Does Your Brand Even Deserve Attention?
It’s now been a week since I attended the Denver Digital Summit, and it’s been just a little over two months since I made the leap from unfulfilling government work into the deep waters of content writing and search engine optimization.
My primary care physician thought this move was some mid-life, manic episode, however, I assured her this was a thought out (err…well…as well thought out as possible) transition into a career where my skills at and passion for writing would no longer be going to waste. It just seemed that simple. So why aren’t we all doing this? Why isn’t EVERYONE working in SEO and copywriting and making bank? How hard could content writing and SEO really be?! Well, from what I gather, it shouldn’t be that hard at all and there is no excuse as to why I can’t succeed in this venture. I say this now…
So much of what I heard at the summit seemed rather obvious. Especially for anyone who has ever had a social media account, which is, in essence, advertising yourself and attempting to increase your visibility. Attention is the new currency; it’s scarce and everyone is trying to get yours, but our collective attention span is shrinking. The challenge isn’t so much reaching an audience; the challenge is keeping the audience (as demonstrated in Rachael Sperling of Facebook’s “Building Ideas for the Attention Economy” session) by catching their attention, inviting them to interact and then allowing them to dig deeper into your service. Oh yeah, and obviously all while avoiding giving the audience a shitty experience. In all, marketing is basically the equivalent of dangling your keys in front of a giggling baby to keep it happy and engaged. Right?
A week later and it seems my biggest takeaway from the summit was the importance of providing a feeling your customers can’t get anywhere else and ultimately having the courage to go all-in to ensure that your purpose intersects and has an impact with the passion of the audience. In the “Marketing Trends That Matter in 2019” session, Leigh George of Freedom presented us with a value-driven ad campaign by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. I am still thinking about how effective it was in gaining my attention, and how impactful taking a deep and authentic perspective can be. If every brand were willing to connect with their audience at such a meaningful level, marketing could be much easier. Most brands won’t…. And there’s your opportunity. I will leave you with that ad by John Jay. Marinade in it, like I have been for the last few days now. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
How can I tell which keywords are driving my sales?
Very recently, I showed you how to find which keywords were driving traffic to your site from search. While this can prove very important to understand where your site is providing value for searchers, it also assumes that all traffic is created equal. It’s not all equal.
Your site isn’t some amorphous blob (I hope) that somehow ranks as a whole? It’s made up of pages that are ranking individually for a myriad of keywords and key phrases. It does a disservice to your efforts to view your site’s top keywords and end your research there. Let’s go further.
While I speak to these examples in terms of completed and submitted contact forms, you can modify this to your own goal. If you’re a B2B company, you may want to use this information to find what keywords are driving leads. If you are a restaurant, you may want to learn what keywords are driving reservations. If you know the goal of your website, following these steps should help reveal what people are typing into search engines to get there.
Step 1: Make sure you have Google Analytics setup on your site.
This is essential for revealing this data. If you don’t have Google Analytics firing on every page of your site, go get that setup and then ask Siri to remind you to revisit this page in two months.
You can find instructions for setting up Google Analytics here.
Step 2: Get as close to the conversion as you can.
What prompted me to write this piece was a company asking how I’d know where to start their PPC campaigns from. I tried to explain this multi-post series in a span of about 2 minutes. The client looked perplexed as to the words I’d just vomited out. I decided to take this step by step to help them (and you) better understand what was driving their conversions.
In their case, they wanted leads in the form of completed contacts, either by phone or from a contact email form on their site. For the sake of making this example easier to follow, we’ll focus on the contact email form. With that goal in mind, I’m considering any visitor who sees the “Thank you for contacting us” page after they hit submit on the contact form a conversion. Let’s pretend that the URL of that page is www.example.com/contact-thank-you/
I have another client who doesn’t sell directly to their customer. Instead, they provide links to local retailers, in their case, visits to the “Find a retailer” page or a button click to “Find a retailer near me” might be considered a conversion, since it’s the closest to a conversion we can get with website interactions (we can’t track the visitor once they leave the site.)
Step 3: Source the entrance page of your convertors
Now that we know the conversion URL (which, as an aside, should be set up as a Goal in Google Analytics), we want to visit Google Analytics, select Behavior on the left-hand menu, select Site Content, and then click All Pages to see visits to all page on the main portion of the page.
