Caveats About Favored Access Method For Dialysis

Not all doctors are convinced that the preferred point of connection for patients to blood-cleaning dialysis machines is always the best.

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Facelift

Title: Facelift
Category: Procedures and Tests
Created: 12/31/1997 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 6/29/2015 12:00:00 AM

9 Step Social Media Audit for Improving LinkedIn Business Page Results

It’s undeniable that LinkedIn is leading the pack for professional social networks. In fact, more than half of all of the business in the world have created a business page on LinkedIn. With over 4 million business pages on LinkedIn, the competition for the attention of potential clients and job seekers is at an all-time high.

One way to take a critical look at your LinkedIn business page is to conduct a social media audit and identify areas for improvement. Understanding the elements that will help you build trust with your audience and provide a seamless brand experience for visitors navigating between your website and LinkedIn business page are incredibly important in creating a cohesive strategy.

If you know that your LinkedIn Business Page could be better, but you don’t know where to start, this guide is for you. The social media audit below identifies nine important elements of LinkedIn business profiles that can be improved in order to get more engagement from your audience, and referral traffic back to your website. Ready to see how many of these items you’re executing successfully and how many are an opportunity for improvement?

9 Step LinkedIn Company Page Audit

#1 – Identify the Right Content Mix
“Content mix” refers to the different types of content posted on your LinkedIn Company page. The first step is to analyze what types of content are published to your business page on a regular basis.

Content types can include:

• Promotional content
• Industry news
• Images
• Videos
• Links to helpful articles

Ideally, all of these content types should be present in your content mix. Posting only one or two types of content will bore your audience. Engage your audience by posting a variety of content to your LinkedIn business page. Don’t forget to include visual content in your mix: posting images on LinkedIn can increase engagement and comments by as much as  98%!

#2 – Establish a Cadence
How often does your brand post on LinkedIn? Are your updates posted regularly, or do days or weeks pass by with no updates? Aim to post at least one message a day on your LinkedIn business page in order to begin engaging your audience and create the expectation that visitors can discover new content on a daily basis. Posting intermittently can cause visitors to think that your LinkedIn page is unmaintained or out of date.

#3 – Post at Optimal Times of Day
Now that you know how often you’re posting, consider what time of day updates are typically posted. Do you use a social media management tool to schedule updates at specific times, or do you post updates whenever you can find the time? Scheduling your updates to post at a time of day when the majority of your followers are on LinkedIn is a great way to increase engagement with your content.

According to Fannit, the best times to post updates on LinkedIn are between 7-8 am and 5-6 pm. That’s because many LinkedIn users check their profile at the beginning or end of their work day. 

Image courtesy of QuickSprout

#4 – Create Consistency with Your Company Name
This seems like an easy one, but it can have a huge impact on how visitors find and perceive your LinkedIn Company page. First, search for your company’s name on LinkedIn. How many results appear? Some brands have multiple pages on LinkedIn, which can make it very difficult for visitors to know which page is the “correct” LinkedIn business page to visit. If your brand has multiple LinkedIn business pages, consider consolidating into one just one page. If your brand has multiple markets, products, or business units, create showcase pages to speak to those different segments.

Finally, ensure that the spelling on your LinkedIn business page matches the branding on your website. This will provide a consistent experience for visitors, and help them understand that this page is the “official” LinkedIn page for your brand.

#5 – Find the Perfect Profile Picture
Take a critical look at the profile picture on your LinkedIn company page. It should be a clear, well-cropped image that showcases what your brand is all about. What’s most important is to ensure that your audience can easily recognize the profile image. Most companies opt to use the brand logo for their LinkedIn profile. This is a great way to improve brand recognition.

The image should be high resolution, and perfectly cropped. Grainy, off-centered images may give your business page an unprofessional or sloppy appearance. The size of LinkedIn profile pictures is 50×50 pixels.

#6 – Use a Banner Image to Create Continuity
The banner image should in some way indicate what your company does. If you work for a healthcare organization, an image of a hospital may be appropriate. They say that one image is worth 1,000 words, so use an image that speaks to your company’s area of expertise. Create a custom image that overlays text over an image in order to include a message, or information about your brand in the banner image. LinkedIn banner images should be a minimum of 646×220  .

Consider changing the banner image on your LinkedIn business page on a quarterly basis to give your page a fresh, updated appearance. The banner image may correspond to a season, event, or important product offering.

#7 – Provide a Detailed Description
Use the description section of your profile to explain what your company does. Avoid vague, industry jargon in favor of precise language and keywords that explain how your company provides value to your customers. Don’t forget that LinkedIn business page descriptions are crawled by Google, which means that you should include keywords in the description section. You should also fill out the sections provided for specialties, website, industry, type of business, address, and company size.

#8 – Include a URL in the First Sentence of the Description
When you visit LinkedIn company pages, you’ll notice that only the first one or two sentences of the description appear, unless you click “see more.” If you’d like to drive more referral traffic to your website, either include your brand’s URL in the first sentence of the description, or keep the description short enough that visitors won’t have to click “see more” to find your website URL .

