6 Next Level Tactics That Will Push You Past a Content Plateau

It’s not uncommon for a company’s marketing strategy to eventually start plateauing. Content requires patience and consistency, but sometimes you reach a point where you need something extra to move the ship forward.

You’ll see content plateaus at various points in your marketing, such as after you hit 10,000 visitors, again after you hit 50,000 visitors and again after you hit 100,000 visitors. For every level you reach, you might require a different strategy to grow to the next level.

If you’re still struggling to get to say, one or two thousand visitors per month, you may want to do further research on how to structure a solid content marketing strategy.

However, if you have a machine that’s been working really well, here are some next-level tactics you can leverage to push through a content plateau.

Reevaluate your strategy

The first step is to open up Google Analytics and evaluate when the content plateau began to occur.

Did you make any changes to your publishing schedule, content creation method, keyword research, or writers?

If you have made changes that correlated with your plateau, revert to your original strategy.

However, if you haven’t made any changes consider this quick checklist:

• Publishing at least weekly and on the same day?
• Are your posts 1,500+ words each?
• Are you doing keyword research and choosing words with low difficulty and high volume?
• Do your posts sound like an expert wrote them?
• Are you reposting your content to social media?
• Is it a good user experience? (Can they quickly skim through the page and understand the gist of the content through clear subheadings, short paragraphs, and screenshots)
• Are you using case studies, examples, and screenshots to highlight your points?

If you see problems with any of the items in this checklist, go back and make adjustments to your content strategy. Without having these items in place (and the majority of blogs don’t have these items in place), your results from the next-level tactics we’re about to discuss won’t be nearly as powerful.   

#1. Leverage an omnichannel approach

If you’ve been successful by just writing blogs, that’s great! But to get to that next level, (10,000 to 50,000 visitors or 50,000 to 100,000 visitors), you need to meet people on the medium that they are most comfortable with.

For example, there are a lot of people that simply don’t read blog posts, but they spend hours listening to podcasts on the way to work. If you don’t repurpose your content into a podcast, you’re missing out on a large audience simply because you don’t meet them with their preferred listening format.

Additionally, these other channels are proving to generate a fantastic ROI. About 88% of marketers are pleased with their profits from video and podcasting is proven to attract a high-earning listenership. In fact, only about 29% of people make over $75,000 per year in the United States, but 41% of podcast listeners make that amount or more.

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If you don’t have any experience with either of those channels, consider starting with podcasting as you only have to worry about audio quality, and it’s easier to edit. 

I started my podcast for just $24 with the Logitech headset that John Lee Dumas recommends. Though if you’re willing to go all-in, he also has mid-range and professional-level microphone recommendations. For editing software, you can use either Audacity or Garageband (which comes free on Macs).

Once you’ve created a podcast episode or video, you can send it to a writer to repurpose it into a blog post and break it up into further social media posts.

This is called the content sprouting method. Eric Siu of Single Grain used this method on his agency’s website and credits much of his growth from zero dollars to seven figures in revenue to the content sprout method.

I’ll give you an example of how he uses it.

He started by having someone record a video of him speaking…

… and then sent it to his podcast team to have the audio published there…

Eric could then send the podcast to a writer and ask them to create a blog post with that content. Additionally, he could ask the social team to break the blog post up into smaller pieces to be repurposed on social media.

This is a great way to produce a high volume of expert content with little effort on the expert’s part.

#2. Engage with your audience

Another great way to push through a content plateau is by engaging more with your current audience. This will encourage more social sharing, which will help you generate more traffic. Additionally, the more loyal your following is, the higher your conversions will be.

So how should you engage with your audience?

Going live is incredibly useful for building a stronger relationship with your audience because they can ask questions in the chat and you can answer them live. Your audience will feel much closer to you, just as if they sat down to have lunch with you.

In fact, Noah Kagan of App Sumo has created live lunch videos just as a way to connect with his audience.

Noah not only hosts fun live streams, but he hosts super actionable ones as well. For example, he helped one person grow his email list to 100 people live in one hour. He helped another person make their first online sale in one hour live.

His live videos are gold because they aren’t just actionable tips – people can literally duplicate what he’s doing with another person and get the same results.

