1. What is Email Marketing?
While social networks have come and gone, and SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization), has been through many changes that have lead people to question its reliability and effectiveness, e-mail marketing is something that has been around for the longest time and shown no signs of going anywhere. Most of us will still start our days by checking our e-mail, and any messages we find in there are still likely to get read and noticed.
While you might think this is something you can do without a mailing list, that is absolutely not true. To successfully collect and manage emails, you will need to handle spam and ensure that people really want to be on your list – both of which will involve the use of a confirmation email. You’ll also need to handle people unsubscribing, you’ll want to maintain “list hygiene” by removing defunct emails, and you’ll want to be able to track who opens your emails and which ones are most successful. None of this would be possible to do manually.
• Using Email Marketing
Collecting emails when someone lands on your website is a powerful and useful strategy for turning visitors into leads. Now you can market new products to them, and encourage them to come back to your site.
One way to use your email marketing is to send out emails that provide additional content – just like your blog posts. Another option is to email people talking about all the posts you’ve recently added to your website in order to encourage them to visit again.
Then, when you have a product to sell, you will message to promote that product and drive more sales. This will be discussed in a subsequent chapter.
The point is that by using email marketing, you aren’t relying on your visitors checking your website every single day. You now have a way to reach them – and it’s a way that isn’t dependent on a third-party site like Google or Facebook.
• How to Get Your Emails to Stand Out
But while email marketing has remained effective, it has somewhat changed in the last decade or so – even though it might not be obvious on the face of it. The biggest change of course is the way that we check our emails. For most of us, this is now done on the move and constantly via our smartphones and tablets. Rather than getting home and checking 20 e-mails at once, we are instead ‘drip fed’ emails throughout the day as we go about our business.
This in turn then means that each email will be more likely to ‘stand out’ from the others and get noticed on its own merits, but it also means that we have become more accustomed to just brushing them off and viewing them as a nuisance. If you want your email marketing campaign to be a success, then you need to take that into consideration and factor it into the way you design your subject headings and the way you send your messages.
2. How to Get Traffic Through Paid Advertising.
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and refers to the use of ad networks such as Facebook Ads or AdWords in order to promote your website or product. Basically, with any of these services you agree to pay a set amount for each time someone clicks on your advert and this way you can avoid spending money on a campaign that is unsuccessful.
Still though you need to think about how you are going to convert the traffic you gain into profit and you need to think about how you can get the right people to click on the adverts. There are a number of tricks to making a successful and most importantly a profitable PPC campaign, so here we will look at what those are.
• The Goal of PPC Marketing
This is really the most important thing to bear in mind; that a PPC campaign that gets the most clicks is not necessarily the most successful one, as that means that you're actually spending the most money. You only want people to click on your adverts if they're likely to earn you money once they come to your site - if they're likely to be returning visitors for instance who will click on your ads, or if they are likely to buy the products that you are selling.
PPC ads are shown based on a split-second bidding system. That means that the more you opt to pay per “per click” (you get to set this amount), the more your ad will be shown in the relevant spots. By increasing the conversion rate on your website and by improving the ads, you can spend more money and get your ad seen by more people – scaling up your profits.
In order to work with this then you need to focus much more on the CTR (Click Through Rate) on your page and the quality of the traffic that the PPC ad is bringing you. If you are tricking people into clicking your advert and they are then only spending a minute on your page, then actually you're just wasting your money. Likewise, if your page isn't doing a good enough job of convincing people to buy, then again you are actually throwing money away.
• Designing Your Ad Accordingly
As such you should be aiming to create an advert that will attract the attention you want it to from the right people, and only if they are likely to make a purchase.
In other words, then you can consider including the price in your advert, the reason being that this will then allow you to drive away people who aren't willing to spend that kind of money - which is just fine because you don't want to pay for them to come to your site.
