Is Your Content Good Enough? 6 Questions to Find the Answer

What do you think of the content that your competitors publish?

My guess? It’s not great.

It’s easy to judge others, but tough to evaluate ourselves.

I guarantee that all your competitors think the same thing as you, that most content in your niche is junk.

And yet…they believe that theirs is the exception.

No doubt you think your content is pretty good too. Otherwise, why would you publish it?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out that we all have biases. Of course we’re going to think our own content is good.

The ideal solution would be to hire a professional marketer or editor to evaluate your content and compare it against competitors.

However, that’s rarely possible.

The next best solution, in any case, is to have a checklist of all the essentials of good content.

While you can make your own, I thought I’d start you off.

I’m going to tell you 6 questions that you should ask yourself before publishing any piece of content.

This is a list of essentials, but feel free to add to it afterwards. 

1. Does it have a real purpose to the right people

There are 2 ways you can write.

You can write for yourself, creating something that you think is superb.

Or, you can write for your readers, creating something that is specifically crafted to help them.

Can you guess which one I prefer? It’s option number 2. Always write for your readers.

One mistake that many content creators make, especially newer ones, is writing something that they think is good.

They’ll write a rant, or some other post just to make themselves sound smart. But this doesn’t accomplish anything other than making them feel smart.

Here’s an example of such a post on Medium:

As you can see, the author wrote a public post that was essentially a rant directed towards her CEO.

You can read it if you want, but essentially it’s a whole lot of complaining. All about “me, me, me.”

As an interesting note, an edit on the post explains that she was let go shortly after (not necessarily related though).

The point is, that even if this content gets read by a lot of people, it’s not going to impact their lives.

All good content, from the viewpoint of content marketing, needs to leave a favorable impression of your brand in the minds of readers.

It should do one of the following:

• Solve a problem – For example, a detailed step by step guide to patching up a wall.
• Inspire action – When content is focused on the reader, it can inspire them to take action to improve their lives. At the end of most of my posts, I ask readers to take action on what I wrote, because they’ll remember me when they do.

• Teach – Everyone loves to learn about the things they truly care about. Good content can focus on teaching an important concept. For example, a post about how Google’s basic algorithm works, written for beginner SEOs.

Go back to the question and answer it now.

Is your content written for your audience, and does it have value to them?

If the topic is good, but you were more focused on what you think is in a good article, go through it and edit it. Constantly ask yourself, “how can I make this clearer for my reader?”

You should be able to articulate the exact value that your content provides readers. If you can’t, it probably doesn’t have any (or much).

2. Are your claims backed up with credible sources?

The days are over when you could write whatever you’d like and be believed.

Many readers these days are skeptical. After reading so many lies, and hearing false promises, it takes a lot to convince them to take you at your word and take action.

And if you can’t get them to take action, you’re never going to claim that place in their email box or memory.

This is why I recommend backing up all your claims, with data when possible.

What’s more convincing? Saying:

• Diabetes causes your hair to fall out.
• Diabetes impairs your brain function.

They both sound possible, but they both sound like they could just be speculation. The difference, is that the second one links to a study in a respected journal.

As a reader, the second one leaves me convinced, the first one leaves me with questions.

What’s a credible source?: A key word in the question here is “credible.” If a reader clicks through to your source, and doesn’t trust it, you’re back where you started.

Here’s what I would say is a good rule of thumb for credible sources:

• Studies (journal articles) are the best if possible
• Data analysis posts
• Government sites
• Highly respected sites (like webMD)
• Posts written by extremely well known authors (or interviews)

3. Do the images add more than just breaking up text?

I’m a big fan of visual content, which you know if you read my stuff regularly.

One benefit of including a lot of pictures is that they break up text, making it easier to read.

But if that’s the only thing the images in your content do, that’s a problem.

Images give you a unique opportunity to:

• Clarify tough concepts
• Provide additional insights
• Present data that you can’t in text

All in a way that most readers enjoy.

But too many bloggers squander this opportunity on a regular basis, even good ones.

Here’s an example from a very popular blog that shall remain nameless:

I really don’t know what a molten chess piece has to do with becoming a brand publisher.

This factor isn’t the end of the world, but using the right pictures can take your post from mediocre to good, or good to great.

Take this post on the Ahrefs blog as an example. After going over a concept that is tough to explain, they presented a tiny infographic to illustrate it:

Even though you don’t really know the context of the article, I bet you already have a good idea of the point that was being stressed.

That’s an image that adds value to the surrounding text.

Just as every sentence should add something to the content, so should every image.