#9 – Dive Into LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn business page administrators should take advantage of the data collected within LinkedIn analytics. Get insight into which updates are performing best by viewing impression, click, and engagement metrics for each update. You can also see how much reach and engagement your updates receive over time. LinkedIn’s unique demographic data can show you what industries your fans and visitors are from, what their job functions are, what their seniority level is, and what size company they work for. This information can help you understand more about your audience, and their interests.

Know When to Call in the Professionals

If you’re overwhelmed by how much time and effort it takes to conduct a social media audit, or to optimize your LinkedIn company page, it may be a sign that it’s time to call in the reinforcements. Do you feel that your LinkedIn company page could be better, but don’t have the time it takes to update and maintain it? Do you crave more expert insights and tips for improving your brand’s social media profiles? Contact TopRank Online Marketing to learn more about our social media audit services .

What are some examples of LinkedIn Company Profiles that you think are well optimized and have followed the checklist above?

Disclosure: LinkedIn, Innovatech and Uponor are all TopRank Online Marketing clients.

Header Image: Shutterstock

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What’s Holding CMOs Back When It Comes To Push Mobile Marketing

Push notifications are the official way for brands to reach users through an app since the operating system—such as Apple iOS or Google Android— doesn’t provide user email addresses or phone numbers. Their ability to provide information to aid in personalization makes push notifications one of the most important tools in the marketing toolbox.

All sounds great, right?

So why then are some CMOs reticent to implement a push mobile marketing strategy?

In our new guide, The CMO’s Guide To Mobile Marketing we identify several concerns that CMOs often have about investing in push— and solutions to overcoming those concerns:

Concern: Push costs too much to integrate into the workflow and back end.
Solution: Marketers should find a provider with an easy-to-implement SDK—which allows for rapid development—that uses technology to gather signals used for segmenting.

Concern: IT time and costs won’t deliver the desired return on investment.
Solution: Marketers are already focusing on delivering a cross-channel experience by integrating email, display, and SMS. Using multiple channels including push picks up incremental lift. Multi-channel customer interactions are 30 percent more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as customer satisfaction and desire to recommend, when compared to uncoordinated efforts, according to McKinsey & Company.

Concern: Users will be bombarded with messages.
Solution: Some marketers fear that if they implement push notifications, users will feel overwhelmed, leading them to delete the app or turn push notifications off. To combat this, send relevant, personalized notifications by segmenting. Another way to interact with customers without sending spam push messages is through an app inbox. Even if users say they don’t want to get notifications on the lock screen, brands can send offers and promotions to their inbox, bypassing the push alerts. This feature is helpful for reaching users that opt out of notifications and for providing offers that last longer than just one day.

To learn about the other two key aspects we identify: SMS & MMS and Data Management Platforms and how to overcome any concerns you as a CMO may have, download The CMO’s Guide To Mobile Marketing today.

FDA May Seek Child-Safe E-Cig Liquid Packaging

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5 Subtle Yet Super Powerful Copywriting Tips

Copywriting is a bit like martial arts; you don’t need to take aggressive action to see results. Image source.

Marketing can be like martial arts.

In a fight, you can floor your opponent with brute force.

You can throw a burst of punches and strikes, or grapple until you’re blue in the face. Or you can calmly step back, target one of your opponent’s pressure points, and quickly end the fight with one swift strike.

Marketing your business is the same.

You can grow by taking aggressive action. You can crank out more content, or pay for ads and leads to increase traffic. Or… simply step back and target the “pressure points” in your marketing by finding small tweaks that create big wins.

One of the best ways to get big wins from small tweaks is to focus on converting more prospects into customers by strengthening your copy.

But not all copywriting tweaks are created equal.

You can spend hours tweaking the wrong things and get weak results, so here are five simple but effective ways to ramp up your conversions by cranking up the power of your copy… Mr. Miyagi style.

1. Use open loops to seduce your prospect

Ever had an awesome TV show that you couldn’t stop watching? A series of books that you couldn’t put down?

You have? Congratulations, you’ve experienced the power of open loops (also called the Zeigarnik effect).

Open loops prey on our brain’s natural desire for completion.

You see, the brain enters a state of confusion or tension when it views something as incomplete. The cause could be a story, a question, even a household chore that you forgot to complete — and the only way to overcome that confusion and tension is for your brain to close the open loop.

When it comes to writing copy, an open loop is a part of your sales message that doesn’t tie up immediately.

You can apply open loops to any copy and instantly make it more magnetic.

Here’s an open loop example from the CopyHour landing page.

The writer starts the sales letter with talk of a mysterious little secret that top copywriters used to sharpen their chops, and as a result make bucket loads of cash – instantly making you wonder what this secret is.

But it doesn’t stop there. The sales page goes on to constantly dangle this secret right in front of your face. This strengthens your curiosity and makes you more invested in finding out what the mysterious secret is – increasing the chance of a conversion.

Open loops aren’t hard to implement.

The easiest way to get started is to ask more questions in your copy and vaguely expand on the question, just like the example above. This lack of completion makes your reader feel curious and more invested in your copy.

2. Make your first sentence hypnotic

Your first sentence has to open with a bang.

It has to immediately snag your audience’s attention and drag them into your copy. If your readers don’t make it past the first few sentences, they sure as hell ain’t making it to your call to action.

Shortening your sentences (and your first sentence in particular) is an excellent way to make your copy a little bit more engaging.

