We’ve all heard that we need to produce valuable, in-depth content and that ‘content is king’.

And that’s absolutely true. But if you tried it in practice, you also know how time-consuming content creation and can be. Plus, let’s not forget that your prospective customers and clients are busy. Just because you’ve shared a piece of your awesome content once, it doesn’t mean they’ve seen it!

So here’s something a content strategy you may have not considered – content repurposing.

In this blog post, we are going to share 6 different ways for you to repurpose a blog post (and save yourself a hell of a lot of time in the process!).

But first thing first…

What is Content Repurposing? 

Content repurposing means taking a piece of content that you’ve previously created and turning it into something that you can reuse and re-share somewhere else. Easy, right?

Repurposing can take many forms. You can record a YouTube video or a podcast episode and turn that into a blog post. Or you can take sections from a blog post and share them as a series of social media posts. You can even pull out interesting quotes from a piece of content and create beautiful graphics, memes, or infographics out of them. That’s repurposing too!

When it comes to content repurposing, you have plenty of options, but we always recommend that you start with a blog post first.

And here’s why…

Why Repurpose a Blog Post? 

We tell all our clients and members to have a ‘website first’ mentality.

Are you now wondering what that even is? Well, fair enough.

It’s simple, really. It means you create content for your website first and then slice and dice it however you like and repurpose it into different pieces. And once you have repurposed it, you can share it in different formats and on other platforms, like your email list or social media, for example.

But why start with your website?

Because the more content you share on your website, the more chances you give yourself to rank on Google for different keywords. And that gives you opportunities of being found by your ideal customers or clients.

Pretty cool, right?

We think so.

Because if you don’t publish content for your website first, you’ll miss out on all those search engine searches that could easily land more and more people on your website. If you want to read more about how creating content helps you drive traffic to your website, head over to our article, SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

But the blog post is the foundation of your content strategy – it’s where it all starts.

So now that you’ve got some amazing blog posts, what can you do with them?

1. How to repurpose a blog post onto LinkedIn 

The great thing about creating a longer piece of written content first (and that’s your blog post!) is that you can then easily take sections of it and create 5-10 individual posts that you can share on social media.

We use this method from Content Writer Sara Bussandri to repurpose our blog posts on LinkedIn, but it works for Facebook or your Instagram feed too.

All you need to do is to grab a section of your blog post (a teaching, a lesson, or a key point you want to share) and ‘dress it up’ for the social media platform you’re sharing it on.

Using Sara’s method, to put your post together, you need:

• A ‘hook’ – an interesting line or question that will stop people in their tracks. You want them to quit scrolling and read your post.
• A short introduction to your topic. Why are you talking about this today? Why does it matter to your audience?
• The lesson or point you want to make. This can be taken directly from your blog post. If it works, copy and paste. If not, rephrase and summarise.
• A conclusion or question to encourage your audience to engage with your post. You want people to comment on your post, as that tells LinkedIn that your content is interesting and popular. And in turn, it will be shown to more people.
• And finally, some hashtags. These work as keywords. If someone searches for a particular term or follows the hashtags you’ve used, they will see your content pop up in their feed.

LinkedIn posts are limited to a maximum of 1,300 characters, so you’ll have to break your blogposts down and repurpose the content.

An Example of a Blog Post Repurposed into a LinkedIn Post

Below, is an example of how we turned a blog post about creating a lead generating website, into a LinkedIn post. The main part of the LinkedIn post (the 3 key steps to get leads on your website) comes from this blog post. Every time we write a blog post we also write up 5-8 LinkedIn posts too. This is because the blog post is fresh in our minds and it makes it a much faster process!

Repurposing Your Blog Post Into A LinkedIn Article

But nothing stops from you sharing longer articles on LinkedIn.

You can either create a LinkedIn article out of your entire blog posts or use parts of it and encourage your readers to go and read the full version on your website. Publishing articles on LinkedIn can help with your brand awareness and visibility. And it’s also a great way to build relationships with your connections.

If you want to find out more about creating LinkedIn articles, our awesome member Louise Brogan wrote this piece: How to Create LinkedIn Articles That People Will Read and Share.

Repurposing your blog post into a LinkedIn Carousels

We don’t ordinarily see LinkedIn as a visual platform. But this recent article from Content Repurposing Expert, Amy Woods at Content 10x, was really interesting! Amy talks about how you can repurpose your content into a ‘LinkedIn carousel’ which is multiple images that you need to swipe through. These images tell a story or explain something. And they work incredibly well on LinkedIn. This isn’t something we’ve tried before but it’s on our to-do list after reading the article!

2. How to repurpose a blog post on Instagram posts and Stories 

Compared to LinkedIn, Instagram is a much more visual platform. So if you are going to repurpose your blog post content for Insta posts or Stories, you need images!

When we repurpose content for our Instagram account, we create graphics out of the content. We use templates from Viral Marketing Stars to help us, which can be customised with your brand colours and fonts in Canva. They’re designed to generate engagement and grow your following and have been working really well for us. 

Obviously, if you’re posting on your Instagram feed, you also need some written content to go with your image. The graphic will capture your audience’s attention and stop them from scrolling, but the text in your post is your chance to encourage them to engage with your content and go and check your website.

