. Your client is likely already aware of the need to manage their reviews on these two platforms. Be sure you’re also checking them for basic data accuracy.

OpenTable and Facebook are each getting a small slice of Google trust, too.

Not shown in the above chart are 13 restaurants that had a web reference from a one-off source, like the Des Moines Register or Dallas Eater. A few very famous establishments, like Brennan’s in New Orleans, surfaced their Wikipedia page, although they didn’t do so consistently. I noticed Wikipedia pages appearing one day as a reference and then disappearing the next day. I was left wondering why.

For me, the core takeaway from this factor is that if Google is highlighting your client’s listing on a given platform as a trusted web result, your agency should go over those pages with a fine-toothed comb, checking for accuracy, activity, and completeness. These are citations Google is telling you are of vital importance.

A few other random ingredients

As I was undertaking this study, there were a few things I noted down but didn’t formally analyze, so consider this as mixed tapas:

Menu implementation is all over the place. While many restaurants are linking directly to their own website via Google’s offered menu link, some are using other services like Single Platform, and far too many have no menu link at all.

Reservation platforms like Open Table are making a strong showing, but many restaurants are drawing a blank on this Google listing field, too. Many, but far from all, of the restaurants designated “best” feature Google’s “reserve a table” function which stems from partnerships with platforms like Open Table and RESY.

Order links are pointing to multiple sources including DoorDash, Postmates, GrubHub, Seamless, and in some cases, the restaurant’s own website (smart!). But, in many cases, no use is being made of this function.

Photos were present for every single best-ranked restaurant. Their quality varied, but they are clearly a “given” in this industry.

Independently-owned restaurants are the clear winners for my search term. With the notable exception of an Olive Garden branch in Parkersburg, WV, and a Cracker Barrel in Bismarck, ND, the top competitors were either single-location or small multi-location brands. For the most part, neither Google nor the dining public associate large chains with “best”.

Honorable mentions go to Bida Manda Laotian Bar & Grill for what looks like a gorgeous and unusual restaurant ranking #1 in Raleigh, NC and to Kermit’s Outlaw Kitchen of Tupelo, MS for the most memorable name in my data set. You can get a lot of creative inspiration from just spending time with restaurant data.

A final garnish to our understanding of this data

I want to note two things as we near the end of our study:

Local rankings emerge from the dynamic scenario of Google’s opinionated algorithms + public opinion and behavior. Doing Local SEO for restaurants means managing a ton of different ingredients: website SEO, link building, review management, GBP signals, etc. We can’t offer clients a generic “formula” for winning across the board. This study has helped us understand national averages so that we can walk into the restaurant space feeling conversant with the industry. In practice, we’ll need to discover the true competitors in each market to shape our strategy for each unique client. And that brings us to some good news.

As I mentioned at the outset of this survey, I specifically avoided proximity as an influence by searching as a traveler to other destinations would. I investigated one local pack for each major city I “visited”. The glad tidings are that, for many of your restaurant clients, there is going to be more than one chance to rank for a search like “best restaurants (city)”. Unless the eatery is in a very small town, Google is going to whip up a variety of local packs based on the searcher’s location. So, that’s something hopeful to share.

What have we learned about restaurant local SEO?

A brief TL;DR you can share easily with your clients:

While the US shows a predictable leaning towards American restaurants, any category can be a contender. So, be bold!

Mid-priced restaurants are considered “best” to a greater degree than the cheapest or most expensive options. Price for your market.

While you’ll likely need at least 100 native Google reviews to break into these packs, well over half of competitors have yet to break the 1,000 mark.

An average 71 percent of competitors are revealing a glaring weakness by neglecting to respond to reviews - so get in there and start embracing customer service to distinguish your restaurant!

A little over half of your competitors have earned critic reviews. If you don’t yet have any, there’s little you can do to earn them beyond becoming well enough known for anonymous professional reviewers to visit you. In the meantime, don’t sweat it.

About three-quarters of your competitors are completely ignoring Google Posts; gain the advantage by getting active.

Potential guests are asking nearly every competitor questions, and so many restaurants are leaving leads on the table by allowing random people to answer. Embrace fast responses to Q&A to stand out from the crowd.

With few exceptions, devotion to authentic link earning efforts can build up your PA/DA to competitive levels.

Pay attention to any platform Google is citing as a resource to be sure the information published there is a complete and accurate.

The current management of other Google Business Profile features like Menus, Reservations and Ordering paints a veritable smorgasbord of providers and a picture of prevalent neglect. If you need to improve visibility, explore every profile field that Google is giving you.

A question for you: Do you market restaurants? Would you be willing to share a cool local SEO tactic with our community? We’d love to hear about your special sauce in the comments below.

Wishing you bon appétit for working in the restaurant local SEO space, with delicious wins ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Read more here - https://moz.com/blog/restaurant-local-seo

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Push Strategies for Getting More Visitors

A push strategy usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.

You aren’t the tweet they want to read, but instead, you’re the tweet ad that they read on their stream. You aren’t the YouTube video they want to watch, but you are the pre-roll ad that they watch to get to the content they were after in the first place.

Pull is analogous to Hansel and Gretel. The sweets lure the children into the house on their own accord. Push is analogous to the Three Little Pigs. The wolf just huffs and puffs and breaks into their homes. You can pull them into your world, or you can push yourself into their world. That’s the main difference between pull and push tactics for getting visitors.

Understanding Lifetime Value of a Customers

The lifetime value of a customer (LTV) is basically the amount of money that you are going to make from a customer throughout their life. If you built an e-commerce app and you profit an average of $100 per customer, per year, and they typically buy for 5 consecutive years before they get bored with your inventory and stop shopping with you, then your LTV is $500.

This is important because another primary difference between pull and push tactics is that push tactics usually cost money. Going back to our example above, if a customer is worth $500 on average then it would be foolish to spend $501 to move someone through your funnel. You would ultimately lose $1 each time you retained a user. Keep this simple idea in mind with all of the tactics covered in this section.

1. Purchase Ads

It may not seem like growth hacking at first glance, but ads are definitely a place to hack the distribution of your product. Sure, if you just purchase ads without a strategy, void of creativity, doing nothing to gain an edge, and ignore the process of multivariate testing, then you will be like everyone else (and it probably wouldn’t be considered growth hacking). But that’s not what we’re going to do. Here are some things you must keep in mind as you approach this push tactic:

Understand Your Ad Platform Options

There are many different ways to purchase ads. Most people assume that there is just Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but there are so many more. You can also purchase ads on LinkedIn, which would make a lot of sense if you’re selling to corporate customers. There are niche ad networks such as Carbon (carbonads.net) or The Deck (decknetwork.net), both of which will allow you to target specific verticals. There is BuySellAds (buysellads.com) which allows you to purchase website banner ads, tweets, newsletter sponsorships, RSS includes, and even spots on mobile apps. There is a relatively new ad network that just focuses solely on email sponsorships called LaunchBit (launchbit.com). There is even a solution called Trada (trada.com) that will crowdsource the purchasing of your paid advertising and only take a cut if they exceed your goals. If you want to focus exclusively on mobile users then you can advertise using Tapjoy (tapjoy.com).

Here is a screenshot of Carbon, a niche ad platform.

Here is a screenshot of BuySellAds, one of the generic ad platforms.

This doesn’t even include the platforms that focus on retargeting. Retargeting gives you the ability to track users to your site and show your ads only to those people as they browse around the internet. Now, even your ads can be pre-qualified. If this sounds magical it’s because it is magical. In this space alone you have a number of platforms like AdRoll, Perfect Audience, and Retargeter.