4. Do you have competition? (and is yours the best?)

Think of your content as a product (even if it’s a free one).

Just about all products have competition. Go to a grocery store, and you’ll find ketchup made by 5 different companies.

Look up a guide to SEO, and you’ll find not just 5, but thousands of competing pieces of content.

Before you publish, and even before you write, you need to know what you’re up against.

Usually, this means going to Google and putting in a few keyword phrases that describe your content.

For example, I would search for “is your content good enough”, or “how to judge content quality” for this article that you’re reading.

Next, go through at least the first page of results. More is always better.

Look through them and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Then, compare those strengths to your own.

If your content is worse in some areas, it needs to be improved before you publish it. No one switches to the new product if it’s worse than the old one.

There is one exception: There is no competition in a monopoly. A monopoly exists when a company can create a product that no one else can, either because of legal reasons or they lack the ability to create it.

It’s great to own a monopoly in real life if you ever get the chance from a business perspective.

If possible, you should try to create a content monopoly on the topic you’re writing about.

If you can approach a topic from an angle that no one else can replicate, you’re guaranteed to stand out.

For example, a few years ago I spent $252,000 on conversion rate optimization and published a post about it:

Anyone can write a post along the lines of “x lessons of conversion rate optimization.”

Very few can say they spend a few hundred thousand hiring the best in the industry, and then share what they learned.

5. Is your title AND opening gripping?

Your title can affect your conversion rate by 40% and plays a huge role in overall traffic.

It’s the part that most people read, and then decide if they are interested enough to read the actual article.

You should write down at least 20 different possible titles for each piece of content you create.

I know it’s a pain and takes a lot of time for just 10-15 words, but it is by far the most important part of your content.

Recognizing a great title takes practice, but essentially what you want to do is put yourself in your reader’s shoes, and ask yourself:

Do I really need to read this right now?

It’s important that they want to read it “right now,” because most people who say they’ll read it later will not.

And if you can honestly answer “yes” to that question, you need a better title. Do not rush this, it’s crucial.

Once you have the title down, move on to your opening 100-200 words. This is the second most important part of your content.

After the title draws in a reader, many will read the opening and then decide if they’ll read the rest of the content.

Again, ask yourself the same question. There needs to be a question that they just need an answer to, or a story they want the end of in order to compel them to read on.

This is hard.

If you’d like to see some examples, check out some posts on Smart Blogger, their editor makes sure that every post has a strong opening.

6. Is your content optimized for the average reader?

Content marketers are not the average readers. So what we think is good, isn’t usually good for the average content reader.

Research shows the readers only read an average of 20-28% of a post.

Most readers are skimmers.

They skim the content looking for anything that stands out. It’s important that you include elements that do stand out and invite readers to pay closer attention.

There are a few main aspects to consider.

Aspect #1 – Subheadlines matter more than you think: Open a new blog post and take a quick skim. What stands out the most?

Usually, it will be the subheadlines, since they are larger and usually darker than the rest of the text.

Just like readers judge your entire post by the title, they also judge each section by the subheadline.

Notice that I rarely use boring subheadlines in my posts. I always try to make some sort of interesting point that makes a skimmer curious. For example:

You don’t need to spend quite as much time on these as the overall title, but don’t just put the first subheadline that comes to mind either.

Aspect #2 – Readability: It’s important that you keep the basics of readability in mind. No one is going to read a post if it’s all one giant block of text.

Instead, keep the following in mind:

• Write in short paragraphs – I use up to 3 sentences maximum.
• Have a short blog width - Each line should have no more than 100 characters in it. Many say that 66 characters per line is ideal. Short lines keep the reader feeling like they’re making progress.
• Use simple words - I rarely include complex words in my posts. You don’t want readers to have to go look up the meaning of words, which takes them away from your post.

Aspect #3 – Images: Images do break up text as we mentioned earlier, which makes content easier to read.

More importantly, they attract attention.

Imagine if you were skimming a post and saw that custom iceberg graphic from earlier, wouldn’t you read that section to learn more about it? Many readers will.

Images will always grab attention, and if they are interesting (i.e. not a basic stock photo), they can suck in a skimmer.

Conclusion

Being your own toughest critic will help you create great content that will win over readers.

But it’s hard to criticize yourself sometimes, and it’s easy to give yourself the benefit of the doubt.

I recommend going through this list of questions for all the content you’re about to publish. It ensures that you don’t skip over a glaring weakness that needs to be improved.

Keep in mind that this is a list of the essentials, but you may have other things you want to ask yourself before you publish something in order to ensure a high standard of content.