On the right hand side, below the graph of pageviews, you’ll see a search bar. Type in the page name of your conversion page. Using our example, I’ll type in “contact-thank-you”
If everything has gone correctly, you should now only see that page in your list of pages.
Below the graph, you should see a drop-down menu labeled Secondary Dimension. Click that drop down menu and type Landing Page in the search box.
Select Landing Page, and you should now see a new column below, just to the right of Page column. This new column shows you the entrance pages of visitors who ultimately landed on the URL in the Page column.
In case that wasn’t clear (it happens): The URL under the Page column is your goal page. The URL under the Landing Page column is the page they entered your site on that ultimately led those visitors to your goal page.
There’s a lot you can do with this information, including optimizing your page for key phrases that drive even more converting traffic. You could even set up a really well researched PPC campaign, couldn’t you?
Leave a comment below if you have any thoughts on this article and be sure to let us know if it helped you. We’d love to hear from you.
Memorize or write down the URL(s) of that page or pages that are driving the bulk of your traffic!
Step 4: Find the keywords that are driving your converting traffic
I hope by this point, you’re excited. I’ve done this a lot in my career and I still think having this kind of information is so cool and it energizes me to write about it. We know there’s a treasure, we’ve found the X on the ground, now it’s time to start digging!
Remember how I showed you how to find the keywords that were driving traffic to your site? Now we’re going to find the keywords that drive search traffic to the page that drive conversions on your site.
Go to Google Search Console and login.
Once you’re logged in, click Performance from the left-hand menu.
Once you’ve clicked Performance, click Pages on the right-hand pane below the graph.
With pages selected and a list of your most popular pages in search by volume of clicks in front of you, scroll down until you see the URL of the landing page of your converters that we found in the previous step. When that landing page URL is located, click on it. This will filter your view to only focus on that single page.
Now that that URL is isolated, click back onto Queries below the graph.
Voila! These are the main terms that are driving converting traffic to your site in search.
There’s a lot you can do with this information, including optimizing your page for key phrases that drive even more converting traffic. You could even set up a really well researched PPC campaign, couldn’t you?
Leave a comment below if you have any thoughts on this article and be sure to let us know if it helped you. We’d love to hear from you.
How can I tell which keywords are bringing traffic to my site?
Search engine optimization is a weird beast to most business owners. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a room with a successful proprietor who wants to rank #1 for a term no one is searching. “Get me to the top page for ‘poly-fabric textile distributor Wisconsin!'”
What drives that thinking? I’d assume it’s because that’s how the owner talks about the products she sells. I’d also assume that the fine people at Kellogg’s refer to ‘dehydrated and compressed corn cereal’ internally, but receive far higher traffic to their site for the term ‘corn flakes’. The industry jargon may or may not be how your best customers talk about your business, but how do you know? A better question might be:
How can I find out which keywords bring traffic to my site?
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- Make sure you’ve claimed Google Search Console for your site. (This might seem daunting initially, but the payoff of information that exists inside of this tool is invaluable.)
- If you’ve just claimed your search console, you may need to wait a couple of days. If you’ve had it claimed for a while, you should be seeing a performance overview.
- On the left hand side, click the word “Performance” in the menu.
- Make sure you’ve claimed Google Search Console for your site. (This might seem daunting initially, but the payoff of information that exists inside of this tool is invaluable.)
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This page is so cool, isn’t it? For the reporting period, it shows you how many clicks you’ve received in Google, how many search impressions you’ve received, your click-through rate (how many impressions resulted in a click), and your average position (which page of Google you show up on, on average)
- If you scroll down, you’ll see queries that Google has been ranking your site for. If you click on the word “Clicks”, this page will sort those queries by the terms that have received the most clicks in Google. Better still, search console will also show you the terms that you’re receiving impressions for in search but aren’t winning clicks on.
If you’re wondering why all of the clicks that you long for elude you, I’ll tell you why: You just haven’t earned them yet, baby! Start writing some content around those terms.
Better EVEN STILL, this is the actual language searchers are using in Google. This is their voice, spoken to Google and whispered back to you verbatim by Google. Mirror the voice of your audience and you’ll have a better opportunity to succeed in search.