These behind the scenes videos work spectacularly well, and as 80% of people say they prefer watching a live video to reading a blog post, give them what they want. To maximize your efforts, simulcast to Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Linkedin, and other platforms.

In addition to going live, be sure to respond to comments on social media and retweet your audience’s posts. One brand that is amazing at this is Glossier.

They have built an incredibly loyal following, and they interact with their customers in a tone that sounds like two girlfriends just talking together. They’re also great at creating user-generated content that helps get the conversation started.

They also retweet tons of their customers’ tweets.

So don’t neglect your social channels and think about how you can make your audience more loyal and engaged with you.

#3. Update old content

One of the easiest things you can do to push past a content plateau is just to update old content. Take your content that previously performed well and has decayed over time and start updating it.

The results are truly incredible. Here’s an example of one piece that I updated.

It went from 11 keywords to roughly 150 in just a few months.

So how should you do content updates?

Start by choosing the right pieces to update. Consider using this tool, which tells you which posts have the best chance of performing better if they are updated.

Then do some keyword research and see which keywords it is currently close to ranking for (say in positions 5-10). Make sure that the keyword is included in the title and add a few paragraphs where relevant/appropriate to include low hanging keywords.

Update any statistics and case studies that are 3+ years old.

Finally, take a look at your click-through-rate (CTR). If you notice that some pages have a very low click-through rate, look at some of the other titles for that keyword. Make your title more appealing (while including your main keyword) and republish it.

#4. Involve influencers

Another great way to supercharge your content is to involve influencers. For example, I host a podcast where I bring on some of the industry’s brightest thinkers and interview them. It’s been a great way to both establish myself as an authority and tap into their connections.

However, it doesn’t have to be as complex as starting an interview podcast. You can simply ask influencers to give you quotes for a project. I’ll show you.

I recently wrote a piece and reached out to several influencers in the space to give me original ideas. The response was overwhelming. Almost all of them gave me quotes for my article. This not only helped make my piece much more authoritative, but many were also willing to share it, which opened up my brand to a whole new audience.

#5. Perform original research

One of my favorite ways to push past a content plateau is by creating original research.

The best part is that it doesn’t have to be super expensive. My favorite example is when Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media wanted to know the average lifespan of a website. He wanted to include it in his article, but the statistic didn’t exist at the time.

So he hired a virtual assistant to pull the top 200 marketing websites according to Alexa using the free public data through the Wayback Machine. They found that the average lifespan of a website is 2.66 years.

The only cost in this research was hiring the VA (probably about $100) and it resulted in about 260 backlinks just for that single statistic.

If you don’t know what kind of statistics to create, just take note of every time you need a statistic to support a claim while you’re writing and keep a list.

A lot of statistics you’ll be able to create with public data. If you can’t, consider partnering with an influencer.

This is what Michele Linn of Mantis Research did when she was growing her startup. She partnered with BuzzSumo and offered to co-publish original research. As she was a scrappy startup, she did the heavy lifting by creating the survey and cleaning the data so that all BuzzSumo had to do was send out the survey to their email list.

Michele says, “Even though our brand was new, we were able to get backlinks to our study. And, it’s common for potential clients to mention that they learned about us by reading the study.”

I’ve also seen a lot of creative polls on Twitter and Facebook. If you already have a following, source some statistics from your own following. Tim Soulo of Ahrefs is a master at this.

If you don’t have a huge following, you could even ask an influencer to post a poll for you.

#6. Consider building a tool

One of the most successful next level content strategies I’ve seen so far is using a tool to build your brand. Neil Patel is a great example of this. He already had a super solid content strategy in place, and while his traffic wasn’t declining, it wasn’t increasing as rapidly as he hoped. So instead he purchased the keyword tool Ubersuggest and gave it away for free.

The results were incredible.

From being stuck at roughly 200,000 visitors per month his traffic then skyrocketed to about 2.5 million in roughly three years.

While Neil purchased the tool for a considerable amount of money, you don’t necessarily have to. You can go to a website like indiemaker.co or codecanyon.net to purchase cheaper ones. It could be a simple calculator or widget.

It will also help you up your SEO game because people are much more likely to link to tools. Just be sure to give it away for free as paid tools will make you just like anyone else.

