Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization gives you more customers with the traffic and marketing budget you already have.

Even better, once you find these conversion wins, you get to benefit from those wins day in and day out.

These are permanent increases to your business.

Start with our Beginners Guide to Conversion Optimization which breaks all this down in detail.

To simplify everything, we put together an extremely detailed guide on How To Double Your Conversions in 30 Days. It’s a step-by-step process for making an immediate improvement to your conversion rates.

Before jumping into all the conversion tactics, we recommend getting a strong foundation with how conversion optimization works. By knowing how customer personas and conversion funnels work, you’ll know which conversion tricks to use for your business:

Website Optimizations

The first step of any conversion optimization program is to optimize your website. There’s tons of improvements that you can ship today. There’s no need for intense A/B testing programs or complex tactics, we always start with the basics.

A thorough polish of your website can easily boost conversion rates 30-50%. That’s a permanent lift from a one-time project.

One of the pitfalls that I’ve fallen into the past: holding back on obvious improvements until I had an A/B testing program that could verify everything. I wish that I had launched improvements a lot earlier instead of waiting. These days, I pursue good-enough instead of perfect.

To help guide you through all the best practices that are worth shipping right away, we put together these guides:

Tips and Tactics

Regardless of what you’re optimizing, there’s an endless number of tips and tactics for getting an extra boost in your conversion rates. When you’re ready to start going after the smaller wins to squeeze every last bit out of your traffic, these guides will give you plenty of ideas to use:

Landing Pages

The right landing page can make or break a funnel.

I’ve seen landing pages improve conversion by over 400% with the right offer and design. That’s right, I’ve quadrupled lead and signup flow by finding a stronger offer for my landing page. Think of it this way: if you were previously paying $10 for a lead, that kind of win would reduce your lead cost to $2.50. Getting 4X the lead volume with the same marketing budget would catapult your business to the next level.

I’m not going to lie, there’s a bit of luck in finding these kinds of wins. But there’s always a lot of things you can do in order to stack the odds in your favor.

We’ve put together all our best practices for landing pages:

A/B Testing

I personally love A/B testing. There’s something about getting hard data on what truly works that I’ve always found to be addictive.

A quick warning: only start A/B testing once you have a ton of data to work with. Even though I’ve built A/B testing teams for multiple businesses, I rarely A/B test these days. There’s just too many other major wins to pursue first. I’m more focused on getting the core funnel to a healthy place before running any A/B tests.

Once traffic is flooding your site and you’re scaling nicely, consider an A/B testing program for that little extra boost. These guides show you how:

Traffic Optimization

While most of our conversion optimization work happens on our site, there are also optimization wins to help with our traffic. Whether it’s SEO or paid traffic, you’ll want to optimize your entire funnel. Use these guides to get started:



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WhatsApp future vision: ‘Private commerce’ and payments

Facebook introduces Business Catalog for WhatsApp to showcase products. The post WhatsApp future vision: ‘Private commerce’ and payments appeared first on Marketing Land.

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How connected are you to your brand’s customer service?

Invest in your customer base in the same way you want them to invest in your company. These three steps can get you started. The post How connected are you to your brand’s customer service? appeared first on Marketing Land.

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Here’s what you missed at MarTech

Earlier this month, nearly two thousand senior-level marketers gathered in San Jose for MarTech®. It was three days packed with learning and networking — strategies and solutions. Couldn’t make it to the show? Fear not. I’ve compiled a list of top-notch event coverage on everything from the...

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Twitter puts focus on exclusive media partnerships to attract video advertisers

The company announced original content deals with several news and entertainment organizations, including Univision, Wall Street Journal, Live Nation and MTV. The post Twitter puts focus on exclusive media partnerships to attract video advertisers appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Quora, Pinterest ads pixel integrations now available in Google Tag Manager

Now it's easier to add Pinterest and Quora ads pixels to your site in GTM. The post Quora, Pinterest ads pixel integrations now available in Google Tag Manager appeared first on Marketing Land.

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Transcript of How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue

Transcript of How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush. It is our go-to SEO tool for doing audits, for tracking position and ranking, for really getting ideas on how to get more organic traffic for our clients competitive intelligence, back links and things like that. All the important SEO tools that you need for paid traffic, social media, PR, and of course SEO. Check it out at semrush.com/partner/ducttapemarketing, and we’ll have that in the show notes.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Roger Dooley. He is the founder of Dooley Direct. He’s an author and keynote speaker and he’s got a new book called Friction: The Untapped Force That Can be Your Most Powerful Advantage. So Roger, thanks for joining me.