If you have any of those questions, I’d love it if you’d share them with me and everyone else below in a comment.

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7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI From Content

I’m not going to lecture you.

You already know that content marketing can be a very successful form of marketing.

You also know that producing great content takes a lot of time or money, sometimes both.

But there’s something that you might not know, at least not for sure.

Just because a piece of content gets thousands of views or hundreds of social shares, doesn’t mean that it returned a positive return on investment (ROI).

You could spend $100,000 on the most spectacular piece of content on how to pet a cat. It’s very unlikely that it would ever make you anywhere close to that amount back.

Content marketing is only effective if it’s profitable.

From what I see and hear, only a small fraction of marketers actually achieve a significantly positive ROI with their content.

That’s a HUGE problem.

While there’s a lot of factors that contribute to your ROI, I’m going to assume you have the basics of content marketing down.

That allows me to show you 7 different ways to maximize your content’s ROI.

If you apply even a few of these tactics, it can take your content from a breakeven or slightly negative ROI to a healthy, positive ROI.

Achieving this will allow you to ramp up your content production in a sustainable way.

1. Pick 1-2 channels and design around them

A common mistake I see is creating a piece of content, and then trying to promote it everywhere.

I’m talking Facebook, Twitter, forums, Reddit, and any number of marketing channels.

The reason that this is a mistake is that audiences on different channels and platforms within those channels typically behave very different from each other.

Content that may be very popular on one channel, isn’t necessarily going to do well on another channel.

That makes a shotgun approach for promotion a waste of your time, and it’s going to kill your ROI.

The solution? Get specific: You need to find 1-3 channels where your content does best.

For Quick Sprout, I use mainly Facebook and Twitter, along with my email list.

Ideally, you want to identify these channels before you even create your content. Then you can tailor everything from the topic and angle, to the title just for those specific audiences.

Here’s your practical takeaway: Stop promoting your content every place you can think of – you’re wasting your time. Focus on the sites that send you the most visitors for your time, effort, and money.

How do you pick a channel to focus on? Analyze your past content and determine the amount of visitors or subscribers you got from each channel. Create a simple table like this for each piece of content to measure your results.

 

• Time spent – how much time do you need to spend to promote content on this channel
• Cost of time – your time has value, input a $/hour value here
• Other costs – put in any money you spent (like on advertising)
• Total cost – add your time and other costs together
• Sales/subscribers/visitors – pick a metric and record the results

Then, divide the sales (or subscribers, or metric of your choice) by the time it cost you, to get a return per hour metric.

You will see that certain channels vastly outperform others.

2. Never stop updating

As you may know, there are 2 types of content…

Evergreen content, which stays relevant for years (possibly for the foreseeable future), and non-evergreen content, which will go out of date in the near future.

You’ll probably end up creating both types of content.

The main downside of non-evergreen content is that once you get the initial value out of it, it fades into irrelevance and won’t help your business much.

However, you can essentially erase this negative by continuously updating your content.

It’s something that Brian Dean does very well, he’s the example you should be following.

For example, he created an incredibly thorough guide of SEO tools:

He updates this guide on a regular basis.

Why is updating so important? Updates are all about the reader. They make the content so much more valuable.

SEO tools come and go all the time.

If you go look at other lists of SEO tools that are a few years old, most of the tools are either ineffective these days, or not even still available. Plus, they also don’t include some great tools that were recently released.

While Brian isn’t ranking #1 for “SEO tools” in Google, he ranks very highly, and I expect his rankings will continue to rise (it’s a tough keyword):

Google is going to see that users find his guide the most useful, and it will be promoted.

Updating has a few other side benefits.

First, it allows you to keep promoting your content. Usually, you publish something and then you go all out on promoting it for a week or two.

After that, you probably have a bit of anxiety doing more promotion, because you feel like your content already isn’t that “fresh.”

If you update your content, it allows you to send a quick Tweet or email to people who have enjoyed it before, letting them know you’ve added a few cool tidbits (like new tools for Brian). That’ll get you extra shares and links.

Finally, a lot of things influence what your readers will share with their friends and communities.

Mainly, they want to share things that make them look good. That’s why they rarely share old content, that’s probably not correct anymore. By updating your content, visitors will still have no problem sharing it, far past your first publish date.

3. Never stop promoting

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

Most of your ROI is going to come from your content promotion.

While great content is a good start, it’s nothing without a substantial amount of promotion.

Some top marketers, like Derek Halpern, even spend up to 80% of their time promoting content (the other 20% on creating it).