The trick is to make sentences so short and easy to read that they instantly suck your reader into your copy. In his book Advertising Secrets Of The Written Word, legendary copywriter Joseph Sugarman even said:

My first sentences are so short, they almost aren’t sentences.

Take for example the opening sentence on Chartbeat’s landing page for their study on audience development.

Have a look at how short and simple the opening is:

It’s not enough to just count clicks and page views anymore.

When someone begins by reading that, they’re naturally inclined to wonder, “What is enough then? What’s wrong with counting clicks and page views? What should I measure?” 

These questions then fuel the reader with enough coals of curiosity to make him want to read on.

Also, shorter sentences look like a piece of cake to read, which increases the chances of someone actually getting through your copy. This is a huge benefit because it’s harder to stop reading copy once you’re already interested and curious.

3. Deploy power verbs for maximum impact

Good copy paints pleasing pictures in the minds of your prospects. It dives into their brains and engages their senses and emotions.

This is where most writers make a fatal mistake. They rely on adjectives and limp words to add flavor to their copy, but as killer copywriter John Carlton said in his book Kick Ass Copywriting Secrets:

Good copy goes light on adjectives. And heavy on action verbs.

The right action verbs give your copy a muscular, grab-you-by-the-throat effect that keeps your reader glued to the screen.

The example below shows the difference between fluffy adjectives and power verbs in creating vivid mental images:

The stomach-turning news was extremely shocking. All of a sudden, he didn’t feel very good. He quickly sat down on the large black sofa and passed out.

After powering up with verbs:

The news hit him like a sharp hook to the stomach. He felt his heart rip, and an ocean of darkness washed through him as he collapsed into the sofa.

Big difference, right?

When it comes to descriptive power and sharp imagery, the second paragraph leaves the first, adjective-infested one coughing in the dust.

Here are some examples of powerfully “verbed-up” sentences from Jon Morrow’s Serious Bloggers Only landing page:

Pay attention to some of the verbs he uses:

• Because they stumbled into popularity
• They are desperate to seize the opportunity before it slips away from them.
• If you’re a serious blogger, you’re tired of wading through thousands of articles, reading contradictory advice, and trying to figure out how to piece it all together.

See how alive and vivid the writing becomes with just a few well-placed sharp, powerful verbs?

Keep a thesaurus handy at all times, and be sure to have a swipe file on standby. This will help you inject strong verbs and words into your copy without ripping your hair out in frustration.

4. Adhere to the AIDA formula

When writing copy, it’s easy to find yourself staring at a blank page wondering, “What’s next?”

That’s where the AIDA formula (by copywriter Gary Halbert) comes in handy.

It’s a formula that allows you to consistently create a smooth, strong sales message that latches onto your reader’s attention and keeps them interested.

So what does AIDA stand for?

• Attention. This is where you snag your prospect’s attention with a benefit-driven headline and introduction to make him want to read on.
• Interest. This is where you’ll pique the interest of your prospects and nudge them deeper into your copy by describing how your pain solving product/service benefits their lives.
• Desire. After arousing your prospects interest, here’s where you pump up his desire for what you’re selling. Usually with a bullet point list that describes all the juicy benefits of your product/service.
• Action. After your reader is blown away with the amazing benefits your product, you then invite him/her to take action. Usually to make an order or fill in a form.

Here’s an example of the AIDA formula in action from the webprofits.com landing page.

Attention

The headline is curious and grabs the reader’s attention by suggesting that the SEO game has changed.

Interest

Once the page catches the reader’s attention, it cultivates interest with paragraphs which explain how SEO has changed (next to the laptop).

Desire

After that, it arouses the prospect’s desire by describing the benefits of the product.

Action

It finally closes with the “Get Free Analysis Now” call to action.

Following the AIDA formula inserts a smooth compelling flow into your copy and keeps readers glued to your sales message.

5. Harness the power of reframing to shoot up perceived value

A 1999 study by psychologists Davis and Knowles showed the shocking persuasive power of a technique called reframing. In the study, they went door to door and sold note cards for charity.

• In the first pitch, they said that it was $3 for 8 cards. They made sales at 40% of households.
• In their second pitch, they told people that it was 300 pennies for 8 cards, which was followed up by, “which is a bargain,” resulting in 80% of the households buying cards.

This tiny change in the pitch had a huge effect on results, but how and why was it so influential?

Here’s what happens:

When people are told the cost of the cards is 300 pennies instead of 3 dollars, their routine thought process is disrupted. Now, while they’re distracted trying to process the odd sounding “300 pennies” and why anyone would use pennies instead of dollars…

They’re immediately told that it’s a “bargain.” And because pennies sound so easy to spend in comparison to hard-earned dollars, they are more likely to accept the suggestion that the cards are a bargain.

This is known as reframing.

Reframing is a wickedly effective technique. It allows you to manipulate the perceived value of a product by making comparisons and shifting the focus of your reader.

Here’s an example of what reframing looks like:

You wouldn’t rush to buy something that’s $500 a year right? I mean for most people, it’s a decent amount of change.

How about for $42 a month?

Or $8 (the price two lattes) a day?

Sounds much more appealing doesn’t it?

This landing page reframes the price of a brand new car in terms of two lattes per day ($8), which serves to soften the blow of the price and make the offer more appealing.