Now that you know which keywords are bringing people to your site, you should take the next step to learn which keywords are driving sales or leads on your site.
One note about Google Search Console: This isn’t accounting for every click you receive in Google. As once heard a fellow marketer say, ‘This isn’t an exact science, it’s just the best science we have.’. Go have fun with this tool and let it shape your efforts.
If you need help on this or have questions, please leave them in the comments below.
The frugal guide to becoming a marketing copywriter.
Making a career change is a marketing problem – and one that has a solution.
While it might feel initially like a stretch to make this claim, I encourage you to embrace this notion and approach your new journey with a marketer’s mindset.
Problem: People need good writers. There is an abundance of content being created each day and this is the minimum that businesses need to do to be present on the web. They need good writers to help them create effective “leave behinds” for potential customers on in-person visits, to have engaging social media accounts, and to construct concise narration in video scripts. Now, more than ever, every business needs good writers.
Solution: You love writing. People love reading what you write. Why would they pay some bored zombie to churn out clinical crap when they can have someone with passion write interesting stories that grab attention from their audiences? They wouldn’t if they knew about you and felt confidence in your abilities. But, they don’t know about you and they wouldn’t trust you if they did. Not yet, at least.
No wonder you’re stressed out.
These are two problems that we’re going to solve by the time you get to the end of this blog post.
One of our mottos at 4B is “Everything Is Marketing”, and that includes your current desire to change professions. Let’s connect your solution with someone’s problem so we can all have a better tomorrow.
A friend, we’ll call him Jim, recently confided that this year was going to be the year that he made some significant life changes, including transitioning from his drone-like government job into something new.
“What is it that you want to do?”, I asked Jim during the text conversation we were engaged in.
“Well, ideally write or ANYTHING creative. But realistically…anything outside of menial customer service work. Thought about PIMA for radiology tech certification, but that’s 40k a year. Coding boot camp…outrageous costs.”, he replied
Jim also intimated that he felt like he needed some kind of certification at minimum, and very likely, a degree, neither of which (he assumed) he was able to afford.
Luckily, I was able to sympathize because…. well, I’ve been there. When I moved on from being the Vice President of a web hosting company, circumstance practically demanded that I refine my career, which I viewed as a career change. While I had enjoyed a lot of success in that capacity, I had also felt like that role and industry chose me. If you had asked any version of Tyler, including that version, if that’s what I wanted to do with my life, the answer would’ve been ‘No.’ Beyond my own personal desire to occupy my time differently, no one is looking for someone who says that they can do everything from server maintenance to product management to running inbound call centers to writing help documentation to making advertisements. The market wants to hire someone with a specific set of skills at which they excel.
Personally, I’ve always found finding a new job, outside of my entry level days, a defeating journey. Compound that with switching industries AND trying to prove you’re worthy of a job that you don’t have experience doing full time… that’s enough to depress anyone.
While I considered Jim’s request, I thought back to a video from TheFutur that discussed the interviewee’s desired goals and the abundance of resources she had to realize them. (At least, I think that’s the video I mean to reference.) The conversation reminded her, and me, the viewer, that no matter the outcome she desired, there was a path to it.
With that in mind and knowing that my friend was already a talented writer, I was able to envision a path he could take to reach the destination he sought.
I began to draw the line from where he was to where he said he wanted to be. “So, consider copywriting for an agency like mine.,” I wrote. “I don’t want to be your boss – but the world needs more great copywriters. You’d be researching and writing blogs and website copy – shit like that. It’s not creative writing, but it would be closer to what you need. “
Jim seemed interested. So began a deluge of further advice.
Free and Low-Cost Resources to becoming a Copywriter
Now that I’d defined a clearer version of what I saw as Jim’s next steps, I first considered the lack of financial resources that he’d said he had. Luckily, we live in the age of information. If you want to take courses from MIT, you can start that today and for free. Are you kidding me? With no money and no process of acceptance, with a little bit of self paced learning, you can walk into an interview and honestly say these words: “I successfully completed an MIT Sociology course last year.” or “I completed a course on Literature from Harvard.“
With resources like that available to everyone with access to a computer, your excuses for failure are dramatically lessened. If you want it, there’s a path to it.
