After you have built your product you will then begin to promote it. This is a big P of the four p’s and the one that most people think of when they think of marketing.

Promoting a product happens along channels -lines of communication that connect you and your product to your target audience. The techniques and methods used for each channel are different and not all channels are appropriate for all product types.

In the more traditional sense of marketing, say promoting a brand of peanut butter, marketers will use channels that include above the line – like TV, radio, and print (newspapers and magazines) advertising and below the line techniques such as competitions and added bonuses. Other forms of promotion include in-store point of sale merchandise, added in-store selling locations like at the cash register, the type of store they sell through, the size of on-shelf product display normally referred to as facings, and the on-shelf location.

Marketing online requires an almost entirely online channel strategic focus. Your channels of communication to your potential audience will mostly be digital, including social media channels, search channels, and forum channels. Don’t exclude the traditional channels though. There may be trade shows you could attend and make a presentation at, or a printed magazine, especially a trade magazine that you could write for. Maybe a TV interview is an opportunity. But while you are establishing your credentials and building your product the online channels will be your domain.

Now for the important part. Figuring out which channels to focus your time. Which ones will return the best bang for your buck? This involves taking the set of keywords you have identified as important to your niche and determining which channels they feature on. This will not be the only test. You will need to examine the demographic profile of users for each channel and the channel types’ relationship with your potential customer. We will examine this in depth below.

Marketing is part science and part art. You need to analyze the channels in terms of the number of searches in your keywords but still make judgment calls as to where to find your audience. It’s good fun.

When writing your plan you need to do the same thing only the channels.

In this course you will learn about the different types of channels in a broad sense and begin to formulate a plan as to which channels will be important to you and your product (blog site), how you are going to utilize each, the amount you are going to spend – if anything, and the methods of approach relevant to each in a broad sense.

Latter there were courses on each of the important channels and the specifics of each.

There are many online channels and no doubt you are very familiar with many of them. Google search (organic search and SEO) Paid Search, Facebook and Instagram, and Quora are all examples of channels that you will need to master in order to adequately promote our product.

Online channels devid up along some simple lines and we will use these to explore each and discuss the broad approaches you need to use with each.

The first distinction is Search, Social, and Discussion.

Search includes all the search engines which is dominated by Google (90% of the market), Bing, Duck Duck Go, and a plethora of other smaller players. Included in the search is YouTube for video search and they have very little competition.

The second distinction is Unpaid vs Paid. For each of the channels mentioned above, you can advertise on them for free – Unpaid, (through engagement and follower building) or Paid, which means buying ads or boosting posts, which will cost you.

Some of the channels are beginning to overlap as many of the social channels vie for a piece of the search market with some success. This complicates things for the marketer because now you need to have a wider presence on social channels that are increasing being used as search channels. but that also increases the opportunity.

The graphic below shows each channel that you will need to consider.

In this section we will discuss the broad strategies you need to employ for each of the channel type. There are chapters for each of the channels where we will go into more specific detail on each channel.

Also there is a course on selling tips and tricks that you will need to learn to create sales or get page views.

The channels

The Broad Strategic approach

People don’t like being sold to on social media. People use social media to add value to their lives, to follow the subjects of interest to them, and to learn. They follow people who contribute to this endeavor so it is reasonable to assume that if you are not adding value they will a. not follow you and b. certainly not reward you. In fact, they may even flame you.

Distributing your latest posts with comments like;

“Check out the latest post I wrote – https://link.com” – is likely to lose you, friends and followers. If you do this on Facebook people will lose respect for you – you have not added anything of value just fairly crassly advertised your post. Also, remember that Facebook does not want to show links that lead away from Facebook and will show your post to fewer people.

So don’t treat your followers like marks that you target a hard sell too. Treat them as you would a friend, build and earn their trust and reward them with what they seek whether that is entertainment, knowledge, or opinions.

If you do this they will reward you with pageviews, even purchases from your store, or follow your affiliate links. This is called reciprocity. If they feel in your debt because of the information you give them, and the value you add to their lives they will respond.