Here is a screenshot of AdRoll, which was named the #1 advertising company by Inc. Magazine.

There has been an explosion of ad networks over the last few years. Some would argue we have too many ways to purchase ads. This can be a good thing if you are willing to investigate the options to find the ones that meet your needs.

Learn the Technical Details of Your Chosen Platform

Once you’ve found an ad platform that meets your specific needs then it will be imperative that you learn the technical details of their offering. The difference between making money or losing money could easily be the difference between knowing the technicalities or not. The most complicated and advanced platform is probably Google AdWords, and it could easily take months to truly master their product, but most of the other options can be learned in a weekend with a high degree of proficiency.

Buying Ads is a Business Model Competition

It’s always hard to know how much you should spend for a single click, or for a set of impressions, but the answer is actually a factor of your business model. If you are targeting the same audience as another company, but your business model is more efficient and your LTV is higher, then you can afford to pay more for the traffic without going upside down. The best thing you can do to win customers using ads is to have a great business model. It’s almost an unfair advantage because no amount of tips or tricks can overcome this one stronghold. If you can pay twice as much to acquire a customer then you have a very defensible strategy.

Consider the Various Personas of Your Customer

Your customers can probably be reached using various platforms. For instance, they are more than likely on Facebook and LinkedIn. You must then decide which persona they are utilizing when they want a product like yours. When someone is on Facebook they are thinking about friends and family. They are looking at photos of other people’s experiences. When people are on LinkedIn they are thinking about climbing the corporate ladder and how networking with others can help them reach their goals. If your product is for project management in agile environments then I wouldn’t choose Facebook, even though technically you could reach your demographic there. Yes, they would see your ad, but their mindset would be incorrect because you are introducing yourself to them in the wrong place. Always think about the persona your customers exhibit while using your particular product before choosing an ad platform.

Circumvent the Ad Networks When Possible

This tactic may not scale easily, but it is still well worth mentioning. You could go to BuySellAds (or other places) and buy banner ads on a particular blog that your audience reads. However, if you cut out the middleman (BuySellAds) and go directly to the owner of the blog then you can get cheaper rates for two reasons. First, BuySellAds is making a cut of every transaction, so if you go direct that is money that you can recoup without the blog owner losing anything. Second, you are able to negotiate. Very rarely is the lowest price and the advertised price the same thing. You can ask for a lower rate and often close a deal relatively simply.

If You Are Paying Per click Then Qualify Every Click

There are two ways to buy ads. First you can purchase them on a CPM basis, which means you pay for set number of impressions and it doesn’t matter how many clicks they get. Second, you can pay per click and this means that it doesn’t matter how many times your ad appears, you only pay when your ad is clicked. If you are paying per click then you don’t want people to click your ad unless they are seriously interested, because it costs you money every time they do. Luckily, there are things you can do to qualify clicks using the ad itself. Consider putting the price of your product in the copy so that people don’t click unless they are interested in spending money. Also, don’t use emotion to pull them in unless that same emotion will cause them to buy from you. Don’t put a picture of cute cat on your ad, just to get cat lovers to click on it, if your product doesn’t have something to do with cats.

Test Variations of Your Ad

One of the most fundamental lessons of ads is that you have no idea what your audience will respond to. You have to test multiple versions of the copy, multiple versions of the imagery, and then multiple combinations of the copy and imagery together. The numbers will tell you the truth about which ads you should be running, but your intuition or gut is probably not accurate.

2. Promo Swap

One of the easiest, and free, ways to drive traffic to your site is through cross promotions with other companies. If you find a company who is already serving your target demographic, and you wouldn’t be considered a threat to them, then there are plenty of ways that you could coordinate to promote each other. Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm possibilities:

Swap Tweets: Each company sends out a tweet to their followers about the other company.

Swap Facebook Posts: Each company writes a post on their Facebook page about the other company.

Dedicated Email Swap: Each company send out an entire email about the other company.

Sponsored Email Swap: Each company puts a “sponsored by” link in their existing newsletter, linking to the other company.

Ad Space Swap: Each company allows the other company to place a banner ad on their website or blog.

Pre-roll Video Swap: Each company gives away video ad space to the other company.

Giveaway Swap: Each company promotes a giveaway from the other company on their blog.

3. Affiliates

Another way to push people toward your site is by hiring affiliates. This is an arrangement where you pay someone every time they reach a certain goal for you, like getting a visitor to your site, or activating a member. An affiliate might use many of the tactics in this book, but you are paying them to do it instead of worrying about it yourself. Here are a few things to know if you are going to use this tactic:

Think Carefully About the Incentives

If you give an affiliate $100 for every new signup, but there is no clause that says the new signup has to stick around for a certain number of months, then you could find yourself in a situation with misaligned incentives. The affiliate would be rewarded for getting you low quality customers that cancel quickly because it doesn’t affect their profit either way. Create a system where the affiliate only benefits if you benefit.

Don’t Roll Your Own Affiliate Solution

There are a number of products that will allow you to easily get up and running on the technical side of creating an affiliate system, and on the acquisition side of finding affiliates to promote your product. There are products like Commission Junction that will connect you with affiliates, and products like Omnistar that actually track affiliate payouts.

Vet Every New Affiliate Early On

When someone becomes an affiliate for you then they are representing your business to some extent. The tactics they use, the language they employ, and their general style, is a reflection on you. They may not be an employee, but they will be the front of your brand for the people they reach. Choose your affiliates very carefully.

4. Direct Sales

I’m going to be honest, this is a hard one to categorize as a growth hacking tactic, but it is a way to get traffic at the top of the funnel so I would be remiss to completely ignore it. Direct sales teams do not work for every kind of product, but in some cases it is a worthwhile tactic. AppStack, a startup that creates mobile websites in conjunction with mobile ads for local businesses, was able to grow revenues to over 50k a month in a relatively short amount of time, and their primary strategy was direct telephone sales. I use them as an example because it’s hard to imagine a startup using this method, but some of them do, and it actually can work.

Key Takeaways

A push tactic usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.

Push tactics usually cost money.

Since money is involved with push tactics you must understand the lifetime value of your customers (LTV), so that you don’t spend more money on a customer then you’ll make from them.

We covered 4 push tactics: purchase ads, promo swap, affiliates, and direct sales.

http://www.quicksprout.com/push-strategy/

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/push-strategies-for-getting-more.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Get the Word Out With Public Relations

You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out.

But you’re on a budget and can’t afford the $10K a month to hire a fancy agency and put out press releases. That’s fine. You’re better off executing you’re on strategy or hiring a really awesome consultant.

When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising. For cost-conscious businesses, ROI is crucial. Every penny spent on marketing should generate revenue. PR is no different. Here are the steps you should take to form a successful strategy for your business:

1. Let go of the agency allure

The sad truth about PR is that existing process are broken. They’re outdated, costly, and inefficient.

Many agencies are still buying very expensive ‘media lists’ and blasting our press releases and pitches to hundreds of journalists at a time.

It’s hard for the PR industry to track and measure the value of what they do.

Press release blasts entirely miss the mark on target audiences.

To succeed with PR, you need to focus less on the appeal of an agency and focus more heavily to focus on results. Prioritize what you want to achieve, not outdated ‘best practices.’ If you want to get in front of journalists, for instance, you are likely better off forming 1:1 relationships than bombarding them with irrelevant pitches.