So make sure you write a unique and engaging post to introduce your blog content. You don’t want to just tell them to click on the link in your bio! You can use the same tips we shared for creating LinkedIn posts to write your Insta posts too.

An example of how we repurposed a blog post to an Instagram Post…

Below was one of several graphics we made based on our blog post, what to put on your homepage. As you can see the image doesn’t just say, ‘hey we have a new blog post!’ It gives people some actual advice (such as the 8 things you should include on your homepage).

3. Repurposing your blog post into a Podcast 

Your blog post can also be turned into a podcast. So once you’ve written your blog posts and organised all your thoughts on a particular topic, it’s easy enough to record a podcast episode out of it.

You can either record yourself as your read out your article like a script and then upload your audio file onto your podcasting platform, or you just use your blog post as a starting point and guideline. Instead of reading, you talk your audience through it naturally. And that will become your podcast episode.

Awesome, right?

If you don’t have a podcast show already, you may have a few other things to think about, including equipment, graphics, etc. To find out more about how to start your own podcast, check out this article from Colin Gray, a.k.a. The Podcast Host, How to Start a Podcast: Every Single Step for 2021.

And if you are a podcaster and your content creation machine starts with podcasting rather than with your website, you can fix that. Your podcast episodes can also be turned into blog posts that you can publish on your website to drive more traffic to it. For more information on how to do this, check out this blog post from Content Writer Sara Bussandri, How to turn your podcast episodes into blog posts.

An example of how we repurposed a blog post into a podcast episode…

We took a blog post on how to create the perfect website and transformed it into a podcast episode called: The 6 Elements That Make a Successful Website. Both contain the same 6 key elements that make a successful website. And both break these 6 elements down.

The podcast and blog post are both similar, only one is written and the other is spoken. So if you have blog posts and you’re planning to start a podcast, remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel! You have plenty of content on your blog that you can transform into podcast episodes.

4. Using your blog post within an email 

Your blog posts can also be used to share content with your email list.

Again, we recommend that you don’t just send out an email that reads,

“Hey! I’ve written a blog post. Here’s the link. Go over and read it!”

Honestly? No.

You won’t get a lot of people who actually go and click on that link to read your awesome blog post.

Think about it – if someone’s trusted you enough to give you their email address it’s because they liked what they saw on your website, and they wanted more of it. So your email needs to deliver some value!

You want your lovely subscribers to learn something from your email, so don’t just ‘link drop’. When you put your email together, include at least some of the content from your blog post. Pull out the most important or interesting points, for example.

Obviously, you can still give them a link to it, but we’re talking about repurposing here. So ideally you want to use your blog content in the newsletter and give your audience the information they’re after.

An example of how we repurposed a blog post into an email newsletter

As we said, you can’t just link to your blog post in your emails. It’s good to actually give some content within the email itself. In this example, from our bi-weekly newsletter, The Jam Sandwich, we break down just one point from our blog post, The Ultimate Guide to SEO.

We go in-depth on this one point and ask people if they want to read the whole blog post. But the point is, they will have learnt something even if they don’t go on to read the whole post.

5. Create a lead magnet out of your blog post 

Another way to repurpose your blog posts is to create content upgrades or lead magnets.

A content upgrade is a piece of content that you offer to your readers as a bonus or as additional information in exchange for their email address. It’s basically a lead magnet that goes with your blog posts.

Why add bonus content to your blog posts? Because that way you can capture email addresses and turn anonymous website users into subscribers. And once you have those people on your list, you can then nurture that relationship, offer value, and hopefully, one day turn that subscriber into a loyal customer.

Cheatsheets, checklists, or guides work really well as content upgrades, and you can create them yourself with very little effort using a free resource like Canva.

An example of how we repurposed a blog post into a lead magnet

You can find a content upgrade example in our blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Generating More Leads From Your Website. Right in the middle of our article, we have a call to action that invites our readers to download our 10-minute Lead-Gen Guide.

6. Use your blog post in a presentation 

And last but not least, you could also repurpose a blog post into a presentation. Once you have a series of nicely designed slides, there’s a lot you can do with them.

For example, you could:

• Upload the presentation as a Document on LinkedIn.
• Give a talk at a networking meeting, an industry event, or inside a private membership.
• Share your content during an online webinar on social media (for example, in a Facebook live).
• Upload the slideshow onto your YouTube channel.
• Talk through it and record a Loom video that you can then upload onto your website.
• Use the content in a paid training session or workshop.

As you can see, there’s a lot you can do with your content, and it all starts from a blog post!

Want some help with consistent blogging?

Thinking up fresh new content for your website, social media, your newsletter, and any other marketing channels you might be active on is so difficult! But hopefully, you can see now why we advocate creating content for your website first. Repurposing your blog posts will make your life easier and save you time too.

And if you’d like some accountability, our next 90-day Content Challenge (or 90DC for the cool kids) kicks off on the 17th May 2021. We encourage you to create a fresh piece of content every week for 13 weeks. It can be any type of content you like, but if you create and publish blog posts, imagine how much you could get out of 13 pieces of content in terms of traffic to your website and repurposing opportunities!

When you join the 90DC you get:

• Accountability.
• A dedicated feedback channel.
• A Private community group.
• Weekly training.
• SEO and Content Marketing courses.
• Content Strategy Planning sessions.
• And even Canva blog post image templates.