But here’s the problem: Even if you do a great promotional push for a week or two, your traffic will spike, and then quickly die down.

I guarantee that you haven’t reached even a fraction of the people that could benefit from your content during that time frame.

There’s no rule that says that you can only promote new content.

If you want to maximize your ROI, you likely need to spend more time promoting your old content as well.

For starters, you can simply repost your content on social media and forums every once in awhile.

Additionally, you can set up Google Alerts to let you know when anyone is talking about the topic you wrote about. You can then pop in and suggest they visit your guide.

On top of those, most promotional tactics are still viable. Very few don’t work simply because your content was published a month or two ago.

4. There are diminishing returns between quality and ROI

This is where creating great content gets really tricky.

Generally, I’m a supporter of creating truly “epic” content.

But it’s not always a good idea.

Sometimes, making your content better will leave you with a worse ROI.

The reason behind this is pretty simple. To design custom images and layouts, it takes a lot of time and/or money.

Even the table of contents for my advance guides (in the sidebar) cost a ton to make:

At some point, you may have a piece of content that’s really good. If you spend another $100 on a custom image, will that bring you more than $100 later on?

That’s the question, and it’s a tough one.

When do you stop improving content?: It’s going to vary in every case, but I’ll get as specific as possible.

Let’s start with a fundamental principle – your content should be better than all of your competitors.

If it isn’t, you’ll be lucky to achieve any positive ROI at all.

The better your content is, the more it stands out from the rest:

But you reach a limit.

Once your content is significantly better than all the other content on that subject, readers can’t tell the difference if it gets better.

Readers determine the quality of your content in large part by comparing it to others. So even if you improve your already-better content, in the eyes of most readers, it’s still just “better” than the rest.

If there’s no significant difference in perception, there won’t be a significant difference in your return. And since you spent more to improve your content, that means your ROI declined.

Your practical takeaway: Make your content significantly better than your competition, and then stop. Any further improvements will be costly and you’re ROI will likely decrease.

Of course, you should test this yourself, but that’s a good rule of thumb to follow.

The one exception to the rule: I mentioned my ultimate guides before. These obviously broke the rule because I went way above and beyond what was already out there.

I did this for one main reason: So that no one could come in later and create something significantly better.

These guides have driven hundreds of thousands of visits to my site since being published. Even though they are years old, no one has comprehensively been able to create content that “beats” them.

They allow my site to retain its position as the leader in each of those areas, and deliver constant traffic even now.

If you know that a piece of content has the potential to deliver a large volume of traffic (usually through SEO) for years, and that others will try to create better content than you, you can take this route.

Alternatively, you could just upgrade your content as others catch up and hope that none of them create a guide like this that you can’t really beat.

5. Advertising is not the enemy of inbound marketing

I told you earlier that Facebook is an important channel for Quick Sprout.

But if you’ve used Facebook for your business, you know that the organic reach percentage, the number of your fans who see your posts, is dismal:

If you only rely on organic traffic on most social channels, you’re missing out on a lot of reach.

But a lot of marketers, especially newer ones, really hate advertising. If you’re a strict inbound marketer, you might not want to tap into outbound marketing options.

But outbound (“interruption” in the picture) marketing and inbound marketing do not need to be exclusive.

You can use both of them at the same time to promote a piece of content. And when you find the right combination, you can see big gains to your ROI.

6. The biggest mistake you can make – not optimizing your funnel

It’s the first word in ROI – return.

If you have no way to make money, no content will have a positive ROI.

It’s absolutely essential that you have some sort of sales funnel in place, ending with some sort of product (or alternative monetization method) for visitors and subscribers to buy.

Most of what I’ve written in this post focuses on your content and promotion, but just as important is what happens after.

Have you optimized your email marketing? Do you have a clear path to where you can generate revenue from visitors?

If you don’t, you need to.

Doubling the conversion rate at any point near the bottom of your sales funnel is an easy way to double the ROI of all your content.

Here’s a good starting point to optimizing your sales funnel.

7. Simple, but crucial – Measure  your ROI

Your ROI for a piece of content is determined based off a variety of factors.

You need to understand how to calculate your ROI, and then measure it for every piece of content you produce.

If you don’t measure it, there’s no way to try out different content creation and promotion techniques and see which ones actually improve your ROI.

Good marketers continually refine their content marketing strategies and find incremental improvement.

Conclusion

Content marketing can be a great tool in your marketing arsenal.

But only if it actually makes your business more than you spend on creating it (aka a positive ROI).