Wrapping up

If you’ve reached a content plateau, consider how you can use some of these next-level tactics to blow past your competition. The best part is that most of these tactics aren’t that difficult to start implementing. Don’t forget the basics of a solid content strategy, like consistency and quality, as you’re adding in these next-level tactics.

Guest author: Megan is the CEO and founder of the content marketing agency, Ignite My Site. She is also the host of a content marketing and SEO podcast that breaks down the strategies and tactics of the world’s most celebrated content marketers. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

The post 6 Next Level Tactics That Will Push You Past a Content Plateau appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/content-plateau/

The Secrets to Cold Outreach For Freelancers

What’s one of the biggest struggles for freelancers? Getting clients.

In fact, 75% of freelancers can’t find new work at a moment’s notice.

This is important especially with so many people opting to freelance, work from home, and start side hustles.

While you can wait for referrals, tap your network, and do the usual things – which do work – there’s a way to take control of your clients.

A way to take control of your income, finance, and turn your freelancing career into a booming business.

Do you know how? Cold outreach.

This is the secret weapon for any freelancer looking to take their career to the next level.

I’ll be teaching you how to land high paying clients with cold outreach and what common mistakes to avoid along the way.

Step 1: Choose your medium

Cold outreach isn’t limited to a single platform.

It can be done anywhere at any time.

That’s why the first choice is to choose a single channel to focus on. You can split test and experiment afterward. But, let’s keep it simple at first.

Select one channel to perform the outreach. I recommend email or LinkedIn.

The first reason for this is that there are 3.9 billion active email users globally. And, let’s be real. All of us check out emails every day. (If not for hours!)

Image Source: Oberlo

Secondly, 92% of marketers include LinkedIn in their marketing mix as it’s the go-to network for reaching B2B professionals. If that aligns with your ideal client (more on that next) then try it first.

Image Source: Foundation

That brings me to my next point.

Step 2: Figure out your ideal client’s persona

If I asked you who your ideal client is, could you tell me everything about them?

You should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who are they and what’s their position?
• What kind of company, industry, and vertical are they in?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• What keeps them up at night? What do they need help with?
• How can you help improve all of this?

Once you know this information, you can begin prospecting.

There are freely available websites, databases, and networks where these leads can be found. Let’s use Angel List if you target startups, for instance.

Simply type in a keyword and adjust the filters to begin.

Click a company that’s suitable and all of the company information will be found on their profile page.

Then, take this data and plug it into a spreadsheet that looks like this:

The most important column is the domain as you will be using that in the next step to find key decision-makers contact information.

Step 3: Find the decision-maker

Next, you need to find the gatekeeper within the companies you’ve found. Think of these people as the individual in charge of whether or not your services will be accepted.

A lot of freelancers make the mistake of cold pitching customer service or generic emails. That’s a guaranteed way to get emails deleted. It’s simply not their role.

It’s infinitely more effective if you take the extra steps and go straight to the top.

Luckily, there’s a tool for that! It’s called Hunter.

Remember those domains I told you to write down? Plug this into Hunter on the homepage (or use the bulk feature with a paid account).

The following page will give you a list of leads with their emails (bingo!), social accounts, phone numbers, and more.

We want their emails or social profiles depending on which medium you chose in the first step.

Organize these into the original spreadsheet and move onto the fourth step.

Step 4: Humanize your email

Now it’s time for the meat and potatoes – actually sending some messages.

I suggest you use a CRM like HubSpot to organize contacts and track progress. But feel free to keep it old school, just be diligent about managing the data.

Keep in mind that it’s easy to lose your social skills when getting into business. We want fast results. We want things now.

You know what I’m talking about: sending out copy and pasted messages in hopes it will convert. It won’t.

That’s why every email needs to be personalized to each prospect. This will maximize open, reply, and conversion rates.

It also creates a much more genuine impression and opens the door to create a real relationship that cold outreach is all about. Not hard selling.

For instance, every email should include:

• The prospect’s first name.
• The prospect’s company name.
• A custom observation or question.
• A unique call to action.

Here’s an example of what it would look like:

You need to introduce yourself, use social proof, mention your services, and most importantly talk results.

Decision-makers and especially B2B companies want to drive revenue, leads, and other tangible performance.