All for only $297 for the full 90 days! Or you can join our membership for just $59 per month and get access to the challenge and so much more You can sign up for the 90DC here. See you there!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to Repurpose a Blog Post (and Save Yourself So Much Time!) appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

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Website copy is one of the key elements that will make your website a success. That’s why, in this episode, we’ll give you four easy ways you can instantly improve your writing.

You’ll learn…

• How to make your copy more engaging
• How to identify passive voice
• How to make your copy less clunky
• How to use rhythm in your writing

Resources

54 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales

Facebook Group

4 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Writing: Transcript

Welcome to Episode 44 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today I’m going to give you 4 instant easy-peasy ways you can improve your writing.

But before we get into that, this show is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Community, this is our signature membership community where we help small business owners build and grow a successful website.

So let’s get on with the show.

Now firstly, who am I to tell you how to improve your writing? I own a web design company after all. Well, your website’s content is one of the key elements to its success. So, no, we don’t write your website copy, but we really do care when it’s a load of crap. Because that means your website won’t be as successful as you want it to be, you’ll be sad, we’ll be sad. There are just crappy feelings all around.

So I actually spend a lot of time learning about how to write business copy, so I can pass this knowledge onto our clients and our members too.

So, my first tip…

1. Cut the fat

We use a lot of excess, unnecessary words in our writing, especially if we write how we talk. So it helps to cast a glance over our writing to try and spot words or phrases that are redundant i.e. we don’t need them. Why bother doing this? Well, the more the brain has to read, the harder it has to work. Brevity is beautiful, so it’s a good idea to cut as much as we can without losing the meaning of the sentence.

My favourite redundant phrase is 100% true. I use it all the time. I even know when I’m writing it that I have to go back and edit it, and often I forget. Of course, there’s no percentage when it comes to truth. Something is either true or not true (unless you’re a politician in which case there seems to be some sort of different scale of truth where things can be kinda true.) But for most of us, it’s either one or the other. So in this instance the ‘100%’ is redundant. You just need to say something is true.

Some other common redundant words or phrases are – I absolutely guarantee. It’s just I guarantee. Or the end result. It’s just, the result. The basic fundamentals – I see that one all the time. It’s just the fundamentals. Let’s collaborate together, that’s a good one. Obviously it’s let’s collaborate. Actual experience – as opposed to…what? That fake experience that seems to be going around these days. Actually, my CV when I was 20 had a lot of fake experience so maybe that one does make sense. But you get the picture.

You won’t pick up on all of these but if you have an awareness of it you should be able to catch a few of them in your writing.

2. Use active voice

So this may sound like I’m sending you back to school, but that’s not what I’m trying to do here. There’s a huge difference between active and passive voice and they can have a remarkable effect on the reader.

Passive voice is when the noun becomes the object of a sentence. Whereas active voice is where the noun is the subject of a sentence. But let’s give some examples.

The letter was posted by me, that’s a passive sentence.
It makes the letter (or the object) the subject of the sentence. It essentially makes ‘the letter’ the most important thing in that sentence, and the ‘by me’ is like an afterthought.
Whereas if I say ‘I posted the letter.’ That’s active. ‘I’ is the noun which is made the subject of the sentence. And you can see the difference ‘the letter was posted by me.’ ‘I posted the letter.’
So you could have ‘the training programme must be attended by all staff.’ But it would be better to say ‘All staff must attend the training programme.’ It’s stronger, isn’t it? It puts the noun, in this case, ‘the staff’ at the forefront.
And this is a common problem in writing. I think this happens when we’re trying to tiptoe around things, like the training programme must be attended by all staff. It sounds less bossy than all staff must attend the training programme.
But what happens when we use passive voice is that we don’t sound as engaging. And we end up using more words too, words like was, were, been, be – the training programme must be attended by all staff. It just makes the sentence clunky and doesn’t inspire action. Particularly on sales pages, this is really important because you want sharp, focused copy. Not a rambly mess.
Although saying that, Martin often moans at my bluntness on WhatsApp or Facebook messenger because once you start doing it, it does become a habit, so perhaps just be wary of it in emails. Or just add a smiley face emoji. That’s what I do when I think I’m being blunt, I’ll just throw in a smiley face emoji and hope for the best. You see, you’re getting the best writing tips ever in this podcast episode.
Now, I said in the beginning that I’ve always struggled with grammar and spelling and spotting active/passive voice is no exception. So I use a handy tip from a school teacher called Rebecca Johnson who tweeted about this. Rebecca said, if you can add the phrase ‘by zombies’ after the verb in a sentence then you have passive voice. The letter was posted…posted being the verb. The letter was posted by zombies. The training programme must be attended by zombies. Our business is recommended by zombies.
And every time a politician says ‘mistakes were made’ I swear you’ll say ‘by zombies’ in your head.

I don’t know what’s with me and politicians today, they seem to have annoyed me. Who knows.