Here’s another example from the CopyHour landing page:

The landing page reframes the price by comparing the total price of the course to how much it costs per day, instantly reducing the weight of the price in the prospect’s mind.

Crafting seductive landing page copy doesn’t have to be painful

Powerful landing page copy doesn’t have to be painful to create. Pick a couple of strong techniques and tips, focus on the needs of your prospects, and you’ll be fine.

Now it’s your turn. How do you go about cranking up your copy power to increase conversions? What’s the weirdest conversion boost/decline you’ve had with regards to copywriting? I’d love to know!

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The Do's and Don'ts of Writing a Customer Case Study [Infographic]

Want to write a powerful customer case study that resonates with your audience? Then check out the following do's and dont's of crafting a successful case study. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Supreme Court Rules To Keep Texas Abortion Clinics Open

The Supreme Court also ruled 10 clinics that perform abortion can stay open in Texas thereby giving the clinics a chance to appeal the federal court decision ordering them to close in early June.

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For Type 2 Diabetes, Where You Live Matters (CME/CE)

(MedPage Today) -- T2D risk based in part on access to healthy food, exercise facilities, says study.

The 5 Stages of Blog Growth: How Your Traffic Tactics Should Change as You Grow

If you know exactly what you’re doing, you can build a blog that gets over 100,000 visitors per month in less than year—from scratch.

Chances are, however, you don’t know exactly what you need to do to achieve that, but that’s okay.

The fact that you’re here and ready to learn means that one day, you will know what you need to do to create a fully sustainable business from your blog.

Another factor is the time it takes. Some of you may be able to build a thriving blog in a year, while others may take two, three, or even five years.

During this journey, your blog will progress through five distinct stages:

1. Blog creation
2. Initial growth: finding your 100 “true fans”
3. Scaling up your traffic
4. Reaping the rewards
5. Maintaining your success

In this article, I’ll outline the five stages of blog growth to help you understand where you’re today and how far you have left to go. 

Stage 1: Your blog is born

Expected time to complete: Less than two weeks.

When you read most blogs on creating an online business and online marketing, the sexy parts involve hundreds of thousands of visitors and profit.

But traffic and profit are the result; your foundation is the cause of those results. Figuring out the important details of your blog isn’t always easy, but without a solid foundation, you can’t build a skyscraper.

There are four things you need to do in this preparatory phase.

Even if you already have a blog, you may benefit from going over these things again and improving them if you skipped them before.

1. Define your niche

This is the first step—the step where most blog owners fail. It is crucial to know who is going to benefit from your content.

In other words: who do you want to serve?

You don’t need to know how you’re going to do it yet. The products you will make, the content you will create, and your traffic generating methods don’t matter yet. The audience you want to help comes first.

You need to be able to state what type of people you’re trying to serve and be as specific as possible. It’s better to be too specific than too general as you can always expand later.

For example, you may want to serve office workers who want to learn how to eat healthy at work.

Here are 124 niche case studies, both good and bad.

2. Create a reader persona

Now that you know the people you want to serve, you need to learn more about them.

In order to create content that actually helps them, you must understand who they are, how they act, and what they struggle with.

You can learn about your target audience in many ways, for example:

• in-person conversations
• demographic sites like Alexa and SEMrush

By the end of your research, you should know your target audience’s:

• age
• gender
• job
• hobbies
• beliefs
• values

You can even give your reader persona a name. Note that all of these have to be as specific as possible. For instance, 25-35 years old isn’t an age, it’s a range. Pick one age that accurately describes your ideal reader.

In the end, you want to have one specific person in mind you can write for. This will help you create content that resonates with your readers.

3. Create your blog

If you’re going to build a blog-based business, you will at some point need a functional blog.

Unless you need some really unique features, I recommend sticking with WordPress for now. It’s the simplest option to get you up and running, and you can always redesign the blog in the future. Here’s how to install WordPress—it’s pretty simple.

Alternatively, if you’re already running your site on a platform like HubSpot, it might be even easier for you to create a blog.

What I don’t advise you do is go out and spend thousands of dollars on a custom CMS or design. The first version of any blog isn’t going to be perfect, and it’s going to change a lot down the line.

Focus on getting a simple, functional, and not completely ugly blog up and running as fast as possible. Don’t waste weeks or months trying to make everything look perfect.

4. Discover where your readers hang out

Before you can even attempt to draw your target audience to your blog, you have to figure out where they spend their time.

Note that in some niches, you may have to get offline and go to conventions or local meetings to connect with your target audience and get them on your site.

To start with, find the most popular blogs in your niche. The easiest ways to do this is by Googling “top [your general niche] blogs.”

Create a spreadsheet to keep track of these sites. In one column, indicate if the blog allows comments, and in another, if it allows guest posts. To check for guest posts, Google “[domain name] guest post.”

Go through any big lists of blogs, and visit each one individually. Look for signs of high traffic such as several comments on each blog post or a lot of social shares.

Add the best ones to your list. You want to identify blogs that your reader persona visits so that you can eventually get them over to your site. Ideally, you want to identify as many as you can, but at least 50. If you’re having trouble getting that many, think broader, e.g., “best health sites” instead of “best nutrition sites.”