I encourage you to test out all the ways to maximize your ROI that I just showed you. In most cases, you’ll see a significant bump in your ROI.

At this point, I’d like to hear from you. Specifically, what kind of ROI have you achieved with your content in the past? Leave me a comment and let me know.

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6 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Webinars

Webinars are one of the ways, if not the best way, to convert traffic and subscribers into actual customers.

Even with a mediocre webinar, you can convert around 5% of your viewers into customers.

Very few other conversion tactics come even close to that.

Depending on how long you’ve followed my work, you may have seen any one of the many KISSmetrics‘ webinars.

The total number of attendees of the first 77 webinars at KISSmetrics was 74,381. And 16,394 of those converted. That’s a 22% conversion rate if you don’t want to do the math.

We had good webinars, but they weren’t anything that others couldn’t deliver.

Adobe reports a 19% conversion rate with webinars, and Buzzsumo says that 20% of their webinar attendees turn into paid customers.

If you search around, you’ll find many other businesses achieving similar results.

I’ve written before about creating high converting webinars.

But that leaves one problem: Where do you get the traffic (that turns into your viewers)?

I’ll admit, it’s not too difficult for businesses like mine. You may have seen that I hold regular webinars on NeilPatel.com:

I have enough traffic to my blog that I get plenty of new webinar signups on a regular basis. Even if I didn’t do any extra work, I’d be fine.

But if you don’t have that traffic already, I can see why you’d be hesitant to hold webinars. After all, you don’t want to hold one with two people in the audience.

That’s where this post comes in. I’m going to show you 6 things you should do in order to get your webinar attendance to a solid level.

It might not be thousands right away, but it will give you a base to build on, and over time, if you keep doing the right thing, your audiences will grow.

If you’re interested in getting more traffic to your webinars, read on… 

1. Start with the basics

If you’ve been doing any sort of marketing already, you need to start with your existing audience.

It’s cheaper and easier to convince your existing subscribers and readers than complete strangers to watch your webinar.

Let’s quickly walk through your options to make sure you don’t miss anything:

• Your blog – You can create a dedicated post that announces your webinar so that any casual reader can see it (and those subscribed to your RSS feed)
• Social media – Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or some other network, create a post promoting your webinar. Don’t stop there, though. Post multiple times leading up to the event.
• Your email list - Your email list has your most active readers. This is a great place to get a lot of webinar signups. However, there’s much more to it than that, and I’ll get to it near the end of this post.
• YouTube/Vimeo - You can create a promotional video for your webinar and post it on these major video sites. Obviously, it works best if you already have subscribers on the sites or are willing to pay to promote.

One common aspect of the above suggestions is to try to make your promo shareable.

For example, when I promote my webinars on social media, I usually create custom images:

Not only do they get more attention, but they also get shared more.

If you create a custom video to promote the webinar, make it great. If you can get people sharing it, it can lead to thousands of views and hundreds of visits to your webinar signup page.

2. Re-design your website to focus on your webinars

Webinars are something you can’t half-commit to. You either go all in and make them your main focus or don’t do it at all.

Yes, you can test them by doing a few to start off, but if that trial run goes well, decide to commit (at least for a while).

When you commit, it’ll be worth it to spend extra time re-designing parts of your website to get your webinar offer in front of more of your readers.

The big opportunities are in your sidebar or content and your webinar landing page.

Start with the sidebar: Check out any blog post on NeilPatel.com when you get a chance.

You’ll see this attractive image in the sidebar (or something similar):

This is one of 3 links to my webinar landing page.

These images were custom designed, but you can see that they’re not that complicated or expensive to make.

Spend a bit of time or money to get some really high quality images for your sidebar to drive traffic to your webinar from your blog posts.

Next, create a landing page: All webinars should have their own landing pages.

If you’re asking for webinar signups in a sidebar with a simple opt-in form, you’re missing out.

A good webinar is jam-packed with value, and there’s no way to explain it all in a small sidebar feature. Instead, you need a landing page where you can highlight the biggest benefits of attending the webinar:

I took it a step further when I saw the power of webinars. If you look at the NeilPatel.com homepage, it’s actually a landing page for my webinar.

All that organic traffic that arrives to my website from searches such as “Neil Patel” is presented with the webinar offer. I get a lot of extra signups this way.

3. Webinars make advertising highly viable

I, and most marketers, consider webinars a form of content.

The only difference is that webinars convert much higher than other types of content.

So, while you can definitely advertise content like blog posts and e-books on “cheaper” advertising networks like Facebook, you need to have a really effective sales funnel in place if you want to profit.