3. Sentence rhythm

Okay, so I realise you’re not a poet or musician. Well, you might be, in which case this will be a doddle.
So essentially when our sentences don’t have rhythm, the reader will get bored. And quickly.
Now rhythm is a tricky subject but I’m going to go through one tip that helps me with my sentence rhythm and I’m going to do it by first showing you a bad example.
Sometimes I get emails. And they’re usually from men actually. I have no idea why. But it goes like this. And by the way every sentence I’m going to read is on its own individual line.
Lyndsay.
Your Business is Dead.
You don’t have sales.
You don’t have leads.
You don’t have hope.
I have the solution.
Yes, that’s right.
I have the solution.
Ready to hear it?
I bet you are.
No, not really mate. Because I’m bored with this incessant style of writing style. Short, sharp sentences are really useful, but only when peppered amongst longer sentences. To create that rhythm we need peaks and troths. If you use too many short sentences, they lose their power. If you use too many long sentences it can become boring and tiring. So mix it up.
There’s a brilliant quote from Gary Provost who is an American Writer about this. I’ll pop it in the show notes because it’s a great one but it goes:

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

And I think that pretty much sums it up.

4. Stop with the stuffy

I used to be a copywriter and if I ever did receive negative feedback it was always the same thing: People used to say, ‘I don’t feel like the copy is professional enough.’
The thing is, before I would write anything I’d phone the client and say, pretend I am a prospective customer and tell me about this service or that product. But what I was listening too wasn’t just fact and figures, it was their tone of voice. The way they spoke, phrases they used, how formal or informal they were, where I could hear the excitement, how they got to the real benefits of what they sold.
So when I received the feedback that the copy sounded unprofessional. I would ask them if it sounded like them, sounded like a conversation they’d have with a client. ‘They would say yes…but it’s different for a website.’ I would explain, that really, it wasn’t. What you want your website to do is to connect with the reader, make them understand who you are and how you help. And they’d say ‘Yes, but my competitors’ doesn’t sound like this.’
And that’s the crux of the problem. We want to look good in front of our peers so we say things like established in 1982, suchabody financial services, offers a complete solution to your financial needs (I had to do that in that voice by the way.)
And I get it, being different is scary. Just think about school. Many of us wanted to fit in, right? But there was always that one kid that was different, who owned being different and didn’t care what others thought. And you know what, she or he actually got respect for it. That’s what your business needs to do. It needs to be that kid. Don’t worry about what your competitors do, however you speak to your clients is the way that you should write your business copy. Of course, it should be well structured and without all the ums and arrhs. But it doesn’t have to be super formal.

So I hope you found that episode.

And if you’re wanting regular feedback on your website copy or content, then check out our membership community, Make Your Mark Online. We host a 90-day challenge where our members produce one piece of content every week which we then give feedback on. If that sounds good head to makeyourmarkonline.net to find out more.

So that’s it for today’s episode, we’ll see you next time on the Make your make online podcast

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 44- 4 Easy Ways To Instantly Improve Your Website Copy appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

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In this episode, we’re going to go through some of the changes that have happened with Google and SEO. How these changes could have an impact on your business and finally what you can do to keep (or even increase) your search traffic.

In this episode, you learn…

• The issues with Google that could lead to less organic traffic to your website
• How you can still maintain and even get more traffic from Google even with these changes

Resources

54 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales

Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves?

Facebook Group

Is Google Dead: Transcript

Welcome to Episode 43 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about whether Google is dead. So that’s nice. I’m going to go through some of the changes we’ve seen in Google, what impact they’ll have on you and essentially, what you should do about it.

But before we get into that, this show is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Community, this is our signature membership community where we help small business owners build and grow a successful website.

So let’s get on with the show.

Okay so firstly, what’s happening Google?

What have we done to deserve this?

Now you may have noticed that Google’s got a little frosty with those of us who use it (or for the many of us who rely on it) for organic traffic. And there have been a few changes that have sounded pretty scary for us business owners.

Rand Fishkin, the CEO of Moz – and if you know anything about SEO, Moz is pretty much the frontier in providing SEO knowledge. But Rand Fishkin wrote an article in 2019 that stated that less than 50% of Google searches result in a click to a website. For mobile, that’s even scarier, at less than 27%. I’ll link to this article in the show notes so you can go look at some scary graphs and cry into your bowl of cereal.

But maybe before you do that, you could just listen to the rest of this podcast and hopefully, it will put your mind at ease.

Why Are Is Our CTR (Click Through Rate) Decreasing?

Well, there are many different factors. Firstly, you may have noticed something called featured snippets in search results. So when I type into Google ‘How much does it cost for a website’ – Google provides me with an answer without me having to click on the website that provided me with the answer.

So, it takes the information off the website that answered that question and delivers that as an answer on its own platform. And in this case, it’s a gives a reasonable ish answer, it says it costs between $100-$500 to build your own website and up to $30,000 to get a custom-built site. And it’s quite difficult to see the name of the company that wrote the article and provided the answer.

Which is why some people argue that a featured snippet is resulting in a decrease in people clicking on your links in Google search. The data certainly seems to show that.

So, that’s pretty scary, isn’t it?

And the answer to that is yes and no.

The problem with this data is that it doesn’t factor in what people are searching for. So I don’t know if you do this, but when Martin and I watch a film, we’re like, is that Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon? I’m like, it’s Matt Damon, definitely. And Martin’s like, no it’s not, it’s Mark Wahlberg. No, you’re completely wrong. Okay, Google it. And then you Google the name of the film and you get your answer straight away without having to click on a website. So it’s not taking into account all the millions of people who are also performing these kinds of searches.

So, when we talk about there being fewer clicks from Google, it doesn’t necessarily categorise what people are and are not clicking on. Essentially, yes, overall click-through rates from Google are down, but that’s not necessarily true of educational content.