After blogs, it’s time to check out forums in your niche. Again, search for “[your general niche]+ forum,” and go through the results on the first few pages.

If you find forums you believe your target audience visits regularly, record them in a separate section of your spreadsheet. Note the number of members, or active members, to indicate activity and popularity.

Forums typically aren’t big enough to use as a main traffic strategy at any point, but they can help you refine your reader persona and can be used for certain promotion tactics.

Stage 2: Finding your 100 true fans

Expected time to complete: Less than four months.

Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly coined a concept called 1,000 true fans. It really took off when Seth Godin started referencing it in his advice.

In short, he described how anyone could make a great living if they interacted with and had support from 1,000 true fans.

This article was written in the context of being a musician or an artist, but the same applies to most small businesses. A relatively small group of loyal readers can make your business a big enough success to allow you to become a full-time blogger (if you aren’t already).

If you have a new blog, going from zero to 1,000 is a big leap. Too big, in my opinion, and unnecessary.

A better goal is to gather 100 true fans.

When you first begin a blog, you’re starting at zero. No matter how well you research your target audience, you’re going to make mistakes. The problem here is that no one will tell you what mistakes you’re making—at least not yet.

As long as you defined your target audience well enough, you will have the ability to attract your first 100 fans (although it could take a while). These fans will play an instrumental role in the growth of your blog.

Loyal readers will comment on posts and respond to emails. They will tell you when something resonates with them through comments and feedback. They will also tell you when they don’t like something either through a comment, email, or silence.

If you have 100 high quality subscribers and still can’t get any comments or email replies, the problem isn’t the subscribers: it’s your content.

In reality, you’ll likely fall somewhere in between perfect resonance and radio silence. On some posts, you’ll get a lot of engagement (say 10-15 comments from your 100 fans), while others will only get one or two.

Use this feedback to tweak your reader persona and craft content that helps this updated persona. That’s when you’ll start seeing consistent resonance and more rapid growth of subscribers.

So, where are we right now?

You have a brand new blog but no audience (or a very small one). This is your main challenge. You need to get your first 100 fans.

In addition, you have a ton to do. You need to create content, build relationships, create more content, promote your content, and more. But you’re likely the only one who can do it since your blog isn’t producing any revenue.

You need to spend your time wisely. That’s why I’m going to tell you the optimal strategies that you should use to get your first 100 true fans.

Optimal strategy #1: Guest-posting

The core of your initial traffic strategy should be guest-posting. The most common places that your target audience hang out at are likely other blogs (in most niches).

You need to find popular blogs that have a huge audience. A small portion of this audience will be your target audience. You can then attempt to get these readers to subscribe to your site through a guest post. Guest-posting is an important strategy for blogs of all sizes.

One common mistake people make that you may also make is to try to write any guest post that you think will be popular on a site. However, even if the guest post becomes popular and sends you a lot of subscribers, they might not be the right ones that you want to build your blog and business around.

Instead, find a topic that you think will do well on the blog you’re guest-posting on, but angle it towards your target reader.

For example, if I were writing a guest post on Forbes (which I regularly do), I wouldn’t write a general article on the current state of the economy. Although it might become popular, I would rather write a slightly less popular article about how the recent economy problems affect your business’ marketing plan, or something along those lines.

Always remember that your goal at this stage is to find that small group of 100 true fans and get them to your site. Attract their attention first and foremost before considering the rest of a traffic source’s audience.

Here is everything you need to know about getting results from guest-posting:

• Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
• 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts
• Advanced Guest Posting Strategies

Optimal strategy #2: Create the right type of content for your blog

As I’ve already noted, your time is extremely limited. While it might be ideal to pump out a ton of content to get your blog rolling, it’s not the most important thing.

Right now, you have very few (if any) visitors. You don’t need to continuously create content because no one’s reading it.

It’s better to spend time trying to get traffic from other sources before creating a high volume of posts on your own blog.

That being said, you do need some content on your blog, but some types of content are better than others. Writing an opinion post is going to be a waste of time: why would anyone care what you think at this point? That’s not an insult—it’s a fact. You need to build up your expert reputation before writing a post like that.

But certain types of content can work well at this stage. In particular, you should create a few posts that can attract quality backlinks and help you build relationships with influencers. If you do it right, it might even result in some decent targeted traffic.

These magical content types are:

• roundup posts
• ego bait posts
• “poster boy” posts

You probably already know what link roundups are. You ask several influencers in a niche the same question and then publish the results. Some influencers will comment on the post, link to it, and share on social media.

Ego bait describes a wide range of posts. Essentially, you want to appeal to the ego of an influencer or company with a large following. Make them look good by showing that their advice solved a problem for you or someone else. Let them know you created the post, and maybe they will link to it.

Finally, you can use the “poster boy” formula. It’s a lot like ego bait, but it takes the tactic to the next level. Find a few particular influencers, and find a particular piece of strategy or technique advice from them.

Then, implement that advice and track the results. Create a case study of your results that make the influencer look amazing. This will lead the influencer to keep linking to your case study as evidence of their awesomeness.

This last tactic is a lot of work, but it produces results. Bryan Harris was able to get over 400 subscribers with this technique on a new blog.