Roger Dooley: Well, thanks for having me on, John. I’m excited.

John Jantsch:  Let’s start with friction. The word friction, I mean for a lot of people that’s kind of a bad thing. I mean, friction in science is … causes drag, friction in business makes it hard to buy. You’re proposing that it is somehow and advantage.

Roger Dooley: Well if you … it is usually a bad thing, but that means that if you can eliminate it, you will have an advantage over your competition. I mean if you look at what Amazon has accomplished in the last 20 years, much of that has been by reducing friction. Back in 1997, Jeff Bezos was talking about frictionless shopping when most companies were just thinking about getting serious about being online. And throughout the years he’s made that just a point of relentless emphasis. Even things like packaging. About 10 years ago they saw the customers were struggling with these packages. Like if you go to Walmart, buy a product, it’s probably in one of these plastic blister packs. But you see the product and they look nice, they prevent theft because they’re hard to put in your pocket and walk away with, but they’re difficult to open. You may need tools, you may injure yourself by stabbing yourself with sharp plastic. And so they said, “Hey, we can eliminate that.” And they created frustration free packaging. And not only did people like the packaging, the reviews on those products improved. They had 73% fewer negative comments just from that change in packaging. And so eliminating friction can be a big competitive advantage. It isn’t just big companies because often big companies are the slowest to respond. So a smaller company that sees how they can make things a little bit easier for their customers can get that advantage.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I must admit that my wife will be reading a magazine and she’ll say, “We should get this and,” and it says the website and all that stuff, and I go straight to Amazon and see if they have it because I know it’s going to be really easy for me to get it.

Roger Dooley: Well you and me both. John, just a few years ago, my loyalty to Amazon was tested because up to that point, in Texas, they were not charging sales tax. Then they worked a deal with the state where they would be charging sales tax, which meant that all of my Amazon purchases immediately had an 8% price increase. And I assumed that my behavior would change because of that. In fact, it changed almost not at all. And because of what you’re saying. It’s just so easy, why would I want to go someplace else, deal with setting up an account to have some sort of uncertain shipping process where they say it’s going to be seven to 10 days and … when I know with one click I can get it from Amazon and it’s going to be my doorstep 48 hours later without fail.

John Jantsch: So you mentioned the bigger companies, it’s harder. Some of that can just be the practical nature of making change is harder period. But do you think it has anything to do with that a lot of times friction is felt by a customer, but not necessarily expressed? They may not even realize that their shopping cart is hard to operate.

Roger Dooley: Right. Well, many times customers can’t articulate that there is a problem. It’s only when they see somebody doing it better. I mean, look at the taxi industry. For pretty much our entire lives, we dealt with taxis as something that was a pretty good way to get around, generally better than the bus or the subway and worked reasonably well. And it wasn’t until Uber came along and showed us how every element of that process was full of friction from getting the cab in the first place to getting out of it and paying. They eliminated all that and suddenly it’s like, wow, none of us really saw that before, but now we could. So yeah, I think what businesses have to do, whether they’re large or small, is kind of look at their processes from a third party point of view. Instead of saying, “Well, this is how it’s always been done,” or “This is how our competitors do it and we’re actually a little bit better than our competitors,” for one, you have to compare yourself to Amazon and to Uber and say, “Okay, is my experience as good as theirs? And if not, can I move my experience in that direction?”

Roger Dooley: So it’s just important to focus and also to observe customers. I bet you’ve had the same happen, John. You’re on a website or you’re trying to accomplish something and you just can’t figure out what to do. And you’re wondering, did the people who created this website or this app ever actually watch somebody try and go through it for the first time? Because you’re perplexed and you’re struggling and you’re clicking stuff. And I think the answer is in many cases, they have not watched users go through it. They have an idea of what the users or customers want, or will do, or how they’ll behave, but they haven’t actually watched them doing it. And that’s so critical.

John Jantsch: And I think the one thing that a lot of people underestimate too is that … if you used the taxi example. I mean you and I just tolerated it. We didn’t like it, but we didn’t necessarily think we had a choice or that it was even a problem per se. It was just the way the world is. And I think when you watch, what happens a lot of times is that next generation comes along and goes, “This is nuts.” We’ve been doing it, so that’s all we know. But they’re new to it and all of a sudden they’re like, “Why would anybody do this?” I have millennial age children that are so funny to watch how little they will tolerate from a website because they just, that’s not how they feel like the world should work. And they’ll go find somebody who gets it. I mean, because they don’t have that same sort of loyalty, I guess is what I’m getting at.