Webinars are different.

You can sell high-priced products with high profit margins through webinars at an incredible conversion rate.

Say you were selling a product priced at $300 with a $100 profit margin, and you managed to get a 10% conversion rate from your webinars. (That’s a pretty conservative example, by the way.)

That means you could spend $10 to acquire a single webinar viewer and still break even.

With a good landing page and a decently run AdWords campaign, you can convert visitors to webinar signups easily at the rate of over 30% (usually much more).

Accounting for 40% of signups not actually showing up for the event, you can still spend up to $1.8 per click if my math is indeed correct.

That’s not a hard target to hit on an expensive advertising network like AdWords, and you can easily achieve it on most others as well.

And remember, that’s a conservative case. If you have a really effective webinar, you could spend 3-4 times that and still profit.

So, while you probably don’t go too crazy advertising your other content, you can get a quick and healthy return advertising your webinars.

4. Encourage sharing with your promotion

People share content all the time.

Let me rephrase that…people share great content all the time.

The great thing about webinars is that your audience already likely values them higher than any written content you create.

And it’s generally true. They get an hour or so of your time to not only learn something valuable but also ask you questions live.

That means that people will share webinars.

Some will do this automatically, but others need prompting.

Start by making a thank-you page for your visitors after they register for the webinar.

On this page, you can put a lot of important information, but one of the elements should be a sharing section, complete with sharing buttons for all the major social networks.

On top of that, when you send a confirmation email about the webinar, you can add another call to action to share it.

If your niche isn’t particularly social, provide a direct link to the registration page to share. Ask them to share it with their co-workers, employees, and friends.

5. Don’t send a single email

Email is very important to running successful webinars.

The worst thing you can do is send a single email to ask if anyone wants to subscribe and a single email to let them know when the webinar is (after they’ve signed up).

I’m going to divide this into 2 main subsections: pre-signup and post-signup.

Emailing before the signup: Here, you’re emailing subscribers on your existing email lists to get registrations.

There are a few key factors here:

• Send more than one email
• Be compelling
• Split test (if possible)

Starting from the top, you need to plan ahead and send at least 2-3 emails in the weeks leading up to the webinar (if it’s not a frequent occurrence).

These emails should not just say “sign up for my webinar.”

Instead, approach them like any other serious piece of copy.

Here’s an example of a promotional email Tim Soulo of Ahrefs sent to his list:

Notice that he came up not only with a good, benefit-driven headline but also with 3 more specific benefits that he knows his subscribers are interested in.

Just like any other good email would have, this one also has clear calls to action on their own lines.

Finally, he takes it one step further by limiting the number of viewers to 250 to leverage the power of scarcity.

If you send a single email, make it like this one.

If possible, treat your webinar like a product launch, and send a few emails beforehand to build anticipation (e.g., “we’ll be showing you soon how we do things behind the scenes—live…stay tuned”).

Emailing after the signup: These emails are just as important, if not more important, than the pre-signup emails.

You’ll never get 100% of people who signed up for your webinar to show up for it.

A decent chunk of them, say 20%, just plain can’t make it due to scheduling issues.

Then, another chunk will simply forget about the webinar. That’s usually another 20-40%.

You can reduce this percentage significantly by sending reminders about the webinar. An effective default schedule is:

• 1 day before
• The morning of
• 1 hour before
• Just as it’s starting

This ensures that very few people who sign up forget about it.

You can also follow Gael Breton’s lead and send a final email the day before to the rest of your list (that didn’t sign up) to see if they want to join at the last minute:

6. Make use of your thank-you page

One final way that is really effective to get more webinar signups is to create a custom thank-you page for new email subscribers.

On top of your typical thank-you message for new email signups, you need to highlight your next webinar and include a call to action that lets them register for it.

This is something Tim Paige from LeadPages did with great success (example below):

He was able to double the number of his webinar attendees by making this one simple change.

In addition, it’s great for starting a relationship because you’re giving away something of high value right away to your new subscribers.

Conclusion

I really hope that if you haven’t yet given webinars a try, you will now.

While you might be afraid you won’t have enough viewers, if you use the tactics in this post, you’ll be able to get 50-100 at a minimum.

That’s enough to get some practice with webinars and still make anywhere from 5-15 sales in most cases.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to use every single one of these tactics. Instead, pick a few that fit your business, and get really good at them.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with webinars and the most effective ways for you to drive traffic to them. Please share them in the comments below—I’ll be waiting!

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Having Trouble Converting Your SEO Traffic? This Is Probably Why

It’s a problem I see all too often…

Marketers learn about SEO tactics and actually do a good job applying them.