Optimal strategy #3: Paid traffic

If you have more money than time to invest in your business, paid traffic is a way to accelerate your growth.

That being said, it’s completely optional. Many successful blogs never use paid ads, while many other successful blogs do it at one point or another.

The big benefit of paid ads is that despite having no existing traffic base, you can create an audience. It can get expensive, especially if you’re new to using paid advertising. It’s very important that you spend some time improving your email opt-in rate before blowing through thousands of dollars.

Here are some of the best resources on using paid traffic to build a blog’s audience:

• 6 Simple Steps to Start Your First PPC Campaign
• PPC Hero guides
• PPC Advertising is Just As Much About the Audience as it is Keywords

Optimal strategy #4: Develop social media presence

Last but not least, you have to attend to social media.

Popular social media platforms have boatloads of traffic, and the most popular ones—Facebook and Twitter—almost definitely contain your target audience.

The problem is that any good social media strategy takes time to work. If you’re going to use social media, you have to be prepared to consistently use your chosen platform for months before it starts to pay off with some decent traffic.

If you’re really set on using social media to funnel traffic to your site, you can speed it up by using paid traffic. As I’ve shown on the nutrition site case study, paid ads on Facebook are relatively cheap and can help you build an authoritative page quickly.

I don’t recommend using social media as a primary traffic strategy unless you’re willing to continually invest in it. However, you can still identify one or two channels to start building while you focus on other traffic generation methods.

What about SEO?

If you know me well, you know how much I love SEO and benefit from it. But aside from building authoritative links when you get the chance, you shouldn’t focus on it very much at the beginning.

Gaining the authority and trust from search engines takes several months of publishing high quality content. You should start seeing some real organic search traffic after about a year, and that’s when you can shift more of your focus toward SEO.

Stage 3: Attracting swarms of fans—scaling up

Expected time to complete: 8-24 months

Now that you know almost exactly what your audience needs help with and wants, it’s time to kick your traffic growth efforts into overdrive.

Although you will be growing much faster than you did during the last stage, this will take time too.

Look at the NeilPatel.com blog as an example. I began the blog at the very end of September 2014. In the month of May, 2015, my traffic grew to 63,827 visitors—that took about eight months.

Consider that it took me eight months to grow to this point even with my experience and personal brand. Additionally, I’m still in the process of scaling up the traffic to that blog, which means it falls into this stage.

At this point, you have some traffic and a good idea of your target audience. Your main challenge now is starting to create great content on a regular basis. In addition, your time is still limited.

Optimal strategy #1: Continue with your traffic-building strategies 

Since now you have to spend more time on content creation, you will have less time to spend on getting traffic from other sources. Nevertheless, you need to continue your traffic strategies from Stage 2.

Although you may have 100 true fans, your rate of growth will be too slow if you solely depend on those fans to spread the word. Instead, as you gain traffic during this stage, start spending more and more time on creating and promoting content on your own blog.

Optimal strategy #2: Create a content schedule

In the previous stage, you started creating content for your blog. Now, it’s necessary to do it on a regular basis. Think about not just those specific types of posts that we looked at but any type of content your true fans may enjoy.

You need to decide how often you want to post and what you will be writing about.

A thorough content calendar will help you plan out content for up to a year in advance. At this point, you’re still getting a lot feedback from your 100 true fans. I’d recommend planning your content for only a few weeks or months so that it can be adjusted based on the feedback you receive.

Once you achieve consistent resonance, you can plan your content schedule as far in advance as you’d like.

Optimal strategy #3: Start considering monetization

Traffic is nice, but the end goal should always be to produce revenue.

If you’re selling a service, e.g., offering consulting, you can do this early on with no issues. It doesn’t take a lot of time to create a simple landing page. Put a link to it in your menu, and drop it in your emails to subscribers when appropriate.

The long-term goal of your blog may be to sell a product. If you already have a product, you can start selling it during this phase and put some time into improving your conversion rate.

If you don’t have a product, now is a great time to start paying attention to the major pains of your audience so that you can create a product around them. Most products take months to create, so the farther you can plan ahead, the better.

Stage 4: Reap the rewards—getting paid

Expected time to complete: three to six months

The line between Stages 3 and 4 is often blurred. Once you develop a sizable audience (most go with 5,000-10,000 subscribers), you need to monetize your blog as soon as possible. At the same time, you need to keep growing and continuing to do all the growth strategies described in Stage 3.

Optimal strategy #1: Focus on monetization

“Why does it always have to be about the money?”

I know that you might feel like I’m telling you to be greedy by advising to monetize as soon as possible, but it’s the opposite of that.

At this point, you have tens of thousands of visitors a month (at least!).

If you don’t monetize your blog, how can you continue to serve your visitors well? You can’t invest in better content, and you can’t respond to all emails or comments any more. One person can’t service an audience of thousands.

If you really have zero time available to create a product, know that once you have a sizable audience, you will be approached regularly for joint ventures (JV).

Essentially, the other party will create the product; you provide the audience to sell it to; and you split the profit. Don’t immediately accept the first JV offer. Take your time, and only work with someone you trust and respect to provide as much value for your audience as possible.

Finally, you can always promote other reputable affiliate offers if you feel that you’re not quite ready to create your own product.