Roger Dooley: Right. Well, it’s not even so much loyalty. It’s that they realize how simple and powerful experiences can be. I think a good example of businesses that really don’t get it are cable providers. I have an internet cable provider and I have a satellite TV provider and they both kind of fall into that category of not getting it, making their experience really high friction. On Amazon, I can look at anything I bought in, I don’t know, 10 years, 12 years, beats me. I can go back as long as I want and see every order I’ve placed. On my Internet provider, I can only go back six months. So when I go to do my tax and say, “Okay, well I need those bills for that purpose,” then it’s not there. And you say, well why would a business design an interface that would only let me look at the last six months? Now that makes no sense. But unfortunately businesses say, “Well, hey, why would a customer want that, or we’ve done it this way, it’s been fine.” And they don’t have necessarily anybody that’s forcing them to do it any better.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And that’s actually a great feature of Amazon though. Have you ever done this? You buy a book and they go, “Whoa, you know, you bought this book two years ago,” and I go, “Oh, okay. So it’s on my Kindle. Nevermind.”

Roger Dooley:  Yes. I personally have never had that experience, John. But I have heard from people who have. It happens to me all the time saying, “Ah, book looks interesting,” and “Oh, damn, I bought that, I’ve got it on my shelf somewhere. I better go find it.” Yeah, it’s great. And I think that is an example too of a business that is putting its customers in the forefront because there are certainly some businesses out there would say, “Ha, that jerk just bought that for the second time.” Where Amazon wants you to have a good experience and they know that eventually you might discover that you bought it once, you already had it, and either you’re going to return it or you’re going to feel stupid because you have two copies now and they help you prevent that.

John Jantsch: And I think you just touched on where this starts, right? It’s not just about how can we make this website faster, easier to use. I mean it really kind of starts with what you just said. How can we make sure that our customers are having a great experience? I mean that’s what sort of turns you into the detective to go looking for this stuff, isn’t it?

Roger Dooley: Yeah. And I think just jumping back to taxis, if somebody had just, say taken a video of the taxi experience, you could look at the particularly, I don’t know, I’m sure you get to Europe occasionally and like to pay for taxis by credit card there. If I have to take a taxi and … because Uber isn’t available because it’s illegal or something. And inevitably what you see is the driver first saying the machine’s broken. And then you say, “No, I don’t have any cash.” So you got to use that. And so, okay, they reach under the seat, they pull out this a clunky machine trying to establish an Internet connection, get your card, wait for the thing to print out. And then they’ve got to print out and sign it and they’ve got to reenter it. It’s this horrible process that takes minutes. And if someone just looked at that, they could say, “Well, can I imagine a way in a perfect universe where I could eliminate this?” And it wouldn’t be that difficult to come up with multiple ways of eliminating that process, but it took this really disruptive company to come along and actually do it.

John Jantsch: And I suspect because you pay attention to this stuff that I can envision you across the counter from a young clerk who has a very … a process that is riddled with friction and doesn’t make any sense to anybody. And you point it out to them and they say, “Well that’s the way we do it here. Or that’s how we’ve always done it here.”

Roger Dooley:  Yeah. Or they say, “Yeah, no kidding. We’ve complained about this, but they won’t do anything about it.” More often than not, people inside the company can identify it as friction, but they are unable to get it fixed. And to me the important thing is that businesses develop a friction aware culture so that their employees are sensitized to look forward in the customer experience. But even in their own experience, because oh, there is a huge amount of money, in fact there was a Harvard Business Review article that estimated that $3 trillion a year is wasted in US businesses by what they called organizational drag. Used the word drag just in the intro. And organizational drag is what they call all the time that’s wasted by bad processes, dealing with email that you shouldn’t have to deal with, meetings that served no purpose, or all this waste of time in organizations is a $3 trillion problem. And so businesses that develop this friction awareness will not only improve their customer experience, but they’ll improve their internal experience. And that’s great because the team members themselves do not enjoy wasting your time. They’ll be more engaged if they feel they’re working on stuff that is important or is helping a customer, as opposed to doing stuff that is really serving no purpose other than the fact that they’ve got to do it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I read a survey, this is going back at least a decade, maybe longer, and it was a giant Gallup survey talking about what made people happy at work. And you would think it would be that they felt challenged and they were paid well, and the number one thing was that they had the tools that allowed them to do the work effectively. So essentially, processes and equipment, and tools, and things are of part of that that causes friction, isn’t it?