2. Know When to Use a Press Release

A press release is worthwhile if your announcement is over-the-top catchy and newsworthy. But here’s the thing — most press releases read like giant sales pitches. If you think that journalists and publishers are going to be attracted to lukewarm content, guess again. They’re not. They don’t care. Their email inboxes fill up with 100s of spam messages again.

We hate to say it but marketers — get your head out of the clouds. The world does not revolve around your business, and journalists could care less about what you have to say.

If your goal is to get targeted placements for your brand, you will be better off cultivating a unique and thoughtful pitch in your area of specialty. A press release won’t cut it. Position your organization as a valuable, reliable, and trustworthy source of information instead.

3. Focus on Building Relationships and Making Connections

The problem with PR is ‘spray and prey’ or ‘broadcast’ mentality. If you shout at journalists with a megaphone, they’re not going to listen.

Above all, journalists care about compelling stories. They want to hear about your founders’ emotional journeys. They want to know what problem your company is solving and what motivates your team to wake up and come to work in the mornings.

Treat journalists like trusted business partners, not eyeballs. Develop a conversation. Let them ask questions.

Strategic Planning Wins the Race

Every so often, you’ll come across startups that generate insane amounts of traction on almost zero budget. You might think that it’s the outcome of luck — most likely, that isn’t the case. The more likely scenario is careful, strategic planning. WIth online media, Hollywood success stories are few and far between. Behind the scenes, marketers are hard at work — building key relationships with key stakeholders.

Karen X Cheng founded Dance in a Year, a platform that helps users learn anything in a year.

Karen learned to dance in a year and videotaped her entire journey. The outcome was an amazing video that went viral on YouTube. In just a few short months, her video has amassed millions of views. She makes the experience of learning to dance look seamlessly easy. She makes the process of making a viral video look pretty darn easy too.

That’s how you know that she put some real muscle behind the process.

First, she posted her video to Facebook and Twitter, as well as social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News. She asked her friends to share the it and tweeted it to established bloggers. She also reached to bloggers who had previously written about viral dance video. Of the channels she pursued, Reddit was the top performer. The video gained attention and made its way to the top of the GetMotivated subreddit page. After day 1, she received 80K views.

Day 2 was discovery day. The bloggers who had seen her video previously began telling her story on sites like Mashable, Jezebel, and the Huffington Post. These blogs were significant traffic drivers to Karen’s video. This coverage amplified her web traffic numbers to 800K views.

The video’s popularity pushed Karen to the YouTube homepage. That chain of events helped take Karen to 1.8 million pageviews on the third day.

Karen also leveraged her video to connect with potential sponsors and stakeholders in her project. These included companies like Lululemon and American Apparel – two organizations that she was happy to support. Some of these companies supported Karen and shared her video on their social networks too.

She also released her video on Tuesday, guessing that on Monday, people are most likely to be catching up on emails from the weekend.

Use Public Relations Tools

The problem with PR is that the supply/demand ratio is completely imbalanced. PR seekers are constantly spamming writers, journalists, and bloggers for attention.

A service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO) can help to alleviate some of this crunch. Using this service, journalists can find sources to interview for upcoming stories. People seeking PR can monitor journalist queries and join the conversation where they’re qualified to contribute.

You can sign up for a simple e-mail digest that looks like this:

Here is what it’s like using HARO as a journalist:

For some queries, they’ll receive 50+ responses and most of the pitches I get are totally irrelevant. They make the journalist jump through hoops to get the information they need.

The thing to know about journalists is that they’re incredibly strapped for time and working under short deadlines.

From a journalist’s perspective, here are some tips for making your HARO query stand out:

Answer the question specified in your pitch. Don’t assume the journalist can hop on a call. Tell they the story you want told upfront — offer to schedule a phone conversation as a follow-up. Send ready-to-quote material instead.

Don’t send a generic pitch. Send a unique, compelling story. Share something that stands out from a typical PR blast.

Stop bombarding the writer. Journalists work on a deadline but do not necessarily know when their work will be published. Don’t bombard journalists with follow-up questions. Don’t harass them on LinkedIn, and don’t aggressively talk them via multiple email addresses. If you don’t hear a response, move on to the next story. Don’t be offended. HARO writers receive a ton of emails, and it’s impossible to respond to each and every one.

Write a really compelling email headline. Instead of just replying to the query, take the time to craft a unique headline that summarizes your story’s value proposition. Remember that there is a human being on the other end of the computer screen. Make it really, really easy to deliver your message, and the reporter will be more likely to open your email message.

Set-up Google Alerts. Make sure that you have Google Alerts set-up for the keywords you’re monitoring about your brand. Especially with HARO, you may not know when a writer will feature your story. Don’t bombard the writer with questions. Run Google Alerts to help you keep your eyes peeled.

Use Tools To Save Time

Save yourself the time and hassle of combing through spreadsheets and sending hundreds of emails. Use tools that have been developed to solve your exact pain point — scale with limited resources.

One example resource is BuzzStream — a CRM (customer relationship management) platform that helps PR professionals build relationships, monitor conversations, and maintain historical records of conversations with PR and media platforms.

Features include:

Automated tools for researching link-building prospects

Resources for identifying campaign opportunities

Team-based tools for building and managing relationships with influencers

The ability to prioritize a human, relationship-based touch

BuzzStream lets you automate mundane tasks like saving information about key contacts and partners. Teams can also collaborate on initiatives and delegate outreach tasks.

Collaborate With Other Business to Boost Your PR

Content marketing means that brands are becoming publishers and building their own audience bases. Companies, like you, are looking to connect with key audiences through PR and distribution.

Team up with fellow-business blogs who are looking to reach the same audiences as your organization. There are two ways to get going — guest post on industry blogs, or invite others to create content for your blog.

Grasshopper, a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs, uses its blog as a platform for giving props to their best customers. The company has a “submit your story” program and will write about their customers who have something awesome to share. For Grasshopper, PR is an invaluable way to say “thanks” to their trusted business partners.

Give Samples of Your Product or Service

One way to get press coverage is to give away trials or samples of your product or service. Reach out to prominent journalists and bloggers, and ask if they would be open to doing a product review. Give them a free trial or sample to try.

Always Say Thank You

When a journalist, blogger, or fellow business writes about you or your company — reach out and say thank you. Offer yourself as a resource for future stories. Position your organization as a company that wants to return the favor and help.

PR is, first and foremost, about building relationships. To the best extent that you can, maintain a personal touch. Take journalists out to dinner as a ‘thank you’ (not a bribe) for writing about you.

Show that you are grateful, and you’ll stand apart from the crowd of people who aren’t. Add value to your industry — don’t extract it. Pay it forward whenever you can. Connection karma, and you never know when something small will materialize into something much, much bigger.

Key Takeaways

PR is an inefficient and frustrating rat race. Cut through the noise by zeroing in on the results you want to achieve.

Treat PR like business development. Build key relationships with journalists.

Put yourself in the shoes of a journalist. Craft meaningful, compelling pitches. Don’t ‘spray and pray’ a salesy advertising message.

Personalize pitches to the journalists’ needs and interest.

Develop a powerful brand story to share.

Give more than you get. Say thanks. Offer to add as much value as you possibly can.

http://www.quicksprout.com/public-relations/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/get-word-out-with-public-relations.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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How to Tell Your Brand’s Story

Human-to-human connections are the heart and soul of business. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with people — your company is solving problems, alleviating pain points, and providing delightful customer experiences. Revenue is something that happens as a byproduct of a sound business model and a positive customer experience.

Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. It’s an age-old concept that brings people together and keeps them engaged. It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re based or how much funding your startup has.

Good stories give big voices to small ventures. That’s why it’s mission-critical that companies take the time up front to fully develop their approaches to storytelling.

Storytelling and marketing go hand-in-hand. Just think about it. Whether you’re producing infographics, writing copy for a Facebook ad, or writing a free online guide (like this one), you need to capture your audience’s attention.

On a daily basis, consumers (yourself included) face advertising overload. Marketers are constantly competing for their prospects’ and customers’ attention. More likely than not, your brand will be buried under spammy advertising messages.

How can you make your brand stand out? Storytelling.

Chapter 3 is an all-inclusive guide that explains why your brand should prioritize storytelling and how your organization should get started. This is not fluffy stuff, either. Storytelling is a powerful and actionable marketing technique. Convinced? Let’s get to it.

What is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is:

The reason why your company came to be

What motivates your team to wake up and come to work everyday

How your product came to be

What types of customers find value in working with your brand and why

A transparent view into the people behind the company

A relationship-building tool

More subtle than you realize

A concept that underscores your entire web presence

Something that your entire team, at organizational levels, embraces

A look into who you are as a company

Direct

Brand storytelling is NOT:

A long-winded, 5-paragraph essay about your company

A blog post

Something isolated

A fragmented view into your company

Something reserved for the marketing team only

A PR stunt

A viral video

A tool to manipulate customers and prospects

Boring

Artsy

Contrary to popular belief, brand storytelling is not about your company. It’s about your customers and the value that they get when engaging with your product or service. The most powerful brand stories are the ones that prioritize customers as the stars. Think of your company as a supporting character.

Oftentimes, marketers get hung up on this concept. They’re stressed about communicating the perfect message and confused about where this initiative should be housed within your business.

Should you hire a consultant? Should you loop in your company’s EVP of corporate communications? And what if you’re an engineer? Does that mean you’re doomed?

Don’t overthink this process. Storytelling is something that we do naturally. More often than not, we don’t even realize that we’re doing it.

The problem is, online content is difficult to write. Stories become lost in translation. The human interest behind our brands will fall through the cracks.

And you feel stuck — at a loss for words to describe what you do and why you matter to your customers.

So why not let your customers tell your story for you?

That’s what Clarity did. The company provides a marketplace for advice seekers and experts to connect and share business advice. The company recently launched a series of stories from actual customers. If you’re wondering how Clarity can help grow your business, take a lesson from the leaders who actually use it.

It’s not just startups that make use of this powerful approach. Enterprise CRM Salesforce hosts customer success videos on its Pinterest page.

Brand storytelling is more than what you write on your webpage to your customers. It’s more than your blog posts and about pages. It’s how you communicate your messaging. It’s your values. Your brand’s stories are values are infused in every piece of copy, customer service answer,

Okay, so you’re convinced. But what what the heck does it all mean? Storytelling still feels tough. Web copy and advertising messaging are still challenging to write. Here’s what you need to do.

Forget About Marketing

This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s the key to successful marketing. Stop thinking like a marketer. Stop trying to sell your product, and instead, focus on developing human interest. Answer the question of why people should care about what your company has to say.

That means being persuasive and appealing to emotion.

Whatever you do, don’t be boring. Do not let the words on your page hide the personalities behind your organization.

Share more than what you sell. Share your strengths, weaknesses, and how you arrived at where you are today. One way to do this is by participating in the storytelling ecosystem. Just as you’re looking for customer testimonials and case studies, make sure to pay it forward by offering to do case studies for other companies.

Be Conversational

Authenticity is crucial to copywriting. If you’re overly formal or on guard, you’ll lose trust with your audience. And that’s because consumers can sense disingenuous messaging from miles away. From awkward stock photos with fake customers to false promises, empty messaging can only hurt your brand.

Be real instead. Be human.

Pretend that you’re talking to a new friend over drinks or coffee — not giving an academic presentation in 1862. If you talk down your customers and prospects (or show any indication of lack of respect), they’re going to stop listening immediately.

Don’t dwell over whether or not you’re using perfect grammar. You can always hire a copywriter for that. Stop worrying about the occasional misplaced commas. Focus on developing your messaging instead.

Conversational writing also means keeping it short. Write what you want to say. Get it all on paper. Then cut it. And cut it again. Stop trapping yourself into the mentality that you need a minimum word count to convey information effectively.

Write what you feel like writing — with the exception that you can’t let your stories get too long and unwieldy. Too much writing on a blog post or webpage will make your readers feel distracted or lost. Say what you need to say in as few words as possible. There’s no need to try to sound smart. If you build a great product, your customers and prospects will perceive your company as incredibly smart.

Craft Your Message Architecture

Brand storytelling is more subtle than what your company is saying. As we mentioned earlier, the ‘how’ matters just as much. Take a lesson from Pinterest’s lead content strategist, Tiffani Jones Brown. She and her five-person team are responsible for the voice, tone, user interface copy, grammar conventions, and pinner education on the site.

That’s right. It takes five people to get Pinterest’s public-facing messaging just right. This fact may seem surprising, given that some companies have zero resources devoted to getting their messaging just right.

Your company’s message architecture is far from coincidental. It takes careful strategic planning to position your strategic planning.

Don’t expect good stories to appear out of thin air. You need to focus on getting your messaging just right. You need to craft your company’s message architecture to underscore all of your brand communications. Yes, this is a real thing. And it looks a little something like this:

This table represents the steps that Speak2Leads has taken, conceptually, to connect with the company’s core audience — sales team leaders and small business owners who are looking to increase the speed of connecting to new leads. The concept is simple — when you wait too long to connect with an interested prospect, your company risks losing his or her business.

But here’s the problem. When sales teams are too aggressive, they risk driving customers away. That’s why Speak2Leads has positioned its company and product as one that boosts human-to-human connections. Selling is not about annoying your customers and prospects. It’s about being the first to respond and building a superior connection.

Before articulating your company’s brand persona, you need a thorough outline of your message architecture.

So what does that mean?

A message architecture, according to Bloomstein, is a way to transform vague goals into substantive concepts with context and priority. Your company’s message architecture will look a little something like this:

Speak2Leads incorporates these values in all of the company’s written material from help center documentation to email marketing initiatives and blog posts. The goal is to keep communication standard across its entire team and to maintain that consistency as the organization begins to scale. That’s why the company defined its message architecture as early on as possible.

The company’s story as a technology, partnerships, and customer-service minded organization comes through in absolutely everything on the website. Even though the company’s blog and help center, for instance, are managed by two different people — a customer service lead and marketing consultant, the same brand story will always shine through. Speak2Leads is a company that prioritizes human interest and is committed to solving a real problem in sales.

The company’s blog:

The company’s customer-facing knowledge center:

So how do you get started in choosing the keywords to place in your message architecture?

Brand strategists leverage a technique called a card sorting exercise.

Create a list of keywords relevant to your brand. These could be keywords that you customers have said about your company as well as descriptions chosen by your own employees.

Transcribe these keywords onto note cards.

As a group, sort through the note cards to determine which words are most applicable to your band. Separate these words from the rest.

Go through what’s left and rank the keywords in order of priority to your brand. Which are most relevant and which aren’t? Assemble these words into sentences that describe your brand.

Piece together your message architecture.