While I did ultimately recommend the Harvard course to him, I wanted to start with an easier goal to complete. I wanted Jim to prove to himself that he was willing to do the bare minimum to better his life. If he wasn’t willing to do that, I wanted him to stop wasting everyone’s time.
So, what requires minimal effort to take those first steps?
I began with Udemy copywriting courses. I’ve used Udemy in the past and find to be an amazing resource. These courses are taught by self-identified experts in whatever field they’re teaching. The courses are usually based around video content and exercises to put the content into practice. Upon completion, you’re awarded a certificate. Whether having a Udemy certificate on your resume is a positive or negative badge is in the eyes of the beholder, but you’ll know you did it – and confidence may be, in the end, everything.
When evaluating which Udemy course(s) to take, be sure to not only look at the relevance to your goal, but also consider the star rating and volume of reviews that the course has received. Also, not that you likely will ever have to, but never pay full price for their courses. It’s not that they aren’t worth hundreds of dollars – but there are always blanket sales that allow you to get almost any course for around $12. Also, every once in a while, you may even find some free access to courses in sub-reddits around copywriting.
The next resource I recommended was Lynda’s instructional courses on copywriting. Lynda’s courses are taught by Lynda appointed subject matter experts, which may provide you with more confidence that you’re getting a better education than on Udemy. Like Udemy, the Lynda courses will also provide you with a certificate of completion once you’ve finished a course. The deal gets even sweeter when you find out that many library cardholders have free access to Lynda courses. The disadvantage is that the courses you find aren’t as varied as they are on Udemy, so I recommend taking courses on both platforms. It certainly couldn’t hurt to have a more well-rounded education from multiple instructors, even if the subject matter isn’t as precisely dialed in as you’d like.
The next resource I recommended were local writers meetups on Meetup.net. This is a pretty important recommendation for a few reasons.
- Firstly, what better way is there to break out of daydreaming about being a professional writer than to associate yourself with professional writers? They exist and you can pick their brains.
- Secondly, I’ve seen strong evidence that suggests that your next job isn’t going to come from craigslist or Google, but from your own network. People like helping other people that they like. They appreciate seeing themselves in others and helping them to overcome hurdles. These groups are essential for finding people who have progressed deeply in the journey you’re just beginning, to learn from their mistakes and discover their shortcuts.
- Third, you will not be any worse of a writer from attending these meetings. The only way to go is up.
Easy ways to get real-world experience as a marketing copywriter
Telling people that you can write and showing people that you can write are two different things. In order to land that next job and speak about your skills with confidence, you’ll need to know that you can make an impact for your clients or company. Here are a few ways I’d recommend doing that:
Step 1: Find someone who needs your help.
This is so easy. Do you know a business owner? Reach out to them and offer to write blog content for them. Does that sound daunting? You can rely on Hubspot’s blog topic generator to give you some solid ideas of what to write about.
What do you do if they don’t have a blog? Offer to re-write their product or services pages. Almost every business needs a good writer to improve their key pages. Neil Patel offers some amazing tips on writing a great product page here.
Offer to write or re-write their “About Us” page and make it absolutely slay. Susan Greene offer tips for doing that here.
The only things you’ll ask for in lieu of payment are:
- A reference from the client.
- The ability to use their business name and logo in marketing yourself.
- The opportunity to track your results.
I’m too afraid to ask a business owner if they need my help. Now what?
I recommend asking friends and family if they could use your help. Let them know that they’d be doing you an incredibly big favor in giving you a chance.
If that doesn’t produce results, post on Facebook or Twitter and offer to write for your friend’s businesses, free of charge. Again, tell the story of why you’re doing this so your friends understand that not only will you be helping them, but they’ll be helping you.
Still no one? Hop on these sub-Reddits and offer free copywriting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ecommerce/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/
Be genuine in your request, don’t bloviate or get spammy. Be authentic in your offer and appreciative for the opportunity to help make someone else’s business better.
Final steps in making your career change become your writing career.
If you’ve followed our steps you should now have the following:
- Training on becoming a copywriter.
- This may include certificates of completion and/or education from Harvard.
- At least one peer group that meets with some regularity.
- Real world experience in developing effective content for businesses.
- Results from that real world experience to show your effectiveness.
