Web Content | SEO Writing

You Should Give Away Free Reports

What can giving away a free report do for your business?  Plenty!  It can help you capitalize on more of your website traffic, increase your conversion rate (convert visitors to customers) and develop a repeat business customer base. Let’s explore why you should invest in writing free reports and giving them away as well as how to get one written.

Everyone loves a freebie

When people land on your site, you hope they’ll buy something.  If they don’t buy something straight away, signing them up for a freebie can get their attention and help you capture their e-mail address so that you can have an opportunity to sell to them in the future. If you don’t have a squeeze page, you might never have the opportunity to sell to that person again! You did something right to get them there, just because you couldn’t hit the ball out of the park the first time, don’t write them off forever!

How to get people to subscribe to your list

People don’t want to just sign up for any old mailing list. No one wants more emails with special offers and sales pitches. You need to offer them something valuable that they’ll want.  A free report that gives out insider tips or helps people solve a problem is a good idea, especially if it’s related to the bigger ticket item you’re trying to sell. By giving away a report with a bit of information in a niche where the upsell will be the item that will make you profit, that free report is just part of the sales process.

If people don’t come back and buy right away you can still work on selling to them as well. A newsletter, an email autoresponder series or future email marketing campaigns allow you to continue to work on increasing your sales.

How do you write a special report?

A special report or free report just has to be a document you give out. It can be a few pages or it can be as long as the great American novel. It’s all up to you.  You can simply write a word document and convert it to a PDF. There are professional ebook and report writers (like myself) that can also do this for you.

The two most important aspects to this strategy is:

1. Provide something people want
2. Capture their e-mail address

How do you manage your mailing list?

Sign up for a service like GetResponse to help you manage your mailing list and you can capitalize on much more of your website traffic! If your report is of great value, it’s likely to be much more memorable and get someone to open and read a future email from you so be sure to either write something great or get professional writing help to get the job done well.

Achieving Tightly Targeted Site Monetization

In the quest for a maximum conversion rate, you may consider the monetization strategy of your site or blog. More and more, I’m seeing internet marketers who choose to leave Google Adsense off their blog.

Why Is Google Adsense Potentially Dangerous To Your Bottom Line?

If you have a tightly focused site that aims to sell something, you want the viewer to naturally progress to that call to action. If you’re selling a weight loss product on a site but you add Google Adsense, your contextual advertising will lead your potential customers to a competitor’s website.  If you look at this blog you’ll see that I don’t use Adsense here.

I love Adsense and use it on more than a dozen of my own blogs. Why isn’t it used here? If I do, other professional writer PPC ads will tempt you to visit their website and if you’re here to buy professional writing services, I want you to buy them from me.  When creating a site that you’re monetizing you need to decide if you are broadly monetizing or tightly monetizing it.

Why Multiple Ad Sources Might Be a Bad Idea

In your site, if you’ve gone through all the trouble of getting potential customers to your site and then extra trouble of conversing effectively with them in your copy so that they’ll buy something specific from you (such as a ClickBank or your own product) why are you going to let them get wooed away by someone whose banner ad was more compelling than yours?

If you look at sales letters, you see that there’s only one way out: The BUY NOW LINK.  Don’t work hard to get your customers to buy something and then let them get distracted by a 10-20 word ad that’ll earn you a few pennies instead of many, many dollars.

Some food for thought.

Is Your Online Business Recession Proof?

If you’re in the world of internet business, you know it can have ups and downs and can go from feast to famine to feast again.  When you’re in a bit of a famine, it can be jarring; especially if you work full-time on the Internet.

While no business is typically recession proof, here are some ways that you can protect yourself and some tips about how to align your eggs so that:

a) you’re prepared for growth

b) you can survive a slow period

c) you use down time constructively

Diversify Online Business

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you’re meeting your nut every month with selling one affiliate product or through your own product creation sales, make sure you have more than one stream of income.  If an internet marketing program should get cancelled or sales suddenly plummet you want to have a backup plan and you don’t want to be crippled financially because you’ve lost your only source of online income.

Portion Your Income Wisely

Business owners should pay themselves and pay their business so be sure you use a portion of your profits for future business development as well as sock away a few months worth of living expenses. When money is really good, be sure to save some for a rainy day.

Plan For The Future

Here’s a big one.  When you’re booming and busy it’s easy to stay in the now instead of looking ahead. Always look ahead even if things are good. When you have a bit of down time, use it to grow your business. Read up on SEO and social marketing and follow some gurus who give great advice. Keep doing article writing even if you like the search engine results you have. You need to work persistently at your site’s SEO. Don’t ever become complacent with whatever spot you’ve got in the search engines because you’ll suddenly be dethroned one day and you won’t know what hit you. SEO isn’t evergreen so you need to work at it constantly.  When you feel a lull in your business volume, work at it some more.  How do you do that?

SEO Isn’t Evergreen!

-Add a blog to your site. I know a skilled ghostblogger (wink) who can help you keep traffic coming to your site and get you new customers.

-Article marketing.  Add articles to article directories that point to your site. It’ll bring you people and visitors.  (I offer a great article directory SEO package. Ask me about it)

-Social media. Step up your social media efforts to network with more people, get more customers and get the skinny on the latest and greatest goings on in your niche.

This business does  have peaks and valleys but even in a recession, you can weather the storm. If you’re constantly growing your knowledge and investing in your business you’ll ride the wave and be ok!