Is possible, try to get your customers involved in this process. One way is to interview them for customer case studies. What words and expressions are they using to describe your brand? The more interviews and service reviews you conduct, the more patterns you’ll start to see.

Let your customers determine your brand messaging. Let them define the voice behind your company.

Unify Your On-site and Off-site Presence

Your company’s story, message architecture, and brand identity should follow your team members everywhere from on-site blog posts to PR opportunities in major media channels. You need to keep your company’s identity as unified and consistent as possible. As we mentioned earlier, the image you share with the world should be a genuine, authentic, and transparent view into your organization.

Choose Your Words Wisely

What you say is just as important as how you say it. Make sure you’re using the tone, voice, and communication style that your audiences value most.

How do you know what this should be and what words you should choose?

Jump back to chapter 1, where we walk through the art meets science of knowing your audience.

If you’re speaking to an audience of millennials, for instance, they tend to embrace a casual, conversational tone and style — more so than an audience of baby boomers would.

Again, unless you were a college English major (like Ritika was), the concepts of voice, tone, and style are really vague. How the heck do you put it all on paper?

What you need is a styleguide to provide instructions for all of your on-site and off-site brand communications. Get started by completing the following template:

Website goal: Jot some notes about what your website visitors should hope to accomplish when visiting your website.

Audience: Who do you expect to be engaging with these specific website sections?

Core concepts to be reinforced: What do you want your audiences to feel after visiting this section of your website or piece of writing?

Tone: What emotions should come across after somebody reads this story or section of your website?

Perspective: Do you want your writers to communicate in the first, second, or third person? Who is telling the story?

Voice: Should the language be conversational, formal, or somewhere in between?

Your brand styleguide and message architecture can be custom-tailored to any form of multimedia, beyond writing. Whether you’re producing infographics, brand videos, e-books, or blog posts, your plans will ensure that your messaging is consistent across mediums. Writing is only one form of online communication. Make sure that you invest the time in energy in creating structure behind everything that you produce online.

Key Takeways

Human-to-human connections are the heart of marketing. Brand storytelling is a technique that can reinforce these bonds.

Stories can give your brand a powerful voice, regardless of whether you’re running an enterprise organization, small business, or startup.

Storytelling is medium-agnostic. Tell your story through blog posts, customer help centers, about pages, videos, or infographics.

You need to formalize your brand story to build connections both on and off your site, especially if your company is actively building a PR strategy.

Storytelling is more than what you say explicitly. It’s how you communicate your message and how you connect with your target audiences.

Storytelling concepts are vague, abstract, and tough to plan. Rely on card sorting exercises, message architecture maps, and brand styleguides to articulate your strategy and scale it across teams.

Brand stories are cross-functional commitments that should guide your entire organization. Your sales team, engineers, product managers, executives, and entry-level professionals should all have a hand in articulating your brand’s messaging.

Who defines your brand? Your customers. Study and truly understand what they’re saying about you. Identify patterns, and hold these concepts as close to your heart as possible.

http://www.quicksprout.com/brand-story/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-tell-your-brands-story.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Drive Sales With Affiliate Marketing

Connections are the heart of online marketing. Affiliate programs take that concept to the next level.

Let’s say that you’re running a company that specializes in shoes. Your customer base knows that you’re a shoe expert but also values your input on other high quality products — like handbags. Maybe your customers have asked you about handbags, and you find yourself recommending the same options over and over again. As a shoe vendor, you’re acting as a marketer for the handbag company.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finalize the deal?

With affiliate marketing, you can.

Company A directs Customer to Company B where the transaction occurs.

Company A then earns a commission from the transaction on Company B.

Affiliate Marketing Quick Facts

The earliest days of affiliate marketing stem back to the 1990s, around the time that Amazon launched its Associates Program (which still exists).

Affiliate marketing as grown quickly since its inception. One report points out that the worldwide affiliate marketing industry is worth $6.5 billion across sectors including retail, personal finance, gaming, gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation.

Affiliate programs are both consumer-based and business-to-business oriented.

Most affiliate programs follow a revenue sharing or pay per sale model. A small proportion follow cost-per-action. CPC and CPM payment methods are much more rare. Typically, commissions are fixed up-front, as part of a standard program.

Participants in the affiliate marketing ecosystem are typically known as “publishers” or “advertisers/merchants.” An advertiser/merchant is the provider of the offer. A publisher promotes the offer. A publisher can also be an advertiser — they are not mutually exclusive roles.

Here is an example of affiliate offers on a mom blog. Here, Amazon is the advertiser/merchant, and 3boysandadog.com is the publisher:

Some advertisers offer programs in tiers. Once publishers reach certain thresholds, they can begin to earn higher commission rates.

Affiliate programs are appealing to advertisers because there is no loss involved. It’s entirely based on “pay per performance.” In other words, advertisers pay for incremental sales, only.

What businesses cannot do is rely on its affiliate program to replace its sales stream. Advertisers need to actively build their own sales and marketing arms. Publishers are typically third parties and are independent entities.

Advertisers have limited ability to control publishers. If they don’t sell? Tough. Publishers might be open to hearing an advertiser’s suggestions, but ultimately, the two entities are independent from one another.

The Most Popular Affiliate Programs

Merchants can host their own affiliate programs or distribute offers through one or more established networks. An affiliate network is, essentially, a matchmaking service between merchants and publishers. Affiliate networks monetize by taking a portion of the commission.

The most popular programs are:

Amazon Associates: Bloggers, large content sites, or large networks can choose products to market directly to their customers.

Commission Junction: This affiliate network works primarily with large consumer brands to distribute their offers.Publishers who wish to join the network can choose from pay-per-call, lead generation, and even international solutions.

ShareASale: This affiliate network features opportunities for B2B.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work for B2B?

ffiliate marketing can be a challenge for the B2B landscape, but success is entirely possible. For a publisher to succeed in driving sales, web traffic is key — typically, a publisher will need to generate significant traffic to generate any significant return.

If you’re a high-traffic publisher, it can be worthwhile to feature B2B offers, and revenue potential tends to be much higher, even though there are fewer sales (there are higher dollar-value transactions).

B2B advertisers may find success in working with publishers who run B2B blogs. Conversely, merchants may find success in promoting complementary products and services that are of interest to its customer base.

Check out some of Heidi Cohen’s offers, for instance. She runs a blog about marketing, so she’s promoting offers that her audience would care about — links to free guide and whitepaper downloads as well as the opportunity to sign up for a conference.

If you run a B2B blog, and you want to promote affiliate deals (but you don’t want to sell), check out RevResponse. This affiliate network will pay you to promote free resources to your readers. You’ll be paid between $1.50 and $20 per download. The value to the advertiser is that they will be able to connect with your audience. If you run a content marketing program, you can use this platform to reach audiences outside of your existing visitors.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for You as an Advertiser?

The first step is not to go out and research potential affiliate networks.

To answer this question, you need to think about the following questions:

What products or services would you advertise on an affiliate network?

Who would be potential publishers?

What would you expect the yield from these services + publishers to be?

These questions will help you forecast your revenue potential. Is the market big enough for you to pursue? If not, you should invest your limited time and resources into higher yield marketing opportunities.

An important step is to get out and talk to prospective publishers and business partners. Do they participate in affiliate programs already? What has the yield been in terms of performance? What are the typical revshares that ad networks are taking? What are typical conversion rates? What would be the incentive for publishers and business partners to promote your products and services?

Real data and partner insights can help you better understand the role of affiliate marketing in helping you meet your market demand.