This approach is quite different from an ad you might run on the same platform. Paid ads are fine and they work in a different way. Because it is obviously an ad it is treated differently. There is no attempt at subterfuge, you are not trying to scam the relationship you have built up, you have something to sell and you are open about that by paying for the ad.

Just don’t use your following to sell to.

Your posts can be communicated to your social media following by creating enticing abstracts that give them something of value but leave them wanting more. You need to give to get. Even if you give away the whole article you may get pageviews as people navigate to your site to see what else you have to offer.

Engage, don’t sell

This is where you demonstrate your knowledge and passion for the niche. Your desire to add value to your followers’ lives will be noticed and rewarded provided you stay true to this goal. Its your goal to inspire, educate or entertain first so you gain respect and authority. The reward will come latter as you grow your following and your status.

There are many ways to engage. We as talk about these methods in the Course on advertising but your goal here is to be genuine. So some ways of engaging and rewarding your followers include;

• Contribute original content. Parts of your posts or detailed summaries of your blog posts.
• Ask controversial questions and then follow up by replying and questioning further. this can also result in fertile material for new posts.
• Ask about your follower’s experiences.
• Quote industry numbers and statistics that help inform.
• Create a tips and tricks post type that you can spread to your following.

What is most important is that you follow up and engage with the comments and responses you get. Don’t just float something out there. Build a rapport.

Even better if you can follow up with extracts from your vast library of posts you will leave them hungry for more.

The end game

Remember that the endgame is still page views. You need to see something for all this effort. Track your effort and your page views to make sure you are being rewarded. If after a suitable amount of time and effort there is not much to show for it then alter your plan and move on.

Being a thought-leader and having a loyal following is all well and good. But you are a business blogger. If you cant make a living from the effort then it’s time to re-think the strategy.

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use the attached channel list in the draft marketing plan and budget to assess how important you think each channel is going to be to you. It doesn’t matter if this turns out to be what you actually do. Your marketing plan will be something that will be in constant flux as you test and develop different strategies and as you start to make more money.

Do your keyword analysis in each channel. List your most important keywords along the top of a spreadsheet or piece of paper and the channels in the first column down the rows. You will only need to use the most important keywords, the others should follow suit. and the number of searches done in each channel in columns. Then fill in the numbers. The advantage of using a spreadsheet is that you can now order the sheet by one of the columns to easily see which channels are the most prominent.

You need to decide if you are going to spend money on paid search or advertising – this will shorten the list, or if you are going to concentrate on growing a following through social media engagement.

You can probably see how your planes are going t change over time. As you build a following and start to make money you may decide to start spending money and s you will need to revisit your plan to allocate the spending and time.

This is all part of the planning process and is essential if you are going to succeed.

• Type of Content: Instagram influencers are all about carefully curated content. On the other hand, TikTok ones are raw, homegrown, and insistent on entertaining their audience — which means fewer edits and filters and keeping things organic.
• Following Trends: Instagram influencers are less invested in trends, rather they are focused on keeping their personal image aligned to the brands. Tik Tok influencers, however, are ALL about hopping on the latest hashtag challenges and keeping in trend.
• Audio: Instagram influencers are less audio-focused in their content, while TikTok influencers are more audio-centric.
• Competition: Instagram influencers are in a highly competitive market, whereas TikTok influencers are considered a fairly new and upcoming thing.

Tools that can help

There are many tools that can help you be more efficient and stay on top of your social media strategy. these are a few that I like.

Publer

Publer is a social media scheduling tool that helps you manage the constant posting to your social media accounts.

Publer -> https://publer.io/

TubeBuddy

This tool will help you manage your YouTube channel. It keeps track of performance, helps optimize your videos, includes templates and editing tools, and helps research, publish and test your approach.

It’s not free but if your blog requires a big YouTube presence then it may be of value to you. They claim to be loved by more than 3,000,000 creators and brands so they must be doing something right.