The name and company name is simple. However, the custom compliment takes some digging. It can be about:

• New clients
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Funding or venture capital
• New products or services
• Collaborations and partnerships
• Branding changes

That brings me to the last step in nailing your cold outreach.

Step 5: Success is in the follow-up

Who are you messaging? Is it vice presidents? C-suite executives?

These are busy people with lots on their plate. Naturally, a random email isn’t going to overly pique their interests.

They may be in need of your service or want to learn more, but they have colleagues and projects that come first.

That’s why follow-ups are key to success with cold outreach as a freelancer.

You need to catch them at the perfect day and hour. CoSchedule concluded that Tuesday at 10:00 am, Thursday at 8:00 pm, and Wednesday at 2:00 pm are best to yield results.

Image Source: CoSchedule

Furthermore, 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups. Don’t give up too soon.

There are many different ways to send follow-ups, too. The first way is to send a simple reminder and reiterate the original email like so:

Additional follow-ups can be focused on sharing content, asking for feedback, or scheduling a discovery call.

Conclusion

One of the biggest challenges of freelancing isn’t getting your website set up, building a brand, or marketing. It’s getting clients.

And while you wait for all of the former to pay off, there’s one way to instantly land clients and that’s through proper outreach.

It all begins with narrowing down your ideal client into a buyer persona. Map out their demographics, company size, strengths, weaknesses, and every other detail.

Then, it’s time to get their domain information. Use databases like AngelList, Crunchbase, Dribble, or others. Most importantly we want their URL to run through a tool like Hunter for their email.

Plug this information into a CRM and begin sending customized emails. It should be tailored to each lead. Use their first name, company name, and present a custom observation or compliment.

Following up is crucial after this. You may not catch them at the right time the first time. Or the second. Or the third. You get my point.

But, you’ll be in total control of your freelance career. And, that’s priceless.

Guest author: Carmine Mastropierro is a copywriter who has written for Neil Patel, GoDaddy, Marketo, and other publications. He helps businesses drive traffic, leads, and revenue.

The post The Secrets to Cold Outreach For Freelancers appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/cold-outreach-for-freelancers/

How to Do a Reputation Audit For Your Brand (And Why You Should)

Many sources create a brand’s reputation.

Getting positive feedback, responding to trends, being aware of competitors, gleaning audience insights, and establishing relationships with customers each play a role in building a good reputation for a company.

Gathering and analyzing this information is essential for growing and managing your online reputation, but these tasks involve a lot of data.

Social listening as a powerful marketing tool is a major trend in 2020 and platforms for monitoring social networks are indispensable for managing the many tasks involved with keeping your online reputation healthy.

In this article, I will explore an important component of brand management: the online reputation audit.

A reputation audit is often the starting point for work on the company’s online reputation, whether building it up and increasing reach, changing a brand’s position in the market, or addressing negative sentiment among customers.

What is a reputation audit and why is it important?

A brand reputation audit analyzes mentions of a brand, company name, trend, event, or other specific topics. A social monitoring system like Brandwatch or YouScan collects the data into one place so it can be examined. A thorough audit provides insights for launching a new business or product as well as the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

With a reputation audit, you can:

• Analyze customer relationships with the company. You will identify positive and negative comments about the brand in general as well as sentiment toward various specific criteria such as price, quality, and services. This helps you work out your customer’s pain points.
• Identify problems with business processes. For example, customers refusing to order again because a delivery person was rude.
• Identify new audience groups.
• Compare your brand to the competition.
• Analyze market leaders and outline development points for the brand.
• Identify user insights in order to improve products and prepare a content strategy or change brand positioning.
• Conduct market analysis before launching a new product and perhaps even predict emerging trends.

Your reputation audit can be an independent study or a supplement to offline analytics. As monitoring platforms become more sophisticated, companies have more opportunities to use audit data instead of conducting surveys. Audits are more reliable than surveys and focus groups because they use unfiltered opinions from a brand’s audience.

The reputation audit and brand monitoring

First, a little terminology:

What is brand monitoring?

Brand monitoring lets you keep an eye on your brand’s reputation and stay on top of user comments that need a response by scanning mentions on a daily basis.