After completing the exercises above, you will have determined whether affiliate marketing is right for you. Once you’ve come to an answer of “yes,” you need to make the following decision:

Should you join an existing affiliate network or create your own?

The answer to that question will stem from a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Is there an existing affiliate network that aligns with your company’s products and services?

What is this affiliate marketing company’s track record? Do you feel confident in the company’s ability to deliver results?

How much time would it realistically take for you to build an affiliate network from scratch? Do you have someone on your team to oversee this initiative by forming relationships with publishers, handling disputes, troubleshooting technical problems, and making sure that payments are sent on time? Do the anticipated returns justify the invested time?

If an affiliate network doesn’t exist for what you need and you think that the ROI is worth it, you should definitely go and launch your own. But keep in mind that you’ll need to devote resources to get this up, running, and profitable.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for You as a Publisher?

If your organization is looking to promote affiliate deals, you need to ask yourself these key questions:

Is this a viable revenue opportunity?

Does promoting affiliate offers align with user experience goals?

If the benefits outweigh the costs, the first step is to run a small test on a (random and representative) cross-section of your web traffic. Do your users convert? Are affiliate deals complementing or creating a distraction from your core business lines?

If you see a tangible return on your affiliate deals, you can gradually scale up your test by increasing the percent of your web traffic that sees it.

You have a range of options for hosting affiliate deals on your website. You might want to run these on the sidebar of your blog (like Heidi Cohen) or at the bottom of a piece of content (if you’re a mom blogger like 3 Boys and a Dog. If you’re running a B2B organization, you could have a portion of your site devoted to partner offers).Test different placements of your affiliate offers rather than confining them to one area of your website.

Be Generous

Treat your affiliates are your most valuable partners, and they’ll jump to do business with you.

Around 2007, entrepreneur Mike Geary from The Truth about Abs joined Clickbank’s affiliate program. He noticed that most merchants in the network were paying between 35% and 50% to their affiliates. Because he was selling a digital product, he had leeway to be more flexible with payouts — he didn’t have much overhead.

This sounds crazy and over-the-top generous. It was. But here’s what happened.

Hundreds of affiliates noticed Geary’s payout and switched their traffic to point to his website. Out of more than 10,000 products being sold on Clickbank, Mike’s product shot up to being the top sold, which drove even more attention to his company.

According to Mike, his revenue is around $1M per month.

Case Study: CrazyForBargains.com

Here is a great case study from Practical Ecommerce and CrazyForBargains, a family-owned retailer of high-quality sleepwear. The company has been around for more than 10 years — Melissa Canepa Murphy launched their e-business in 2002.

In 2004, Murphy launched an affiliate marketing program on the ShareASale platform with the goal of developing a diversified revenue stream for her business. At the time, the majority of her web traffic was coming in through search engines. As of 2012, the company still relies on search engines, but they have developed additional (healthy) revenue streams.

Murphy has grown the affiliate channel to represent 11 percent of her overall revenue. She hopes that she will be able to grow that number to 20 percent. What she likes most about the affiliate channel is that it is performance based — instead of paying for ad placements and hoping that they work, she pays a 12 percent commission on actual sales generated. The program tracks sales based on a 365-day cookie, which means that affiliates earn commissions on repeat purchases that occur within one year of the initial referral.

At the beginning, Murphy created her own affiliate program in house. She found that this process was a major time sink — she had to take the time to constantly monitor her program and remember to pay affiliates regularly. She made the jump on an affiliate network, where she could immediately access tracking, reporting, and payment systems (as well as instant access to affiliates who were more-than-ready to help sell her products).

In 2009, she also hired an outsourced program manager to run the affiliate program — she pays him between $2,500 and $5,000 per month. The variance depends on whether or not there are performance incentives in place and whether or not there is a need for additional services like design and development.

Maintain a Personal Touch

Interpersonal relationships have been crucial to the success of Murphy’s program. She frequently consults with top affiliates directly to keep communication open. She’ll also adjust her product mix and merchandising to increase conversion rates to drive mutual profitability and long-term value. CrazyForBargains takes these key steps to stay active in the affiliate community:

Participate in forums

Purchase PPC advertising

Attend marketing conferences

Actively recruit new affiliates

Remember that there’s a person on the other side of the computer screen. Form lasting, business-to-business relationships. Hop on the phone. Meet your top affiliates over the phone. Strategize together.

Case Study: Groupon

Until 2009, Groupon was considered to be a significant failure. But at the end of 2010, their traffic exploded. There was even speculation that Google would buy Groupon for $5 billion dollars.

Groupon eventually went on to float the largest IPO from a web company since Google.

What sparked this growth? Two words: affiliate marketing.

One important part of Groupon’s strategy was to cut out middlemen — affiliate networks that took huge cuts from the revenues generated. Instead, Groupon focused on creating direct relationships with affiliates.

Groupon would then sync up with influential publishers. Keep in mind that thanks to social media, you don’t need to be a publisher to have a following — you can promote affiliate deals to your social media network.

Groupon knew that they needed to make life easy for affiliates, so they pre-made banner ads for partners to use. Each day, affiliates would automatically receive new deals — all tied to a single affiliate ID. This strategy fueled Groupon’s growth.

Groupon went out and built affiliate relationships from the ground up. Here’s what you should learn about building your own.

Lessons learned from Groupon:

Reach out to bloggers: Approach individual bloggers who are aligned with your product and industry and ask if they would be interested in being an affiliate. Don’t just target big-name bloggers. Find influencers who support your brand and have a strong connection with your audience.

Connect with social media influencers: Hunt down mid-to-small range social media enthusiasts who may be interested in joining your program.

Partner with publishers: Ask key publishers and media outlets if they would be interested in reviewing your products and services. Keep in mind that most big sites won’t want to write about your affiliate program or deal. You’ll likely find better luck with smaller publishers.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Here are the steps that you need to take to launch your own affiliate program:

1. Look at your current audience The key to getting your affiliate program off the ground is to find the right affiliate for your company. Start by looking at your blog readers, email subscribers, and social media followers. Some of these folks are current, previous, or future customers.

2. Define how you will market your affiliate program If you want a successful affiliate program, you will need to market it outside of your existing user base. Affiliates won’t just randomly find you.

You need to actively recruit them by hunting down bloggers and website owners who could promote your product or service. Also look for publishers with email lists.

Another option is to go through networks and have them recruit affiliates for you.

There’s no reason why you can’t start your own affiliate network while participating in a third party’s. When you’re getting started, do a bit of both.

3. Focus on acquiring traffic Traffic acquisition is critical to the success of your affiliate program. Help your affiliates drive more traffic, and most importantly diversify your traffic so that you’re not relying on a single affiliate for your business. Use paid traffic sources and build relationships with bloggers.

4. Announce the program Take the time to make sure that your community knows about your affiliate program. Publicize your affiliate program on directories like OfferVault, PointClickTrack or 5 Star Affiliate Programs and relevant forums.

5. Measure results If you want to grow something, you need to measure it. Use your analytics tools to figure out what is and isn’t working.

Key Takeaways on Affiliate Marketing

Unlike most marketing channels, you only pay per transaction with affiliate marketing. In other words, you only spend money when you make money. This strategy is important for small businesses that have limited resources to spend on advertising.

It’s easy for anyone to be an affiliate — even if you don’t have a website. You can rely on your social media channels, entirely.

If you make things hard for your affiliates, no one will want to work with you. Make the process as seamless as possible.