TubeBuddy -> https://www.tubebuddy.com/

Canva

Hubspot

ahrefs

Cakemail – email marketing – seems expensive

SparkToro – Research Tool
From their website
“Uncovers the people, websites, and publications that influence your customers, you’d spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on market research surveys that can’t deliver comprehensive, accurate information. Now, demographics, behavioral traits, topics discussed publicly online, and other crucial audience research data are available in seconds.

We believe the most effective marketing reaches your customers through people, publications, and places where they already pay attention. Marketers shouldn’t have to pay the tech giants just to have their voices heard. SparkToro provides unique research and insights, aggregated from tens of millions of verifiable public social and web profiles, to make channels outside Facebook and Google accessible to everyone.”

CHAPTER 2

quora article 

How can I get traffic for my blog, at least 10,000 per day? – bookmarked in quora

1.          Write guest posts for other blogs

Why do companies spent a fortune getting their commercials aired during half time at the Super Bowl? Because it gives them access to tens of millions of viewers. They didn’t create that audience. They just used it to get their message across.

And you can do you something similar with guest blogging.

I wrote my first guest post back in 2002, before guest posting was even a thing. Another blogger read one of my posts, and sent me an email asking if he could interview me on his blog. The email included half a dozen questions, and he asked if I could answer each one in 400–500 words.

My initial reaction wasn’t very positive. I was thinking, What? You want me to write two and half a thousand words of content for your blog?

But then I started thinking about it differently. That’s a lot of work. But this guy’s been blogging for a year now, and he has a decent audience. Okay, let’s do it and see how it goes.

I put a lot of time and energy into that post, and ended up writing 3,500 words to answer his questions.

The day after the interview went live on his site my readership grew by more than tenfold, and I immediately saw the value in creating content for other sites and other people.

These days there are far more opportunities to do this. Think about the top five ways your ideal reader would like to spend their time (or the top five people they would like to spend their time with). That could be their top five:

• blogs
• forums
• Facebook groups/pages
• LinkedIn groups
• podcasts
• television shows
• newspapers
• magazines
• books
• authors
• events
• influencers (Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.)

Now that you know where they hang out and what they like talking about, try creating some guest content for them.

Of course, you can’t just publish a post on someone else’s blog. You’ll need to build a relationship with those bloggers, and then find out whether they accept guest content. But most blogs will let you add a comment, and that’s where you can add some guest content.

I once wrote 400 words responding to a question I saw on another blog. It was practically a guest post in itself. But I know that 400 words will be read not only by the person who asked the question, but also hundreds of others (at least potentially).

Leaving a comment in a forum or a Facebook group is another way to create guest content.

So as you work through the 50 or so places your ideal readers hang out, look for opportunities to create guest content, whether it’s writing a guest post for a blog, being interviewed on a podcast, or just being helpful in the comments section.

2.          Create sharable content

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll know what sharable content is about. Just take a look in Google Analytics and look at the content that gets shared more often and drives fresh eyeballs to your site.

Content that gets shared a lot on Digital Photography School includes:

• myth-busting pots
• debates (people seem to like sharing them to justify their opinions)
• research polls (and the results)
• cheat sheets
• posts with infographics
• long-form posts
• beginner guides
• posts written with a bit of humor.

BuzzSumo is a great resource for finding sharable content. Enter a domain name (for your site or someone else’s), click the button, and it will tell you what content has been shared the most. It also shows you the social networks each piece of content was shared on and how many times it was shared.

When you analyze your own blog, look for themes and topics that get shared a lot. Also take note of the format (list, Q&A, roundup), and the medium (video, podcast, infographic).

But as nice as it is to have content shared, don’t go overboard trying to turn every piece of content you create into something people will share. Yes, getting that sudden spike in traffic feels great. But keep in mind that getting people to look at your content is just stage one. You still need to get those people interested, connected, and engaged (which I’ll be talking about over the next few weeks).

3.          Repurpose your best content

One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that if content has been shared a lot in one form, there’s a good chance it will be shared again in another form.