Take the search query I mentioned before – How Much Does It Cost For a Website. Google gave the answer between just between $100-$500 or up to $30,000 dollars for a custom site. Now the likelihood is, someone will need more information than that. Between $100 – $30,000 isn’t particularly helpful. So there’s that to consider.

And there was actually a study by Hubspot that stated that these featured snippets get more clicks than organic search results, so that’s good news here.

So it conclusion, yes it’s a worry and I’m going to talk about how to combat all this later. But it’s probably not all doom and gloom as you might think.

So let’s move on to some other obstacles Google is throwing at us.

The second is how Google is changing the way it displays ads.

In fact, this is changing regularly. I used to instinctively know which results in Google were ads, and I’d just click on the results that I knew weren’t ads.

Now it’s trickier. The way ads are displayed is changing so much that we don’t really have time to get used to how they look and well…avoid them.

And it’s often more difficult to get to the organic traffic too. We’re on the first page for ‘top web design agencies manchester’ and yet you have to scroll down to halfway down the page to find that search result. And that’s because there’s a lot of ads and a big map in the way. So, thanks for that Google.

So what do we do?

Do we just not bother anymore? Forget content marketing and forget having a website and just focus on social media?

Well, no. Good God no.

In fact, this is an opportunity to invest more in educational content. If someone types into Google, web designers in Manchester they’re just going to see ads and a map and maybe click on a company in the organic results, maybe not.

If someone is typing into Google a question like ‘how much does it cost for a website?’ then they need education. Educational content is the best kind of content to use in order to get traffic from Google. We’ve certainly found this too, the majority of our traffic has come from our educational content, even now. And in a lot of cases, our educational content gets more traffic than our homepage.

In summary, if someone needs educating, they’re generally going to need more information than what’s included in a 40-50 word featured snippet. Not always, but mostly.

But more importantly, this highlights something bigger.

You cannot rely on one single platform in your business.

Now it’s scary when we see people building businesses using just Facebook, and we’re like, ‘oh my God, get a website!’

But equally, perhaps we web designers haven’t been very clear about how we shouldn’t rely solely on Google either.

We cannot control Google. They are there to make money, not be our friends. And they don’t owe us anything.

This is why it’s frustrating when we see websites rank purely for search engines. If you look at some of the websites that are on the first page of Google for ‘How much does a website cost?’ yes the articles are helpful but some of them are…well just kinda boring. They aren’t memorable. The businesses have no personality. No brand. Nothing. I’d read their article and then I would forget their names.

What we need to do instead is elevate ourselves, build our brand, be clear on who we are and have that come across in our content. We need to provide helpful content but also have personality too. We need people to find us and remember us.

And we also want more and more people searching for our business name. If there’s one thing Google can’t do, it provides other answers to our business name. When I want to know something about SEO, I don’t type that question into Google, I search for Moz and then I use their internal search to find what I’m looking for. Essentially, you want your own website to become the Google of your industry. So we all end up with a bunch of tiny Googles!

To do that we need to, as I said merge both personality and content marketing. To make sure we’re found and also remembered.

We can still optimise our content for Google, of course. But we can’t put our eggs in one basket. We need to use social media too. We need to join communities and make connections. We cannot sit back anymore. To get traffic to your website you need a constant proactive approach.

In short, don’t rely on anyone but yourselves.

So I hope you found that episode useful and not too scary!

And if you’re wanting to learn more about how to grow your website so it acts as the best salesperson for your business, then check out our membership community, Make Your Mark Online. We do talk a lot about SEO in our membership especially how it relates to content marketing. If that sounds good head to makeyourmarkonline.net to find out more.

So that’s it for today’s episode, we’ll see you next time on the Make your make online podcast.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 43- Is Google Dead? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

In this super practical podcast episode, we’re going to tell you exactly how to produce over 50 pieces of content in just 30 minutes.

You’ll probably want to grab a pen and paper for this episode, or better yet, download our content planner which will help you.

In this episode, you learn…

• How to relate your content to the products or services that you offer
• The type of content that delivers more leads and sales
• The six key topics you need to cover in your content
• How to get in front of people searching on Google
• Why you need to view your content as a customer service tool
• How to create over 50 pieces of content in just 30 minutes by following along to this episode

Stitcher| iTunes | Radio Republic | Soundcloud

Everyone wants their website to look great. And I get it. When our websites look good, we look good. And we feel confident driving traffic to it.

But often we get too caught up in how a website looks and we neglect everything else.

Your website is not a piece of art to be looked at and admired, it’s a tool that should be used to drive action – usually by delivering leads and sales.

So although strange of us as web designers to say, we need to stop obsessing over how our websites look and start thinking about how they’ll drive leads.

There are actually 6 elements that make a great website, and all these need to be carefully balanced. In this episode, we’ll go through exactly what those 6 elements are, and how you can apply them to your website.

In this episode, you learn…

• The 6 key elements that lead to website success
• How to balance these elements across your website
• Quick wins to make your website that bit better – and get more sales!

Resources

54 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales

Content Planner

Big, Bold Statment 

Facebook Group

Website Buyer’s Guide

Homepage Blueprint

The 6 Key Elements that Make a Successful Website: Transcript

Welcome to Episode 42 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the 6 elements that make the perfect website.