Treat your affiliates as trusted business partners and advisors. Work with them towards a common goal — to amplify sales for your product.

http://www.quicksprout.com/affiliate-marketing/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/drive-sales-with-affiliate-marketing.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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AdsCrisp Review : Bonus

Have you ever wanted to create a video ad for a product but didn’t know where to start? You spent 6 hours thinking of an idea for the video, spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to exactly use the software until you finally gave up and then looked the job up on some freelancer website, only to realise that they charge over $200 just for a video ad, not only that but the video isn’t even proven to convert in the market. If you don’t go the freelancer route then the only option you have left is buying an expensive video editing software and trying to make the video ad by yourself. Now that isn’t really any worse than hiring a freelancer because you’ll still be wasting a ton of money on the actual software and the time that you will have wasted cannot even be measured. It takes months for people to master a video editing software because they’re very tough and I never could get myself to learn one though. Worst case scenario, you spend $200+ on getting the video made not including the time you’ve wasted going back and forth with the freelancer only to create an average video that doesn’t get you any sales. Wasn’t that the whole point of running a video ad? To boost your sales? How do I know all this?... Because I’ve been in your shoes, looking for the perfect software to make a video ad.

There are a bunch of softwares out there that promise a lot of things, but none of them are able to deliver on those promises. I know that because I’ve bought a few of them and I don’t want you to make the same mistakes. Most of them have the same features that are pretty much useless:

They have crappy templates that don’t really convert well in the market.

They only are able to make videos for specific social media platforms and they don’t even cover all the different type of placements on one platform.

They have a very limited library of resources and they prompt you to pay more if you need more resources. (One time payment just wasn’t enough, was it?)

So I went on a quest, to look for a software that would cater to all my needs and let me create a video ad without the hassle. And finally I did find another quality option. A software that would let me make video ads that actually convert and the interface is so user friendly that I absolutely love it! It’s called AdsCrisp Review and it really changed the way I looked at video ads. They don’t really scare me anymore and I’m just able to pump out high-quality videos in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. You can visit this link if you prefer to see the software in action to learn more or keep reading…

What is AdsCrisp?

AdsCrisp basically is a cloud-based software that allows you to make video ads in a very simplified way and very fast. I haven’t come across any other software that actually delivers on what it promises. This software not only delivers what is promised, it over delivers… Let me explain: The templates that are used in the software are not only eye-catching but they’ve also been tested by the AdsCrisp team. They’ve only been added to the software if they’re PROVEN-TO-CONVERT.

youtube

They cover all the major social media platforms, 7 in total:

Facebook

Instagram

Snapchat

Twitter

Youtube

Read more details in our AdsCrisp Review and get a huge AdsCrisp Bonus package - https://review-and-bonus.net/adscrisp-review-bonus Have you ever had a problem with setting the aspect ratio of your video to fit the type of ad that you want to run?... Well, AdsCrisp has a solution for that too. It covers a total of 37 ad placement options. I’ve never seen another software offer this type of detailed ad creation options, it’s like the developers thought of every problem that the user could ever face and put in a feature that would completely solve it. Here are just some of the features that AdsCrisp has to offer :

Easy interface, create videos in about 3 clicks.

Pick from their library of over 1.6 million stock images

100+ music files for you to use in your videos

Videos are rendered in 60 seconds (when was the last time you did this?)

Upload your own music or voice-over in your videos

Publish your creations directly to social media

Cloud-Based (never go through the struggle of having to look for your files)

And a lot more…

Is AdsCrisp worth the money?

I honestly think that AdsCrisp is the BEST video ad creation suite that has been created up until now, especially for it’s one-time price of $47. But my opinion might be biased because it has provided a ton of results for me and has allowed me to generate A LOT of revenue. I personally would love each one of you to check this out if you’re thinking about creating your own video ads. If you are new to the concept of video ads then I think that you should seriously do some deeper research into it because that’s going to be the future of internet marketing in 1 or 2 years for sure. Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/adscrisp-review-bonus.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Forex Millennium Reviews - Live Results

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Forex Millennium Reviews And Live Results - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETjQy3fFMPM Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/forex-millennium-reviews-live-results.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Big Slide Review | Big Slide Bonus

Big Slide - what is it? Big Slides is a new multipurpose toolkit packed with 1000 over Multipurpose Gorgeous Fully Animated Slides which utilize the Power of PowerPoint that you can twist, mix and match to create Unlimited Unique Combinations of Presentations, Videos, Sale Pitch, Sales Presentation, Gorgeous Webinar, Real Estate Presentation, Product Presentation and Many More. This post was first seen on https://review-and-bonus.net/big-slide-review-bonus Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/big-slide-review-big-slide-bonus.html

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

The final episode in our six-part One-Hour Guide to SEO series deals with a topic that's a perennial favorite among SEOs: link building. Today, learn why links are important to both SEO and to Google, how Google likely measures the value of links, and a few key ways to begin earning your own.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. We are back with our final part in the One-Hour Guide to SEO, and this week talking about why links matter to search engines, how you can earn links, and things to consider when doing link building.

Why are links important to SEO?

So we've discussed sort of how search engines rank pages based on the value they provide to users. We've talked about how they consider keyword use and relevant topics and content on the page. But search engines also have this tool of being able to look at all of the links across the web and how they link to other pages, how they point between pages.

So it turns out that Google had this insight early on that what other people say about you is more important, at least to them, than what you say about yourself. So you may say, "I am the best resource on the web for learning about web marketing." But it turns out Google is not going to believe you unless many other sources, that they also trust, say the same thing. Google's big innovation, back in 1997 and 1998, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page came out with their search engine, Google, was PageRank, this idea that by looking at all the links that point to all the pages on the internet and then sort of doing this recursive process of seeing which are the most important and most linked to pages, they could give each page on the web a weight, an amount of PageRank.

Then those pages that had a lot of PageRank, because many people linked to them or many powerful people linked to them, would then pass more weight on when they linked. That understanding of the web is still in place today. It's still a way that Google thinks about links. They've almost certainly moved on from the very simplistic PageRank formula that came out in the late '90s, but that thinking underlies everything they're doing.

How does Google measure the value of links?

Today, Google measures the value of links in many very sophisticated ways, which I'm not going to try and get into, and they're not public about most of these anyway. But there is a lot of intelligence that we have about how they think about links, including things like more important, more authoritative, more well-linked-to pages are going to pass more weight when they link.

A.) More important, authoritative, well-linked-to pages pass more weight when they link

That's true of both individual URLs, an individual page, and websites, a whole website. So for example, if a page on The New York Times links to yoursite.com, that is almost certainly going to be vastly more powerful and influential in moving your rankings or moving your ability to rank in the future than if randstinysite.info — which I haven't yet registered, but I'll get on that — links to yoursite.com.

This weighting, this understanding of there are powerful and important and authoritative websites, and then there are less powerful and important and authoritative websites, and it tends to be the case that more powerful ones tend to provide more ranking value is why so many SEOs and marketers use metrics like Moz's domain authority or some of the metrics from Moz's competitors out in the software space to try and intuit how powerful, how influential will this link be if this domain points to me.

B.) Diversity of domains, rate of link growth, and editorial nature of links ALL matter

So the different kinds of domains and the rate of link growth and the editorial nature of those links all matter. So, for example, if I get many new links from many new websites that have never linked to me before and they are editorially given, meaning I haven't spammed to place them, I haven't paid to place them, they were granted to me because of interesting things that I did or because those sites wanted to editorially endorse my work or my resources, and I do that over time in greater quantities and at a greater rate of acceleration than my competitors, I am likely to outrank them for the words and phrases related to those topics, assuming that all the other smart SEO things that we've talked about in this One-Hour Guide have also been done.