Back in 2002 I wrote a post for ProBlogger called Can You Really Make Money Blogging? [7 Things I Know About Making Money From Blogging]. That post did really well, and appeared in my BuzzSumo report as one of my most shared pieces of content.

So I asked myself, Where else could I share this content?

First, I repurpose it into a talk that I’ve now given a few times at various conferences. I then took the slides from that talk, tweaked them a bit so they didn’t rely on my voice, and put them up on SlideShare. The slides (which linked back to the website) ended up getting around 5,000 views

Later I turned the same slides into a video, added some music, and posted it on YouTube. (I may have also posted it on Vimeo). The videos (which again linked back to the website) got about 6,000 views.

After tweaking the post to avoid having duplicate content I put it up on Medium, where it got another 2,000 views. And finally I used it in episode 32 of the ProBlogger Podcast, which has had more than 20,000 downloads.

If you’ve got a piece of content that’s doing well in one form, think about how you could repurpose it. As well as the forms I used, you could also:

• create an infographic or a cheat sheet
• pitch it to a newspaper or magazine
• ask a podcaster to use it as the basis of an interview.

4. Search Engine Optimization

The final thing I want to talk about in this post is search engine optimization. And don’t just think of Google.

I once wrote a post on Digital Photography School about a Leica camera I owned. The post was a dismal failure, and hardly got any views. So I decided to repurpose it. Using the same content, I then stood in front of a video camera, recorded myself talking about (and showing) my little Leica camera, and posted it on YouTube.

That video has now been viewed more than 60,000 times.

YouTube is also a search engine. And when people search YouTube for that camera name, my video comes up.

Another search engine you might not think about is the App Store. Jarrod Robinson from the PE Geek (a blog for physical education teachers) created an app that aggregates content from his blog and his podcast, and also promotes his workshops and membership sites.

The app gets thousands of downloads every month. And every time he publishes a new blog post, everyone who downloaded the app gets a push notification. The App Store has given him a whole new readership.

When you think of search engine optimization, think about where people might be searching for information. It could be Google, YouTube, iTunes, the App Store, Google Play, or a myriad of other places.

Now remember here, what we’re talking about is the process of taking your readers from being unaware, from being cold towards your blog, your brand, and you to being supper engaged. This is what we’ve been talking about today, getting the eyeball is just the first step.

So there you have it: four ways to get the word about about your blog. And next week I’ll tell you how to conquer the next stage in warming up your readers and turning them into raving fans: getting interested in what you’re saying.

In the meantime, let us know what you do to spread the word about your blog. Do you write guest posts? Do make your content sharable, or repurpose it? Let us know in the comments.

INTRODUCTION

Create a group of brand ambassadors

who will share your content with their sphere of influence. If budget is a concern, ask trusted family, friends and colleagues

Use your LinkedIn network.

Message your connections and ask if they’d be willing to share

Post a snippet

of your blog post on social media with a “read more” CTA

Write Answers on Quora

Quora is technically an upvote community but its unique for its popularity and strict question-answer format. If you have a tool like SEMrush, you can look for new ways to promote your blog by entering http://Quora.com in Organic Research and checking out all of the keywords that Quora ranks for.

Add a filter to look for search terms relevant to your blog. Once you identify some keywords that are relevant to your blog, you can write an answer to the question Quora and mention your blog within the answer.

You probably won’t see a huge impact from one answer, but if you make a habit of answering Quora questions somewhat frequently, you can start to build your authority on the site as a trusted source in your industry. Eventually, you’ll gain traffic to your blog from Quora.

Once you have plenty of answers on Quora, your profile could be a good place to write more about your blog in your bio.

3. Invite guest bloggers

Another easy way to promote your blog is by letting other people write for you! Guest blogging is a way for other bloggers to reach a new audience by contributing a post of theirs to your blog. Usually, a guest post includes a link to the guest author’s website in return for the post to make it a win-win for both parties. The more loyal followers your guest author has, the better. When the guest author goes to share their new post on your blog, it attracts their audience to your site and makes your blog look more authoritative. SEMrush takes guest authors all the time, so much so that we even publish a ”best-of” wrap up with all of our favorite posts from guest contributors!