What is important still though is that your advert catches the eye so that the people you want to see it do, and the important thing to bear in mind for this is that your advert MUST look professional if you hope to make sales. Be professional, be honest and be up front and then as long as you focus on the CTR of your landing page you can very reliably generate money this way.
• Targeting
Whether you choose to use Facebook Ads or Google AdWords, one of the most important considerations for an effective campaign is targeting. In other words, are your emails reaching the right people – the people who are likely to buy from you.
AdWords shows adverts on Google’s search engines and is based on what people search for. You will pick the search terms you want to target, and when someone looks for that phrase, your ad will appear at the top as a “sponsored result.”
Facebook Ads shows ads on a user’s Facebook homefeed based on their interests, demographics, and more. You can this way choose to show your fitness book only to people who have listed “working out” as an interest (but who might also have listed their weight as being a little on the heavier side!).
Which option is better for you? That depends on the nature of your monetization (which we’ll talk more about in a moment). Keep in mind though, that while Facebook lets you target an audience based on a greater amount of information, Google lets you target people based on their intent. In other words, if someone searches for “buy fitness ebook,” then that tells you that they are actually looking to buy an ebook. Thus they might be easier to convert.
3. How to Integrate Social Media to Grow Your Business.
Now you have PPC and email marketing being used to direct traffic to your website, and to drive sales of a product (that we haven’t added yet). But there are still more tools at your disposal for driving even more custom.
One such tool is social media. Social media is an extremely useful resource when it comes to gaining traffic because it essentially lets you talk to an audience like a human being. We all use social media, and so we understand how it ticks. This is certainly NOT necessarily true of Google!
What also makes social media powerful, is that it lets you build relationships with your audience. That in turn can be immensely powerful when it comes to getting people to become loyal to your website, getting them to sign up for your emails, and getting them to visit your page directly – Google or no!
• Social Media Marketing Explained
Sometimes it can feel a little like guesswork when you're trying to build a following on social media – especially when you start out.
At first, you'll feel like every post you write is falling on deaf ears and after spending ages coming up with interesting things to say you'll be met with the sound of silence in return. And what sort of content should you be focusing on anyway? And how do you get people to listen?
While it can seem like you're just blindly fumbling about in the dark though, there is a proven method for finding success on social media and it's perfectly possible to systemize the process to ensure rapid success. Here we will look at how to implement the best strategy and utilize the right tools to start generating a following and taking the guesswork out of social media marketing.
The Strategy
The process of building a successful social media campaign is fairly straightforward when you know how. The goal is to continuously deliver value to your audience via informative and interesting posts that you upload regularly to your various accounts.
At the same time though, you also need to make sure that you have a strong brand identity across these accounts. That means that you should have the same account name, logo and imagery on Facebook and Tumblr as you do on Twitter and Instagram. You should be creating multiple channels that your visitors can use to find you and using them all synergistically.
From there you should begin building your followers. This is trickiest when you're starting out as followers beget followers – in other words, people will be more likely sign up once they see other people have.
To start those followers coming in you should make sure you have social media buttons your website or blog. That doesn't just mean sharing buttons – but links directly to your account that your visitors can follow to find you. Alternatively, you can use more elaborate widgets to showcase your channels, such as having a Twitter feed (this will have the added bonus of making your site look more active).
This is very important and while you might not think it would work, simply having those links there will be enough to gradually get some visitors seeping in.
From there you keep posting. And you can use some of the following tools and strategies to start getting even more followers as you do…
Some quick tips:
• Use the most trending hashtags when posting
• If you can’t be on every social platform (which is ideal), then try to be on the ones that fit your style of content creation and that target the same audience that you are
Don't Give Up!
Hopefully these tips will have helped you to start feeling more confident in your social media campaign. If you find you aren't a hit overnight, though don't worry – these things take time and a combination of trial and error and lots of data will only help you to refine your strategy. This is not an art, it's a science, and once you get the hang of it it's an incredibly powerful tool for you to leverage.
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