But before we get into that, this show is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Community, this is our signature membership community where we help small business owners build and grow a successful website.

So on with the show!

Everyone wants their website to look great. And I get it. When our websites look good, we look good. And we feel confident driving traffic to it.

But often we get too caught up in how a website looks and we neglect everything else.

Your website is not a piece of art to be looked at and admired, it’s a tool that should be used to drive action – usually by delivering leads and sales.

So although strange of us as web designers to say, we need to stop obsessing over how our websites look and start thinking about how they’ll drive leads.

There are actually 6 elements that make a great website, and all these need to be carefully balanced.

1. User Experience

User experience is the biggie. Above all else, this should be your main focus when building your website.

We want our user’s to know exactly where they need to go on your website to get what they are looking for.

One of the key places to do this is your homepage. We like to think of your homepage as the reception area of your website. A reception area of a busy building gets lots of questions, where are the lifts (or elevators as you may call them), where are the loos, I need to speak to sucha body. That’s what your users need from your homepage – where’s your blog, I want to contact you, I want to find more about sucha service.

And like any good reception area, your homepage needs to efficiently direct people to the right place on your website. And quickly.

You do not want people congregating around your reception area, trying to understand where to go. Because they will just leave.And that’s just one example of something you have to consider when it comes to user-experience. There are so many things to think about – do your call to action buttons (so your ‘find out more’ or ‘contact me’) buttons stand out, do you have images that reflect what the text says, is there plenty of white space on the page, can the user flow through your website with ease?

As web designers this sort of becomes automatic. But when you’re DIYing your website, you have to constantly question yourself – is this easy for the end-user to understand and use?

The reason a lot of people get this wrong – and that includes big, fancy agencies – is because they focus too much on how the website looks. If you go on many high-fashion websites you’ll find this is the case, it’s all just too pretentious to actually be user-friendly.

2. Website copy

Yes, you can have a beautiful website but if the words on the page don’t connect with your reader then no amount of beauty will make up for it. Like when you discover that really hot person you’ve liked for ages actually doesn’t have any personality. That’s the same thing, it’s all very disappointing.

People most often get their website copy wrong just because, they don’t really think about it. They just start typing without consciously thinking about the reader, what their problems are and why they’re on your website.

A lot of people also copy off their competition, and often the competition doesn’t know how to write website copy either. So everyone just ends up with…crap website copy.

I think the problem is people tend to overcomplicate website copy. But it really shouldn’t be difficult. As business owners, we speak to people about our products or services every day. We’re able to articulate what we do and what the benefits of our products or services are verbally. All you need to do is to write it down.

Some major things to get right with website copy is making sure people know exactly what you do as soon as they land on your homepage. And you can do this by coming up with what we call a big, bold statement, which essentially summarises what you do. We have recorded a podcast about this and written a blog post about it and we’ll pop this in the shownotes.

Another thing is making having a page for each service you offer and making sure you include everything about that service so your reader can make an informed decision about whether to work with you – so the benefits of the service, the cost, FAQ, the process and previous testimonials.

Finally, it’s about not overthinking the writing. You constantly have to balance copy with user-experience and SEO. This is why calling things like ‘My Journey’ instead of about page is a bad idea because it’s just confusing for your user.

And calling your service a funny name that Google won’t understand will not help you rank on Google. For example, calling an editing service ‘the wondrous wizard package’ just doesn’t make sense. You have to kind of balance creativity with, well, what your readers and search engines will understand.

3. Content Marketing

There’s zero point having a beautiful, user-friendly website without getting traffic to it. It’s like the perfect shop stuck in the middle of the dessert. Sorry, I’m all about the bad metaphors today, you’re just going to have to bear with that.

The problem is, people try content marketing but they produce what we call ‘fluff’ content. So that’s ‘look at this client we’ve just landed’ or ‘look at this award we’ve won’ or even very basic ‘7 ways to blah, blah, blah’ posts. Now these aren’t always bad but sometimes they’re just very basic overviews of a topic that have less than 500 words. They don’t really give the reader any value.

But content marketing isn’t just about driving traffic to your site, it’s about building trust and authority. It’s about answering those questions that none of your competition will answer. It’s about being the go-to person for your particular topic.

If it’s done correctly, content can deliver more leads and sales but it can also deliver better customers, the ones who are the right fit for you.

Some of the major mistakes people make when it comes to content marketing is not answering a question. They skim the surface of a topic but don’t delve in and try to give the best, most informed, most researched answer.

But even when people do, do this what they then fail to promote their content. You need to spend a lot of time getting eyeballs on your content.

Finally, people don’t produce content for every step of the sales process. They focus on ‘awareness content’ – basically making people aware that they exist and that they are knowledgable. But people rarely produce content about their products or services. And this is a huge error. That’s why we produce so many blog posts about our products or services. In fact, we’ve just had one out this week called, Why we charge large companies more for a website redesign.

4. Lead Generation

By lead generation, I mean collecting email addresses or getting people to get in contact with you or book a call.

Now there are usually two camps when it comes to lead gen…

Those who make zero effort to capture leads
Those who harras you so much for your email address on your website that if they were an actual person you’d probably call the police

If you haven’t yet guessed, what we’re after is somewhere between the two.