Optimal strategy #2: Hire

Now that you are deriving some income from the blog, you can start getting some help so that you can continue to help your audience as much as possible.

First, you need to decide which parts of the blog need your attention the most.

Personally, I like to be the one writing my blog’s content (on Quick Sprout and NeilPatel.com), so I can’t outsource that. However, on Crazy Egg’s blog, I’ve hired an editor that has assembled a team of writers to produce content.

Here are the most common areas that blogs usually hire for:

• product support
• product development
• answering simple emails (get a virtual assistant)
• graphic design (images and infographics for content)
• web development (for site redesign)
• content strategy development
• content writing

Once you’ve identified which parts of your blog require your personal attention, start hiring people to take care of the rest.

Do this slowly, and make sure you’re hiring quality people to help you. It’ll save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

Stage 5: Maintain your position on the Golden Throne

Expected time to complete: hopefully, you stay here forever! (or until you sell)

At this point, you have a full-fledged business.

Your blog should easily be generating enough so that you can focus full-time on it. This is the stage that Quick Sprout has been at for quite some time.

In some niches, you will reach this point faster than others, just due to your specific audience and the size of your market.

But if you just sit on your success, you will lose it. Your business is almost always in a state of growth or decline. Obviously, it’s better to focus on growth than let the results of your hard work wither away.

Your main challenge at this point is to continue producing high quality work in the form of blog content and products. Additionally, you still have limited time to take advantage of all the opportunities now coming your way.

Optimal strategy #1: Keep hiring

If you’re doing things right, your traffic is only going to keep increasing. To keep up your quality standards and to free up time, you will have to find more reliable people to add to your small team.

The hardest thing about maintaining a successful growing business is finding and keeping good people on your team. If you find someone who does their job well, pay them accordingly even if you could get them to work for you for slightly cheaper.

This not only keeps them happy while working, but it prevents them from wanting to leave in the future. Not having to continually find, hire, and train people will save you much more in the long run than saving a few dollars on salaries.

Optimal strategy #2: Automate

The great thing about having a significant amount of revenue coming in is that you no longer have to do things you don’t enjoy. Almost all boring parts of running a blog can be automated, either with a paid tool or an employee/freelancer.

Most hires should be for a specific task. When you hire someone, don’t just leave them to figure out things by themselves.

You need to create easy-to-follow systems that outline what you’d like your employees to do step-by-step. Although initial training will take time, in the long run, it will save you from having to waste time correcting mistakes and changing their work habits to suit yours.

Optimal strategy #3: Be selective

At this point, you are going to get offers to do all sorts of things, including guest-posting and conference appearances.

Since you have very limited time, you need to pick your opportunities carefully. Right now, it’s about getting a little bit more traffic and building your personal brand. Pick the opportunities that will have the most positive impact on your reputation and position as a thought leader in your field.

Optimal strategy #4: SEO

No, I didn’t forget about SEO. By now, your domain has a solid amount of authority and trust, and you should be seeing a significant amount of organic traffic from search engines.

At this point, there are three things you should do:

1. Evaluate your blog design for optimal “link juice” flow.
2. Re-evaluate old content, and see if you can optimize for better terms.
3. Strategically incorporate keywords into your future content.

If you don’t have experience with SEO, you could always hire an expert to help you out, now that you are generating revenue.

Conclusion

The purpose of this post was to give you a clear layout of how a blog-based business grows over time.

Growing a successful blog is not something that can be done quickly.

What I hope you get out of this is that if you use the right tactics at the right time, you will strategically grow your blog and take guessing and luck out of the equation.

You can learn all of the tactics you need on Quick Sprout and the NeilPatel.com blog.

As a final note, never stop learning about your readers and trying to help them. Even though this blog is past the initial stages, I’m still learning how I can serve you better every day through your comments, emails, and viewing habits.

To better understand where you are with your business or blog, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a comment below telling me what stage you’re currently at.

As of today, this blog will no longer be updated

You can now find this kind of information on the new USA.gov website.

If you’d like to still get periodic updates from us on timely and important topics, you can sign up for one of our many email lists. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter. 

The Long Term Value of an Email Marketing Welcome Programme

From making a guest feel at home when they visit for the first time to solidifying a new business relationship with a firm handshake, a warm welcome is essential for any relationship to get off on the right foot.

A warm welcome is also crucial for the email marketing environment; just as you wouldn’t ignore a customer entering a store, an email marketer shouldn’t forget to say hello when a shopper signs up to receive the brand’s emails.

At our most recent User Forum (a series of events where we bring Oracle Marketing Cloud customers together to learn from one another), we found that 66% of the brands in the room had a welcome programme that they were constantly reviewing. In order to ensure engagement amongst customers, brands need to analyse whether their welcome programme is effective. For example, if they offer just one welcome email and it’s not generating engagement, it’s likely that a brand will need to add more communication – for many customers it takes more than one piece of great content for them to start clicking.

For example, Missguided’s ‘Welcome Campaign’ consists of a series of personalised emails in the first week after joining Missguided’s database and is activated by sign-up information. The online fashion brand needed to stand out from the competition and welcoming in new audiences, as well as keeping customers engaged between purchase cycles through personalisation, was a highly effective way of doing that.