Congratulations! Think about what you’ve accomplished and feel proud about it. Add “self-starter” to your resume and reference all of this work in the interview. Remind them that you accomplished all of this just so you could help the company you’re interviewing with succeed.
Oh, right, I guess you’ve got to get an interview now. If you can think of 10 companies you’d like to work for, write the names of those companies down. Connect with their heads of marketing on LinkedIn and let them know you’d love nothing more than to be a part of their team. If they don’t accept your invite, send them a letter in the mail. It might not hurt to include a gift card to Starbucks and ask them to meet you for coffee. Run ads on social media targeting the company and make sure they know your name and what you do.
Review the websites of those companies and see if you can re-write key pages for better readability or conversions or search engine optimization. Send the updated copy as a freebie and let them know that you’re available if they’d like more.
Don’t wait until they have an opening to reach out to these decision makers.
Additionally, find out where these decision makers play. Are they checking in at marketing meetups on social or guest speaking at conferences? Are there industry events where you can begin to enter their network? Be where they are – but, you know, don’t be a creep.
Rely on your existing network.
Let your network (through social media and in-person interaction) know how hard you’ve been working on your writing career and that you’re looking for work. Ask for introductions to cool people who are doing cool things.
Your network already knows you. They already love you. They will be happy to give you a job or refer you to someone who needs your services.
My final bit of advice….
…is to treat all ups and downs as gifts. You know where you’re going. You know you’ll succeed. Believe in that. Expect adversity on this journey and make it your mission to find the silver linings. It has been scientifically proven that if you take this perspective, your outcomes are likely to be better than if you didn’t.
Hopefully, I’ve offered some direction so that you can improve your life. I now want to ask you for four favors:
- Share this article with on social media.
- Share your story with me about how this helped you in the comments. No matter how big or small.
- If there are resources you’ve found that aren’t in here, please let me know.
- Remember to refer 4B when you meet someone who needs an agency’s help with marketing.
Marketing Lessons From the Story of a Band with Fake Followers
Real Band, Fake Following
Last week we learned of the band Threatin, who mounted a European tour based on a large online fan base that was fake. As of this writing, they have 38.8k fans on their Facebook page, 4.6k followers on their Twitter page and 1,390 following on Spotify. This is only news because Threatin used the strength of their online audiences, as well as some spliced up live footage of another band, to book that overseas tour. Upon arriving, the venues were virtually empty, with only people from the supporting band’s guestlist walking through the doors, reportedly.
On Wednesday, Threatin released this very enlightened statement, responding to their recent coverage:
What is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion. – Jered Threatin
What a douche, right?
I mean, that’s the real story here; That this narcissist thought he could dupe the western world. And he did, until it crashed spectacularly. And to act like this is all part of the plan now that his house of cards has toppled – well, I’d like to say that it’s pathetic, at best, but in all honesty, it will probably win him a reality TV show where we can watch this walking train wreck take place on a weekly basis.
Is Jered Threatin a moron or a genius?
He’s a moron.
But, the story isn’t as simple as that.
It’s easy to look at how this played out and say, “Well, obviously no one showed. They had no real fans.”, and yes, you’d be right. No one was actually excited about Threatin playing their hometown because, largely, no one knew who Threatin was.
Threatin, whether he knew it or not, was relying on the concept of “social proof” to see his star ascend. This is partially how fame grows, by the way. As an outsider, you see that other people have an affinity or trust for Threatin and that gives you signals that you may like them as well. It’s the reason we trust online reviews, especially in volume, or brands with a massive following. Someone else took the risk of being an early adopter, they still trust this entity, and as a result, you, as a latecomer, have less risk in also relying on that entity.
Plus, now you’re in a group of people who like a thing, rather than being the weirdo who likes something all alone and independently.
This sort of fake fan base/social proof has been used before. It’s been used effectively.
In the 1940’s, Frank Sinatra’s publicist, George Evans, auditioned and paid young girls $5 each to scream for Frank and whip up excitement. We don’t look back at George Evans and call him a narcissistic douchebag because he relied on this tactic. Hell, we may even call him kinda brilliant.
Imagine it: You’re a white,17 year old girl in 1947 and you consider yourself to be Frankie’s biggest fan. You’ve been waiting weeks to share the same oxygen as ol’ blue eyes and, if luck smiles on you, maybe he’ll make eye contact with you and give you a smile.