For example, a customer is upset about a delivery delay. He or she writes a disappointing comment on Twitter. The brand, tracking brand mentions, sees this comment within 30 minutes. It answers with an apology, explains the situation, and offers a discount on the next order.

The company has now exceeded his or her expectations and left them with a positive experience instead of a negative one, causing them to recommend your brand to their friends.

What is a reputation audit?

A reputation audit examines brand mentions over a specific period.

For example, the company changes its positioning in the market and wants to know how customers react. The audit shows a small number of brand-related discussions. The brand’s official social media accounts are active, revealing that there are not enough brand mentions outside the brand communities. In addition, the audit shows that the brand is mentioned less on weekends. Insights like this can shape future advertising campaigns to have the greatest impact.

The audit also answers the specific question it was conducted to address: How do the company’s customers feel about its change in positioning?

Say, for example, users perceived rebranding negatively. Comments reflect that the audience still thinks product quality is low and some even believe the changes represent a failure of the business to be profitable.

These problems may have been avoided if the brand had examined user sentiment before changing its design and positioning.

Audits are useful for more than goods and services. Specific events can also benefit from sentiment analysis, such as a case in Topface Media’s practice where we monitored a film.

Between the release of the first and second parts of the film, we monitored the audience’s attitude toward the film’s characters and the actors involved. We examined audience sentiment as well as the number of mentions for individual characters and actors.

Through this analysis, Topface Media determined the audience’s favorites, the main trends in the social media conversation, and the reaction of users to the trailer. We also compiled “viewer personas.”

This information can later be used for advertising, posters, and more.

What does a reputation audit look like?

The first step in the audit is to set up a monitoring system. Your system must account for the complexity of the brand name: how unique the name is, how many words it contains, and what words should be excluded. The accuracy of your audit depends on setting up this system correctly.

An audit may analyze:

• Dynamics, seasonality, and peaks of the total number of mentions
• Dynamics of and range in the sentiment of mentions
• Brand mention sources, identifying the most promising or impactful sources
• The most important criteria for evaluating a product or service, according to a brand’s audience (such as taste, color, price, quality, delivery, or other factors)
• Audience discussions, identifying “negative personas” and potential brand advocates
• Audience groups, identifying groups that are negative or loyal to certain aspects of a product or service (such as taste, color, price, quality, and delivery). For example, housewives 25–45 years old from large cities are interested in speed of delivery: the audit shows that this is the biggest category of objections. However, they are not price sensitive: the audit found only a few comments on this topic with mostly neutral sentiment.

In addition, the audit should contain a guide to action: the final conclusions and recommendations on the content strategy, setup of an advertising campaign, and other actionable insights determined by the purpose of the study.

Should you conduct your reputation audit in-house or hire a contractor?

Why not just conduct an audit yourself?

While today’s monitoring software is more sophisticated and functional than ever, most brands will have better results in trusting a trained professional to interpret the data. Putting analytics in the hands of specialists can save you a lot of time and money.

An audit first requires data collection. The machines behind monitoring platforms cannot always identify a comment’s true sentiment. They misread sarcasm or fail to determine whether the user has a positive or negative attitude towards the brand.

For this reason, manual tonality adjustment is required. This is especially important for brands and products that have complex technical characteristics, such as car parts, IT products, and software. It’s time-consuming, but an expert has training and techniques to speed up processing the sentiment of a large amount of data.

The next step of the audit is analyzing and formatting data. Agencies that work with monitoring systems on an ongoing basis receive special prices, enabling them to conduct research on a specific topic at a much lower cost.

These lower subscription costs and agency efficiencies can mean outsourcing your reputation audit to professionals is actually much less expensive than subscribing to a monitoring system yourself and conducting your research in-house. Plus, it saves you time and frees you up to focus on other areas of your business.

Wrapping up

In any case, conducting an audit will help you stay abreast of the current reputation of your brand. Monitoring your brand’s reputation gives you a competitive advantage, helps understand your audience, and gives you better tools to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Guest author: Anna Dargie, I am marketing expert specializing in social listening and customer insights. Also I`m managing partnerships and business development and write about online reputation, social media analytics and marketing for Topface Media marketing agency.

The post How to Do a Reputation Audit For Your Brand (And Why You Should) appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/reputation-audit/