C.) HTML-readable links that don't have rel="nofollow" and contain relevant anchor text on indexable pages pass link benefit

HTML readable links, meaning as a simple text browser browses the web or a simple bot, like Googlebot, which can be much more complex as we talked about in the technical SEO thing, but not necessarily all the time, those HTML readable links that don't have the rel="nofollow" parameter, which is something that you can append to links to say I don't editorially endorse this, and many, many websites do.

If you post a link to Twitter or to Facebook or to LinkedIn or to YouTube, they're going to carry this rel="nofollow,"saying I, YouTube, don't editorially endorse this website that this random user has uploaded a video about. Okay. Well, it's hard to get a link from YouTube. And it contains relevant anchor text on an indexable page, one that Google can actually browse and see, that is going to provide the maximum link benefit.

So a href="https://yoursite.com" great tool for audience intelligence, that would be the ideal link for my new startup, for example, which is SparkToro, because we do audience intelligence and someone saying we're a tool is perfect. This is a link that Google can read, and it provides this information about what we do.

It says great tool for audience intelligence. Awesome. That is powerful anchor text that will help us rank for those words and phrases. There are loads more. There are things like which pages linked to and which pages linked from. There are spam characteristics and trustworthiness of the sources. Alt attributes, when they're used in image tags, serve as the anchor text for the link, if the image is a link.

There's the relationship, the topical relationship of the linking page and linking site. There's text surrounding the link, which I think some tools out there offer you information about. There's location on the page. All of this stuff is used by Google and hundreds more factors to weight links. The important part for us, when we think about links, is generally speaking if you cover your bases here, it's indexable, carries good anchor text, it's from diverse domains, it's at a good pace, it is editorially given in nature, and it's from important, authoritative, and well linked to sites, you're going to be golden 99% of the time.

Are links still important to Google?

Many folks I think ask wisely, "Are links still that important to Google? It seems like the search engine has grown in its understanding of the web and its capacities." Well, there is some pretty solid evidence that links are still very powerful. I think the two most compelling to me are, one, the correlation of link metrics over time.

So like Google, Moz itself produces an index of the web. It is billions and billions of pages. I think it's actually trillions of pages, trillions of links across hundreds of billions of pages. Moz produces metrics like number of linking root domains to any given domain on the web or any given page on the web.

Moz has a metric called Domain Authority or DA, which sort of tries to best replicate or best correlate to Google's own rankings. So metrics like these, over time, have been shockingly stable. If it were the case someday that Google demoted the value of links in their ranking systems, basically said links are not worth that much, you would expect to see a rapid drop.

But from 2007 to 2019, we've never really seen that. It's fluctuated. Mostly it fluctuates based on the size of the link index. So for many years Ahrefs and Majestic were bigger link indices than Moz. They had better link data, and their metrics were better correlated.

Now Moz, since 2018, is much bigger and has higher correlation than they do. So the various tools are sort of warring with each other, trying to get better and better for their customers. You can see those correlations with Google pretty high, pretty standard, especially for a system that supposedly contains hundreds, if not thousands of elements.

When you see a correlation of 0.25 or 0.3 with one number, linking root domains or page authority or something like that, that's pretty surprising. The second one is that many SEOs will observe this, and I think this is why so many SEO firms and companies pitch their clients this way, which is the number of new, high quality, editorially given linking root domains, linking domains, so The New York Times linked to me, and now The Washington Post linked to me and now wired.com linked to me, these high-quality, different domains, that correlates very nicely with ranking positions.

So if you are ranking number 12 for a keyword phrase and suddenly that page generates many new links from high-quality sources, you can expect to see rapid movement up toward page one, position one, two, or three, and this is very frequent.

How do I get links?

Obviously, this is not alone, but very common. So I think the next reasonable question to ask is, "Okay, Rand, you've convinced me. Links are important. How do I get some?" Glad you asked. There are an infinite number of ways to earn new links, and I will not be able to represent them here. But professional SEOs and professional web marketers often use tactics that fall under a few buckets, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list, but can give you some starting points.

1. Content & outreach

The first one is content and outreach. Essentially, the marketer finds a resource that they could produce, that is relevant to their business, what they provide for customers, data that they have, interesting insights that they have, and they produce that resource knowing that there are people and publications out there that are likely to want to link to it once it exists.

Then they let those people and publications know. This is essentially how press and PR work. This is how a lot of content building and link outreach work. You produce the content itself, the resource, whatever it is, the tool, the dataset, the report, and then you message the people and publications who are likely to want to cover it or link to it or talk about it. That process is tried-and-true. It has worked very well for many, many marketers.

2. Link reclamation

Second is link reclamation. So this is essentially the process of saying, "Gosh, there are websites out there that used to link to me, that stopped linking." The link broke. The link points to a 404, a page that no longer loads on my website.

The link was supposed to be a link, but they didn't include the link. They said SparkToro, but they forgot to actually point to the SparkToro website. I should drop them a line. Maybe I'll tweet at them, at the reporter who wrote about it and be like, "Hey, you forgot the link." Those types of link reclamation processes can be very effective as well.

They're often some of the easiest, lowest hanging fruit in the link building world.

3. Directories, resource pages, groups, events, etc.

Directories, resource pages, groups, events, things that you can join and participate in, both online or online and offline, so long as they have a website, often link to your site. The process is simply joining or submitting or sponsoring or what have you.

Most of the time, for example, when I get invited to speak at an event, they will take my biography, a short, three-sentence blurb, that includes a link to my website and what I do, and they will put it on their site. So pitching to speak at events is a way to get included in these groups. I started Moz with my mom, Gillian Muessig, and Moz has forever been a woman-owned business, and so there are women-owned business directories.

I don't think we actually did this, but we could easily go, "Hey, you should include Moz as a woman-owned business.We should be part of your directory here in Seattle." Great, that's a group we could absolutely join and get links from.

4. Competitors' links

So this is basically the practice you almost certainly will need to use tools to do this. There are some free ways to do it.

The simple, free way to do it is to say, "I have competitor 1 brand name and competitor 2 brand name.I'm going to search for the combination of those two in Google, and I'm going to look for places that have written about and linked to both of them and see if I can also replicate the tactics that got them coverage." The slightly more sophisticated way is to go use a tool. Moz's Link Explorer does this.

So do tools from people like Majestic and Ahrefs. I'm not sure if SEMrush does. But basically you can plug in, "Here's me. Here's my competitors. Tell me who links to them and does not link to me." Moz's tool calls this the Link Intersect function. But you don't even need the link intersect function.

You just plug in a competitor's domain and look at here are all the links that point to them, and then you start to replicate their tactics. There are hundreds more and many, many resources on Moz's website and other great websites about SEO out there that talk about many of these tactics, and you can certainly invest in those. Or you could conceivably hire someone who knows what they're doing to go do this for you. Links are still powerful.

Okay. Thank you so much. I want to say a huge amount of appreciation to Moz and to Tyler, who's behind the camera — he's waving right now, you can't see it, but he looks adorable waving — and to everyone who has helped make this possible, including Cyrus Shepard and Britney Muller and many others.

Hopefully, this one-hour segment on SEO can help you upgrade your skills dramatically. Hopefully, you'll send it to some other folks who might need to upgrade their understanding and their skills around the practice. And I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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