Oracle Marketing Cloud helped Missguided to implement intelligent and targeted automated marketing so that they could capitalise on sales opportunities at each stage of the customer lifecycle and boost engagement rates. This personalisation ranged from targeting new customers with the variety of welcome emails based on segmentation to offering discounts and incentives around the customer’s birthday. This targeted marketing technique increased the click-rate by 133% for Missguided, and as a result, email conversion rates increased by 298%.

Using data and this trigger-based approach, brands can create tailored welcome programmes that build a strong ongoing relationship with the customer. However, to do this successfully good data hygiene is also essential. For example, as customers sign up to an email mailing list, the brand can implement validation to ensure that the data being captured is accurate. This ensures that the relationships starts without any errors and means that the seeds are sown for a long-lasting brand affiliation.

For example, if a customer doesn’t receive the email they think they’ve signed up to they could get frustrated with the brand. Similarly, a typo can mean a brand misses an opportunity to generate sales from a new customer, but this can also damage their reputation as a sender amongst ISPs as they will receive bounce backs. Adding additional steps into the validation process means that brands can ensure they have the right customer details, enabling them to protect their brand reputation and engage with the right prospects.

Brands need to review their active user base and use their welcome programme to kick-start the customer relationship successfully from the first email interaction. To do this, brands should also look to understand channel preferences. For example, if the customer signed up through Facebook, the welcome programme should acknowledge this and then the brand should look to serve social content. This helps to create a seamless cross-channel experience and shows that the brand has understood the customer’s personal preferences.

First impressions are everything; remind a customer why they signed up to hear from your brand regularly and provide targeted content to drive long term brand loyalty. In a crowded retail market, service is a huge differentiator; if customers have a bad experience of a brand they are unlikely to return. Every email communication with the customer should be valuable; a strong welcome programme means your relationship starts positively, and when followed up with relevant and engaging content, that relationship has much greater potential to grow.

For email marketing inspiration be sure to download our Look Book 2015: a visual guide to the industry’s best branding and marketing campaigns of the year.

The Importance of Customer Centricity in Evolving A/B Testing

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When we talk about A/B testing, we often think about it on a test-by-test basis. While this singular focus is beneficial, it overlooks testing’s role as an ongoing system for optimization.

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Lauren Wagner, Senior Manager, and Tessa Srebro, Lead Generation and Marketing Associate, both of VolunteerMatch, to discuss how to utilize A/B testing to constantly evolve programs.

Lauren and Tessa’s company, VolunteerMatch, is a nonprofit organization that is the world’s largest volunteering network. It also has an interesting funding model. The company sells a Software as a Service (SaaS) product to companies to help fund its organization and, so far, this model has generated almost $1 billion in social value each year through its work with nonprofits and volunteers. VolunteerMatch is also more than familiar with the benefits of testing, as evidenced by the subject line test it ran with MarketingExperiments.

Watch the excerpt below from the MarketingSherpa Media Center to learn how keeping up with current trends and thinking like a consumer can help evolve your testing and your company.

Keep up with current trends and your customers

Keeping up with current customer trends is one of the most important pieces of advice Lauren Wagner gave when asked how to keep a company’s A/B testing constantly evolving. Be sure that you’re keeping up with current trends in the marketplace, but don’t forget to take the time to learn about your customers.

Lauren suggested paying attention to what your customers are interested in and adapting to their needs and interests.

Lauren advised marketers to “continue to look at the space that you’re working in and seeing, you know, what are people talking about, what are the trends that they’re talking about so that you can continue to take your emails and continue to kind of mold them and change them and shift them to what those people are really looking for and are really interested in.”

By utilizing this mentality, VolunteerMatch saw a shift in the departments it worked with and was able to adjust accordingly.

“The employee-engagement, employee-volunteering space has kind of shifted over the years from, you know, sitting in marketing departments, sitting in corporate responsibility departments, sitting in human resources departments,” Lauren said. “For us to kind of shift the way that we’re approaching the benefits of employee volunteering from each of those different places in a company really has to evolve and change over the years.”

Think as a marketer and a consumer

Tessa Srebro highlighted one of the biggest and often underutilized advantages marketers have: Every marketer is also a consumer. Instead of only looking at campaigns and advertisements through a marketing lens, question what ads are working from your point of view as a consumer. Tessa explained that when she sees an ad that impresses or interests her as a consumer, she then asks herself why that’s the case. This approach has led to great marketing insights.

“I’m kind of looking for things that I can take from other marketers to my own organization. I’m constantly analyzing the world around me in that way,” she said.

She then added, “Human nature doesn’t change. So if you have these skills about what sorts of messages are going to appeal to a person, whether through emotions or logic or all of that, that’s timeless. Human nature is not going to change.”

You might also like

MECLABS Email Messaging Online Course [Register now]

Register for MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas, Feb. 22-14

Watch Full Sessions from Email Summit 2015

Online Testing: How a B2B SaaS nonprofit increased clickthrough on landing page by 291% [MarketingSherpa case study]

Lead Management: How a B2B SaaS nonprofit decreased its sales cycle 99% [MarketingSherpa case study]

The Writer’s Dilemma: How to know which marketing copy will really be most effective [More from the blogs]

A/B Testing: How to improve already effective marketing (and win a ticket to Email Summit in Vegas) [More from the blogs]