Before they know it, their site’s traffic has risen to 3,000 visits a month, then to 10,000, then to 20,000. Along with growing their traffic numbers, these marketers also build up their email lists from this traffic.

They’re excited because they’ve read many stories of entrepreneurs making 5 figures a month from email lists of just a few thousand.

And then, they launch a product and get horrendous conversion rates.

It doesn’t make sense to them—after all, they did everything right, didn’t they? Why isn’t their targeted traffic interested in their products?

If you’ve ever been in this situation, I know you understand the pain and frustration it causes.

If you haven’t, I don’t want you to have to go through it.

In this post, I’ll help you understand why it happens and how to use SEO more effectively to prevent this sad scenario from ever happening to you. 

Does this sound familiar?

In that very general overview of SEO work, there was one crucial mistake. If you avoid it, you’ll drastically increase your chances of creating a sustainable business.

Here is the mistake, put simply:

You’ve built up a good size audience, but it’s not a cohesive audience. In other words, the people in your audience are too dissimilar to each other.

This can be a hard concept to understand at first, but once you do, it will become eye-opening.

You may have tried to monetize with Adsense, or a similar advertising platform, and got decent results. Therefore, your search traffic is indeed high quality.

But Adsense is smart; they serve different ads to different people, based on collected data.

They know that the experienced marketer isn’t looking for introductory SEO videos that the beginner marketer is interested in.

Because of this, it doesn’t matter much which kind of SEO traffic you’re getting when you’re monetizing with Adsense.

Has the light bulb gone off yet? All businesses start somewhere, and the majority have only a few products at the most.

If you’re still trying to find your first big SEO success, you might have only one product.

If you’ve been amassing search traffic from any keywords you can, you’ll end up with a highly mixed audience.

Let’s go through an example. Say you’re a soccer blogger, and you managed to rank #1 for these keyword phrases:

• “How to get better at soccer”
• “Soccer betting”
• “Watch soccer online”

All of the above phrases have the word “soccer” in them, so they must be relevant to you as a soccer blogger.

But your business focuses on selling soccer training programs to help players get better.

Although they care about soccer in general, the people searching for betting information or wanting to watch professional matches couldn’t care less about playing themselves (for the most part).

You will get a good response from the part of your email list that signed up through the first article, but that’s it.

I hope it’s becoming clear now:

Your search engine traffic must attract people interested not only in your niche but also in the product you’re selling.

Sometimes you’ll have 3 distinct groups of people. But if you’re ranking for many keywords, you may have several, which makes your results even more dismal.

As you can see, the root problem is in you mindlessly trying to rank for any vaguely-related to your niche keyword.

Traffic is a vanity number at that point because when it comes to your actual business, the traffic you are getting is not targeted, nor is it high quality.

Stop approaching SEO backwards

If you’ve ever fallen into this trap, it’s not your fault, but it’s an important thing to learn from.

Most SEOs approach things backwards. They obsess about the raw traffic numbers, expecting to learn about conversion later—not realizing they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

They spend all their time reading about and applying SEO tactics, without fully understanding their purpose or why they work.

And it culminates in the sort of disaster I’ve walked you through.

So, let’s start with the fundamentals:

Search engines (SEO) are a marketing channel.

The entire purpose of getting the traffic from search engines is to try to move it into your funnel and through it.

Marketing channels feed leads into the top of that diagram.

Once you’ve put your potential customers on an email list, you can usually consider them leads and keep trying to move them down the funnel.

What you should do is reverse-engineer your funnel.

Start at the bottom, and work out a path that a customer could take from the top of the funnel to reach the bottom. If customers can come from search engines, figure out the “right” keywords that would bring them.

For our soccer example, there’s almost no chance that a customer for a training program would come from the keyword phrase “how to bet on soccer.”

By taking this approach, you eliminate the entire problem of an irrelevant audience that won’t make it past the first stage in your funnel.

Who are the types of people in your niche? Some niches are more dangerous than others. For some, there are dozens of different types of people who might be searching for vaguely related terms. For others, there might be only 2 or 3 types.

Obviously, the fewer types of people there are, the less potential for disaster there is.

It’s a good exercise to quickly try to identify the different types of people in your market.

Let’s continue with our example. There are 7 types of people that could search for things related to soccer:

• Players (adults and kids) looking to improve
• Gamblers
• Coaches
• Parents of players
• People looking to understand the basics of a new hobby
• Referees trying to study the game
• Fans (who like to watch the game)

That’s 7 types right off the top.