Hidden Party Coupon

This is a fun one that we’ve used thousands of times.

When customers see your cart and then they see that “coupon code” field, they sometimes feel cheated when they don’t have a coupon code.  So sometimes they’ll go searching in Google for a coupon code.  You’ve probably done it.  I know I have.  And if they can’t find one, they might even think twice about making a purchase.

So what we do is just make a page that we don’t link to from anywhere.  It’s just a page that nobody will find unless they actually go looking for it.  But when they find that page, they’ll see a big image of balloons and confetti and large print that says “You Found It!”.

Then show them a coupon code that’ll give them a small discount.  We usually do something like 5%.  For those customers that go searching, it makes their day.

Check the price on Amazon

We really don’t like posts that look like stores.  When your post just looks like a big advertisement for a product and then has a big button like this

Buy this HERE!

it just makes your site feel spammy.  Most people are looking for helpful information that feels trustworthy.  And spammy looking sites don’t feel very trustworthy

That’s why we stick with the simple approach of using a basic text link to send people to affiliate products.  Plus, we make that link non-threatening.  Instead of something like “Buy it here” we write it as an invitation.  “Click here for current pricing on Amazon.”

This makes our links much more effective.  And if you can get people to click on the link, you get the cookie in their browser and if they buy anythign on Amazon, the commission is yours!

Abandoned Cart

If you have a product on your website, whether it’s physical, digital, or some sort of subscription, you can boost your conversion rate really easily with this one hack.

How this works is first, customers add your product to their cart.  But then, for one reason or another they decide to leave.  Maybe they’re having second thoughts.  Maybe it’s not a good time.  Either way, in most cases it’s not likely that they’re coming back.  So what we do is make them an offer.  “Hey customer dude!  Would it make a difference if we offered you 20% off?”

We’ve used this tactic on some products and it has boosted sales on those products 10%.

A great tool for setting this up on your site is SendOwl.  We’ve been using SendOwl as the shopping cart and checkout tool for all of our digital products for some time now and we’ve been really pleased with not only the cool “abandoned cart” functionality, but also the simple and quick check out process.  Having a good tool for that has a big impact on converting sales.

Just in Time Webinars

Webinars are notoriously difficult to get people to.  You schedule them out, let your audience know they’re coming, get them to register, and then only 3 people how up.

So frustrating!

On the other hand, webinars can be a really effective way to connect with your audience, grow your audience, and convert your audience into customers.

So how do we get better attendance?

Just in time webinars.  Automated webinar software like EverWebinar allows you to record a webinar ahead of time and then set it up so that when someone arrives on the webinar page, is says “This webinar starts in 3 minutes” with a countdown timer.  People are way more likely to attend a webinar if it’s about to start.

Webinars are really effective because they feel more interactive.  And even though these webinars are pre-recorded, the software makes it feel more intimate than a pre-recorded YouTube video.

You can click here for a free 60-day trial of EverWebinar.

Active Campaign—Smart Marketing

Be smart about your marketing.

With today’s technology and analytics, smart marketing is not only possible, it’s also cost effective.  We strongly recommend ActiveCampaign for email marketing if you want to do this sort of smart, targeted marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works.

When someone signs up for your email newsletter, ActiveCampaign collects not just their email address, but their IP address too.  This allows ActiveCampaign to track where that user goes on your website.  Then, you can set certain user actions that will trigger ActiveCampaign to send out a specific email or offer.

For example, let’s say you have a fishing website.  You have content about bass fishing, saltwater fishing, salmon fishing, and so on.  Well, if you just created a new bass fishing course and want to let your audience know, those people who only read about saltwater fishing on your site aren’t going to care.  And if they get an email promoting that new course, they’re going to question whether or not your newsletter is a good fit for them.

But since ActiveCampaign can keep track of where users go on your site, you can have that email sent only to your audience members who have visited pages about bass fishing.

