Tag Archives: website traffic

How to Create an Effective Free Opt-in Offer

How to Create an Effective Free Opt-in Offer

Getting traffic to your site is great, but what do you do when half of the traffic leaves without purchasing or leaving any trace they were there? Here’s where an opt-in offer comes into play. An opt-in offer will grow your email list and continuously generate profits. The tricky part is convincing someone to give you their email.

The most important things to keep in mind when designing your opt-in offer are:

  • What’s in it for them?
  • What message will resonate with my audience?
  • What plan do I have to ultimately convert them into a customer?

When you ask for someone’s email, offer them something valuable for their information. It’s a must! Offer a resource that has significant enough value to be a good “trade” for their email address.  As well, be upfront about what your subscriber can expect once they give you their email address. How many time will they get an email each week?  Tell them what they will receive and it’ll greatly improve your chances of getting their information.

There is a multitude of different offers to use for the opt-in offer incentive including:

  • Coupon Code
  • Webinar Content
  • Educational information i.e.- video tutorial
  • E-Book Download
  • Contest Entry
  • Exclusive offers

Another method to consider is to get an email address and other information with a loyalty points program.

Starbucks is a perfect example of great customer retention through a loyalty program that allows people to earn stars every time they make a purchase. Customers redeem their stars for free drinks, food, and products.If you offer people incentives to create an account and recurring incentives for goal completions, they’ll be 10 times more likely to return.

Once you’ve established your offer, the next step is deciding what to do once you get the email address.

This is the time to make your company’s message stand out from the emails that fill people’s inbox daily. Choose your message and how you want to deliver it, then design your email to display your message engagingly.

We hate to break it to you, but not all emails get read!  If you can get a 35% open rate on your emails you are doing well.  That’s why you need an offer that helps you gain a volume of new subscribers.

Your main message must pop off your email right away.  The subject line often makes or breaks whether the email is read.

So now that you have your email list and message, you need to think about how to get them back to your site.

Your emails should have easy to read call to actions that will bring people back to your website. Offer a promo, show a new product offering, or include an excerpt from a blog that requires people to go back to your site to continue reading. Offer your subscribers solutions to their problems or something entertaining. Make your contact list look forward to your emails and you will see your conversions rise.

There is proven growth in email marketing you just need to be creative to stand out among the millions of opt-in offers.

Your best bet in creating a successful opt-in offer is to get into the minds of your ideal customers. What do they want to know? What would make them give you their information? Answer that and your opt-in offer will do the lead generation for you.

Why a Blog Is Essential to SEO

Why a Blog Is Essential to SEO

By now you’ve heard of blogs.  Perhaps you wonder if a blog is relevant or would be helpful fo your business.  A few common answers to why a blog is helpful for a business includes more traffic to a website, higher sales from greater traffic, and being recognized for expertise from writing regularly on a certain topic. These are right but I’ll add that another important thing to keep in mind is how a blog can impact your company’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Indexing Pages

SEO is about coming up on the first page and in the top results on a search engine when a user types in a phrase or topic your site wants to rank for.  SEO isn’t simply keyword stuffing your articles to maximize how well your site shows up in the search engines, nor is it hidden keywords on a page programmed by a developer.  In fact, this practice is penalized by all search engines (most importantly Google).

With every well-written blog post you publish, you’re building your “keyword footprint” for the search engine.  More articles, more posts, and more pages give Google (and other search engines) bots more material to scroll through and more relevant words from which to gather information for search, and thus more value coming from your website that can then result in your site ranking better in search engine results for key terms of importance.  Blogging makes your website a bigger, ever-growing, more SEO friendly structure on the web.  This can help you rank over the business that has little content and few new updates to their site content.

Backlinking

While backlinking is traditionally thought of as an inbound-only form of traffic (from other sites to yours), backlinking within your own website will help show how connected your content is from post to post.  For example, if your company is working on a campaign to drive traffic for a certain keyword, linking different blogs posts together in a tactful, subtle way shows search engine bots that the articles are relevant and related to one another.

Similar tactics can be used externally.  For example, be a thought leader by commenting on highly-trafficked blog posts from other websites.  Leave your comment (again, tactfully and strategically) along with the specific blog post you wish to drive traffic to (if the comments  allow it) and watch your own blog’s traffic increase all while giving the SEO bots some breadcrumbs linked to you.

Relevant Content to Searchers

Search engines are optimized to find the most appropriate content for their users.  High bounce rates, keyword stuffing, and lackluster backlinking will get you penalized by Google.  On the other hand, a blog with consistent information, which answers searchers questions and provokes thought can make a significant difference for your SEO.

By being the thought leader in your field and publishing relevant, useful content for people instead of merely publishing for Google, the search engine will reward you by elevating your site in search. By doing this, your site will see decreases in your website’s bounce rate and increases in the number of unique visitors and quality visits to your pages.

Lead Generation

Obviously, the most important connection between a quality blog and excellent SEO is lead generation and lead quality.  This requires you to think like your customer.  By establishing buyer personas of who your ideal customer is, understanding what type of information your buyers seek, and tailoring your content for your visitors you’ll dramatically improve traffic to your site and when combined with a lead capture strategy and tool, your lead generation and the quality of leads your website generates can increase exponentially.

Whether you want to make your blog posts more relevant or simply drive more traffic to your website, SEO and blogging go hand-in-hand. An informative blog without the necessary keyword focus, backlinking, and overall power of SEO will remain just good content hidden to those seeking the information it provides but a blog that offers content and focuses on key SEO items can be a way to really boost your business forward.  A blog is not only helpful and valuable to your SEO but an absolute necessity!