The reason you can’t harass someone is that it’s just not good user-experience. And good relationships aren’t built by stalking people unless your that weird bloke off 50 shades of grey.

Equally, saying nothing won’t get you anywhere either.

Now, there are ways of capturing email address or getting people to get in contact with you without being annoying and I actually talk about that in my last podcast episode. But offering things like content upgrades to your blog posts such as helpful checklists or planners to go alongside the topic you’re talking about is a great way of doing this.

Using a sticky hello bar at the top of the page if you’ve got a webinar coming up or something new and exacting is another.

Including a contact form on every single service page is also one.

So you see, you don’t have to be Christian Grey to get leads. You can do it respectfully.

5. Appearance

Okay, so I harped on about how appearance is not all that. But it is something. No, your website doesn’t have to be a victoria secret model but it does help if it’s ya know, showered and put on clean underwear. Your website has to be presentable, easy to use, and yes, have good images and easy to read text as a minimum.

The biggest mistakes we see websites make when it comes to appearance is one, it looks like the 90s has thrown up on the page. Or 2. They copy everyone else.

You see it all the time. Look at the IT industry. Every website looks exactly the same. They use a lot of blues, oranges and whites. And they have a lot of stock photos of people wearing headsets.

The problem is, people won’t remember you.
With your appearance, you generally have to use good images and this is exactly why we recommend people invest in a photographer before they get a website.

You have to make sure you use plenty of white space, so give your text and images room to breath don’t squash things in so close together.

You also have to break things up into sections, particularly on your homepage where everything can feel a bit crowded. So dedicate one section of the page to just about you with an image, dedicate the next section to just your content. Don’t try to cram in testimonials next to your about you text with several images, it just looks and feels messy.

6. SEO

The next thing is SEO. Now the basics of SEO is just good user-experience mixed with website admin. For most of us, this is pretty much all we need to know.

One huge mistake business owners make is worrying too much about SEO and going way to deep with it all that they actually forget about their actual business.

Another thing to remember is that producing content on your website i.e. blogging is also a great way to rank for the questions that people ask you.

So don’t overcomplicate it for now.

But there are some rules you want to follow, such as using your H tags correctly. H tags are essentially your headings on the page. You H1 tag tells Google what the entire page is about, H2 tells Google what the following paragraph is about, and if that paragraph is broken down further you’ll use H3 and so on. This is actually just good user-experience to break up the text and tell the user what the next section is about. It’s just you’re telling Google at the same time.

And you may want to do some keyword research too, and drop these keywords naturally – the key word here is naturally- throughout your copy and your headings too.

In your blog posts, you’ll want to link to other relevant content. And you’ll want to make sure you give all your images appropriate names.

You want to keep your URLs short.

Now, if you’re furiously typing don’t worry you can stop I do have a checklist for this that I’ll put in the show-notes or you can also check out our blog post on how to make the perfect website.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the 6 key things that will make your website a success – user-experience, website copy, content marketing, lead generation, seo and appearance.

Now, remember this can seem overwhelming but you’ll get this right over time. No website is perfect. Ours isn’t perfect. I could visit our website right now and pick at things. But if you have an awareness of these 6 things, and consciously implement them when you work on your website, I guarantee it will be that bit more successful.

So I hope you found this episode useful.

And if you’re wanting to learn more about how to grow your website so it acts as the best salesperson for your business, then check out our membership community, Make Your Mark Online. We actually create one-click-install website pages for our members such as the homepage, about page or even things like lead capture pages and sales pages. These are built with our knowledge and experience so a lot of what’s been talked about in this podcast episode such as user-experience or appearance has already been covered.

If that sounds good head to makeyourmarkonline.net to find out more.

So that’s it for today’s episode, we’ll see you next time on the Make your make online podcast.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 42- The 6 Elements That Make a Successful Website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

In this super practical podcast episode, we’re going to tell you exactly how to produce over 50 pieces of content in just 30 minutes.

You’ll probably want to grab a pen and paper for this episode, or better yet, download our content planner which will help you.

In this episode, you learn…

• How to relate your content to the products or services that you offer
• The type of content that delivers more leads and sales
• The six key topics you need to cover in your content
• How to get in front of people searching on Google
• Why you need to view your content as a customer service tool
• How to create over 50 pieces of content in just 30 minutes by following along to this episode

Stitcher| iTunes | Radio Republic | Soundcloud

In this super practical podcast episode, we’re going to tell you exactly how to collect email addresses on your website.

In this episode, you learn…

• What I class as pushy or annoying ways to capture leads
• The best way to capture email addresses from your blog
• How to get people to get in touch with you when they’re on your service page
• What information you should ask for when capturing people’s data
• How you can capture leads from your homepage

Resources

54 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales

Content Planner

Facebook Group

Website Buyer’s Guide

Hellobar – sticky bar at the top of the page

Homepage Blueprint

Transcript/Notes

This all started with a question from one of our members, Helen – who asked how she could capture leads on her website without being pushy or irritating. And I think that’s a pretty good question because we all want to grow our email list but we don’t want to do it by being annoying.  

So that’s what this episode is about. We’re going to go through how to collect email addresses without being annoying and also look at what are annoying and spammy tactics.

And just to clarify, when I say lead I mean someone enquiring about your products or services or someone giving you their contact details such as their email address. 