This also allows you to target newsletters to customers based on their activities.  You can even integrate it with course software and send reminders out to participants who haven’t logged in for a while.

When you’re capturing this kind of data and you’re using a tool with such robust capabilities, the opportunities for targeted marketing are endless.

Deadline Funnel

The deadline funnel is a lot like the just in time webinar, except for product sales.

Sometimes you only want a product to be available for sale for a limited time.  Or maybe you’re offering a discount but only for a limited time.  That’s a great technique for pushing more sales because it adds urgency to the decision.  The problem is that offering products or sales for short durations makes those offerings visible to only a small number of people.

That’s where deadline funnel comes in.

Deadline funnel allows you to make products or sales available only for a limited time, starting when that customer arrives on the sales page.  The urgency is there, but your sale gets to be seen by way more people.  They only get 48 hours, or whatever time frame you set.  Deadline funnel keeps track of when they arrived and makes that countdown active for that specific user.

You can check out Deadline Funnel here.

Upsell

Do you want some fries with that?

~Every Fast Food Worker Ever

Businesses have been using the upsell technique for ages.  Why?  Because it works.

Customers that are interested in your main product are likely to be interested on add-on products if they go well together.  And while that’s true for fries and soft drinks, it’s also true for digital products.

Here are some of our top tips for a successful upsell.

• The add-on product should be priced no more than half the price of the original product.  If I’m spending $50, $7 more doesn’t seem like a big deal.
• Use a good tool that does upselling right.  We use SendOwl for selling all of our digital products.
• SendOwl keeps the checkout process really simple.  Just enter payment info and you’re done.
• On the Upsell, SendOwl makes the offer after processing the first sale.  This solidifies the first sale before the upsell, which can turn some customers away from the original sale.
• SendOwl also processes the second order without making the customer re-enter their payment info.  Super simple, super fast.

The upsell is really effective if your audience is really transactional.  That is, this person is going to buy the product now but you may never hear from them again.  But if you have a really strong community or a loyal audience, then the upsell isn’t as important.  If your followers are likely to buy multiple products from you anyway, then getting a small upsell right now isn’t as valuable as maintaining your loyal customer base.

Subscription Confirmed.  Here’s the coupon I promised!

This is a really effective way to convert subscribers into customers.

When someone joins your newsletter, that first email is usually wasted.  A lot of the time, you just say something like, “Subscription Confirmed!  Thanks for subscribing.  You’re going to love this newsletter.”

What a waste!

This first email is your chance to connect and convert.  So do it!  Instead of a subject line that says “Subscription Confirmed” have it say somethign like “Subscription Confirmed.  Here’s the coupon I promised!”

The odds that they’re going to open this email go way up when they hear about a coupon.  And then the odds of them making a purchase go way up too.

This is really effective for us when we truthfully tell our subscribers that this is the only discount they will ever get for this product.  Then, we make it a really valuable coupon.

Google the exact name of a post instead of giving a link

When you record a podcast or YouTube video that you want to link to a post, instead of giving out a shortlink or prettylink that will take people directly to the post, tell them to google the exact name of the post.

This is really effective if your post is unique enough that it will show up on page 1 of Google for that exact search term.  So verify that first.  If you have to, ask them to add the name of your site to the end of the search term.

What this does is signal to Google that people that search that phrase really want your article because a bunch of people will search that exact phrase, click on your article, and then not immediately bounce.  We’ve seen this boost a post up on Google rankings really quickly, even for less specific search phrases.

4. Mention influencers in your blog posts (and let them know)

Another strategy to getting more people in your industry aware of your blog is by mentioning influencers in your post. You can include a quote of theirs that you like, share one of their related posts, or just mention how helpful their website is for what you’re talking about.

After name-dropping them in your post, reach out to them over email or social media to let them know. Most people will be flattered that you thought of them and included them as a part of your post. Who knows, they could be interested in your blog and share the post with their followers, ask to contribute a guest post in the future, or offer you guidance!

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Do this now!

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Important!

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Warning

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