But you could divide those even further.

You could divide players by their mastery level: beginner, intermediate, and expert players will all be looking for different things.

Gamblers could be divided into casual and serious.

Parents could be divided into those who just want to know how to introduce their child to soccer and those who want to help their child get a scholarship playing soccer.

Your product likely appeals to one or two of these sub-types of people, which is why it’s very important to understand whom you’re trying to attract through search engines.

Once you’ve done all this, identify the types of people who would be interested in any products you already have or are going to have in the near future. Be as specific as possible.

It’s time to evaluate your content

Your next step is to take a hard look at your current content.

Create a list of all the content you’ve published that has the potential to drive search traffic.

Even better, go to Google Analytics, and export your content from the “behavior” section, sorted by the amount of organic traffic it drove (add a filter for “search traffic”):

On your spreadsheet, add a column beside the title or URL. Go through your pieces of content, one by one, and label each with the type(s) of people who would be most interested in that post.

At the same time, highlight rows, let’s say in green, where content fits the type of people interested in your product (from the step before). A quick glance at the end will tell you where you stand.

Can you salvage any non-targeted content? Hopefully, you’ll have a lot of green, but you might not. You might find that most content is probably read by people who won’t make it through your sales funnel.

Should you delete that content or leave it alone?

You could do either, but that would be a real shame if that content is already generating traffic.

Instead, let me suggest a few other courses of action:

• Add extra internal links - By adding internal links to pages that are targeted, you can leverage the authority that you’ve built on these non-targeted pages.
• Monetize differently – Stop adding visitors to these pages to your main email list. Either add them to a separate list and pitch them different products (use affiliate products if you don’t have a relevant one), or use advertising.

While your focus should be on the green content you just identified, that doesn’t mean you still can’t derive some benefit from your work in the past.

Fix your future SEO by pruning your keyword list

You can’t completely fix past mistakes, but you can ensure that you don’t make them again in the future.

You likely have a large list of keywords that you created from keyword research that you thought were good to target.

It’s time to revisit those.

While all those keywords that you identified before are probably good keywords to target for certain businesses, not all of them are good for your business.

Instead of wasting your time creating and promoting content that attracts the wrong types of audience in your niche, you’ll spend it on highly relevant, targeted traffic.

Just like we did before, go through each keyword one by one, and identify the type(s) of people who would search for it.

For example:

• “How to bet on soccer” would be searched by “gamblers.”
• “How to get better at soccer” would be searched by “players looking to improve.”

I highly suggest focusing on the single main product you’re trying to sell. Then, in the future, you can identify products you could create to target these other segments of your niche.

For now, identify the 1 or 2 types of people who will buy your product—the ones you want going in the top of your sales funnel.

Remove (or hide) all keywords that don’t attract those people.

You will be left with a much smaller list of keywords in most cases. However, any search traffic that you get from these keywords is almost certain to be highly valuable.

You’re not limited to SEO

I understand the hesitation to limit the amount of search traffic you can get.

There’s a certain level of security in knowing you are getting tens of thousands of search visitors per month and that there are always more keywords to target.

But here’s the thing: if you want to succeed, you need to forget about vanity numbers, such as traffic, and look at the quality of traffic—and conversions—instead.

Which would you rather have?

• 10,000 search visitors, 500 of them targeted or
• 1,000 search visitors, all of them targeted

The second site will perform better every single time, even with a tenth of the traffic of the first site.

What about the second fear? You might legitimately run out, or run low, on keywords to target (other than very long tail ones).

What then?

That’s when you put your marketing understanding to the test.

If you truly understand that SEO is just one marketing channel, you know that there are many other marketing channels out there.

Now that you know the type of people you’re looking for, you can find them on social media sites, question sites, blogs, and many other online platforms.

Here are a final few resources that will introduce you to these other channels; just always keep in mind the end goal of your funnel:

• Stop Guessing: Here’s a Social Media Strategy That Works
• 5 Spectacular Traffic Sources That’ll Help You Move Beyond Google
• How to Leverage Q&A Sites to Generate Traffic
• How to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic for B2B Companies

Conclusion

This is one of the most important concepts that knowledgeable marketers need to understand. Traffic from SEO itself is not the goal. The goal is to have traffic that actually converts into customers.

Don’t waste your time creating and promoting content that doesn’t attract the right type of readers to your site.

Instead, make sure you’re focusing on driving search engine traffic that is interested in your products—I just showed you how.

If you need help understanding a particular concept from this post, leave me a comment below, and I’ll try to clear things up.

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