Now, in all honesty, collecting email addresses is something we really struggled with in the past. We didn’t prioritise it for years. I think this was just to do with plain old apathy. We’d built our web design agency through content marketing – essentially giving away everything and being open and honest about the way we worked. And this definitely worked well for us. 

Until one day, we said, do you know what, we’d also like to launch a membership and we were there with an email list that consisted of my mum and dad. We had this idea for something exciting and new, but we had no one to sell it too. So we had to kind of shift our way of thinking a little. 

And in that short time, we’ve learnt a lot about building an email list, but more specifically how to build an email list without being pushy. So that means we don’t use things like annoying website popups – because they’re crap for user experience. Or gating our content, such as only letting people know our prices in exchange for an email address. 

So, here are the ways you can capture leads, without being annoying…

1. Content ‘upgrade’ 

Patt Flynn describes content upgrades as, ‘Smaller, unique, bite-sized lead magnets that directly relate to what people are already consuming.’ and that was a way better description than what I came up with so let’s steal that. 

To give you an example, we recently released a blog post about how to create a perfect website. We then created a lead magnet, which was a free website checklist that directly related to that blog post so people could see where they needed to improve. The content in the blog post and in the checklist was exactly the same, it just came in different formats.

This works really well for many reasons, we didn’t have to write new content, and we didn’t have to hide any content and get that icky ‘I’m only going to tell you this if you give me your email address’ feeling. 

And just another thing, we add information about the content upgrades within the body of our blog posts and at the end. The reason we do both is that often people don’t read all the way to the end, so this is a way of capturing their attention. Like this 😉 

2. Pop a contact form on every service page 

A lot of our leads, funnily enough, don’t come throughout the contact page, they come through lots of different pages on our website. 

So if someone is finding out more about your services, they may have questions as they’re scanning through. Imagine just a little box to the side or at the end of the page that said, ‘Got questions about x service?’ pop in your details below. That’s a great way to capture a lead because they probably do have questions, and you’re making it super easy for them. 

3. If you’re an E-commerce business, offer a discount

A really nice feature, which is great for eCommerce businesses, is to offer a discount as a way of capturing leads. So you could say something like ‘get 10% your first order’. Lots of companies use this. 

You can display this on a sticky bar at the top of the page, which is essentially just a bar that stays their permanently. 

It’s not like a pop-up, so it doesn’t disrupt the user at any time, but it is on display permanently, and with the right copy it will capture their attention. 

The only caveat to this is, obviously, you will have a section for a discount code on your checkout and if someone doesn’t have a discount code, maybe they’re a repeat customer that may mean they feel a bit down about it. Or if you’re like me, you go off in search of a discount code and before you know it you’ve forgotten what you’re buying anyway. So just be aware of that.

4. Don’t ask them for war and peace

When capturing leads, you don’t want to ask for anything you don’t need. I always see forms that ask for your address, and telephone number and blood type. Stop it. Most of us, unless we’re an eCommerce business, will just need a name and email. 

And of course, this is good for GDPR too. We don’t want boatloads of people’s personal data. 

5. Don’t make them identify traffic signs 

Talk about annoying. I get it, we all hate spam but asking people to identify traffic signs is incredibly irritating. I don’t even know what a traffic sign is on these things, I’m always squinting, like is that a stop sign or just some other kind of sign. Is it a lollypop lady? Or something else? Who knows. 

6. How to capture leads on your homepage 

You can create a bar that sits within the first third of your homepage that offers your freebie. This is a great way of capturing people when they first land on your website but without being intrusive. 

On our website homepage, we offer our homepage blueprint which runs through how to create a great homepage. That’s done really well too. 

7. Sell the benefits 

We go on about this a lot. But join my newsletter is not a compelling enough reason to get people to give you their contact details. Give them the benefits and tell them what’s in it for them. Weekly tips on such a thing, or discounts and exclusive offers. 

Also, tell them that by joining your email list they’re joining hundreds or thousands of their peers, give them that social proof that they’re in the right place and with others just like them. 

8. Tell them what will happen next 

Once someone fills in your contact form, then what happens? Don’t just have something that pops up and says, ‘thanks’ 

Equally, if someone wants to download one of your lead magnets, take them to a thank you page. Tell them what happens next.

So I hope that’s been useful to you. I think when considering this, think of yourself as a shop owner. If a customer comes in, would you jump out and shout ‘Sign up to my newsletter!’ Sorry, I seriously hope you weren’t driving then. 

But no you wouldn’t. Then obviously a popup as soon as someone lands on your site probably isn’t the best. 

The worst one by far is giving people these ridiculous options. So you may have seen this where you click the x on the pop up because you don’t want to hand over your details and they say, okay, could you just confirm that you don’t want your life to change and you don’t want to be super-wealthy? And then you have to click ‘Nah I don’t want to be super wealthy, thanks’ 

I can’t actually say what I really think when I see those because Martin wants the entire podcast to be marked as non-explicit but you can guess.

So I hope you found this episode useful.

And if you’re wanting to learn more about how to grow your website so it acts as the best salesperson for your business, then check out our membership community, Make Your Mark Online. This community helps people build and grow a successful website, and do it without being annoying. 

So that’s it for today’s episode, we’ll see you next time on the Make your make online podcast

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 41- How to Capture Leads On Your Website Without Being Annoying appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.