The day of the show arrives and the moment the chairboy of the board (he was too young to be the chairman in 1947) steps on stage, another white, 17 year old girl at the same venue is losing her mind, demanding the attention of the young Mr. Sinatra. Not only is she probably going to get that attention, but now you’re displaced as the number one fan. She’s screaming, now you’re screaming… and maybe crying for extra effect. The girl next to you, who is another white, 17 year old girl who also considers herself Sinatra’s number 1 fan sees multiple other white, 17 year old girls screaming, some are crying. This girl now realizes that this is the appropriate way to act at a Sinatra show and if you’re not doing it…. You must not be a fan.
Have you noticed the differences in execution here between Jered Threatin and George Evans?
Let’s unpack it:
- People were already Frank Sinatra fans. Sinatra was starting with a strong base of devotees. These hired guns were there to elevate the experience and increase advocacy.
Evans’ motivation wasn’t to create an astro turf fan base, it was to create a frenzy among the people who were already there. Maybe some kids would get crushed and end up in the hospital. Can you imagine the kinds of headlines they’d get? Boffo! Social proof certainly played a part in all of this, but he was also creating some artificial competition, which then normalized the behavior of screaming and crying. Behavior that would otherwise be considered absurd.Threatin’s goal was to fake early momentum with the hope that it would snowball into a legitimate audience that would continue to grow into a following. It almost sort of worked. - If you followed my above narrative, you’ll notice that I asked you to pretend to be white, 17 years old and female. I also asked you to imagine other people, in your same proximity, who looked a lot like you. This is the secret ingredient to social proof. That people who are like you have said ‘Yes’.
When you purchase followers from Fiverr, those followers are going to come from Brazil or South Korea or India or, pretty much anywhere you’re not from. You may be able to post up big follower counts, but those followers that you bought aren’t real people, which means that they don’t have real friends who will be influenced. So, what do I care if you have 38k fans on Facebook if not a single one of them is a friend of mine. It almost betrays social proof because it says that the group who loves Threatin are different from my social circle – which strongly signals this doesn’t appeal to me or my tribe.
At least with the tactic George Evans employed, you had to recognize yourself in these screaming teenage girls in the room because you, yourself, were a teenage girl in that room.
How It Actually Could've Worked
In researching this post I listened to Threatin’ and the band/guy seems reasonably good at the music he plays. I couldn’t tell you if he’s the best because I don’t care about hair metal. Frankly, I’m surprised something that shallow didn’t evaporate a while ago. But, that’s beside the point. He seems to be, at minimum, ok at hair metal. (Feel free to correct me in the comments if I’ve got the sub genre incorrect.)
They had a visibly large number of social media followers, as well.
Those two truths and a PR agency will actually get you somewhere. The large following could definitely have been leveraged to get Threatin some coverage from blogs, because they think that once they write about an act with lots of followers, that act will post a link to the article on their Facebook or Twitter feed and that will send traffic back to the blog, which will then make some money from ads.
On the strength of those blog articles, they may have been able to get some stories written about them in bigger publications or worked their way into on-air radio appearances or podcast appearances. At minimum, they could’ve primed the pump on their tour route by promoting those blog articles to local audiences who dig other hair metal acts.
“Check out why Leopard Skin Press calls us the next Whitesnake and come see us at the Elks Club Hall next Saturday!”
But they didn’t do that (I’m guessing). They just booked a tour and figured that someone in England was going to be like, “There are 20 people going to this show… I don’t want to be the only person in my town who isn’t there.”
And that’s the second-most thing that drives me crazy about this story: There was actually a path to success for them if they had thought it through a little bit more. They could’ve snowballed this bullshit following into a real one!
But here’s my main point of frustration, and this applies to the entirety of marketing and people who fake it:
It’s unnecessary to begin with. Simply be the best at what you do. If you aren’t the best today, aim to grow into being the best tomorrow. Most, if not all, of those things that you want will come if you just work on your craft and then share it with the world.
When you’re great, no black hat strategies or tactics are needed.
Now, go follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Our follower count is embarrassingly low right now, so you know we’re not faking it. We’d love your support.