Roger Dooley: Yeah. And there’s a lot of work that’s been done on work and motivation and having that work directed in a productive creative way is one key metric. Dan Ariely he did some really interesting work and wrote a short book called Payoff about that, but where they would have people assemble Legos under different conditions. In some cases, immediately after the person assembled the Lego, the experimenter would tear it apart in throw the pieces in the box. Needless to say, the people that had that experience were much less motivated to build more Legos even though there were being paid the same as folks where their creation was not destroyed.

John Jantsch: So you mentioned this friction awareness. I’m just trying to envision, how does, where does somebody go looking for it? Where does it hide, how did you … if I’m listening to this and I think, “Okay, I’m not aware of huge friction,” where do … how do I find it? How do I create this awareness culture?

Roger Dooley: Well, by reading the book for one, but no seriously John. I think that just looking for examples of it, becoming aware of it. It’s sort of like if there’s a background hum noise, which hopefully there isn’t in this recording, but you generally might not be aware of it. But if you listen for that background, how many say, “Oh yeah, okay it’s there.” And friction is kind of the same way because we become just sort of used to it, like that taxi experience and every other experience like that. But if we start looking at it from a more of an absolute point of view and imagining better ways, then we start seeing it. I found that just if I do a talk where I spend maybe 30 or 50 minutes talking about friction, just that exposure will get people for the rest of the day yelling friction when they encounter some difficulty in the hotel or the conference center, something where there’s a line or some form they have to fill out.

Roger Dooley: So it’s really just sort of sensitizing yourself and then once you start seeing it, it’s pretty hard to stop seeing it. Which is in some ways, is kind of bad because you cannot cure all the friction that you’re going to experience, especially when you’re simply the customer and someone else is controlling that. And it can get you, gets me at least, a little bit cranky at times.

John Jantsch: There’s a line from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I’m actually doing … my next project involves some of that literature. So that’s-

Roger Dooley: I was [crosstalk] going to say this is taken really literary turn [crosstalk]

John Jantsch: Yeah, I was going to say that that’s why this is right at hand and it was, “She had not known the wait until she felt the freedom.” And I think that really goes very directly to this. A lot of times we don’t realize how much we’re way down until we find this better way. And we were like, “Holy crap.”

Roger Dooley: Wow. I would have put that in the book, had I known that quote at the time, John, so I may still have to use that somehow. So thank you for that.

John Jantsch: And you talked about this thing actually called invisible friction.

Roger Dooley: Indeed. Not … to some degree, all friction can be a little bit invisible if we’re not looking for it. But there is another kind of cognitive friction where we … there’s no rational reason why something should be higher in friction, but it’s all in our brains. And it has to do with a concept called cognitive fluency, how easy it is for our brains to process something. And this affects our behavior in a few ways. If something is difficult to say or read, it seems more dangerous and risky. So when scientists ask people to rate the amusement park rides for how dangerous they were or risky, if they had a hard to say name, the exact same ride description was rated as to being more dangerous. Same thing for prescription drugs. Drugs that were hard to say were seen as more dangerous. But where the friction comes into play is that if something is hard for us to process, it seems more difficult.

Roger Dooley: There is another research project that found people were less likely to follow important medical instructions, now imagine that, medical instructions that are important for their health and perhaps their life, if those instructions were in a hard to read font and it wasn’t that they were so difficult that it was impossible to read. It’s just that when things are hard for our brains to process, even a little bit harder, they seem a little bit more difficult. At the University of Minnesota, they ran this great experiment that asked people how long it would take to perform a simple exercise. It just gave them two short sentences. Exact same text for two groups. One group saw it in a simple arial san serif font, so a very easy to read font. The second group saw the exact same instructions in a slightly harder to read brushy font. Still perfectly legible. You’d have no problem reading it. But the first group that saw it in the simple font said it would take eight minutes to do, the second group said it would take 15 minutes.

Roger Dooley: So what was happening there was that the difficulty in processing that information, the difficulty in reading, translated into difficulty in doing. And that’s really an important message for anybody who is designing websites or apps or print material. Anytime you’re asking somebody to do something, you want to make sure that those instructions are short, concise, easy to read, black on white, or something. And use the simplest font possible because the more difficult it is to read, the harder whatever it is you want them to do is going to seem and the less likely they’ll be to do it.

John Jantsch: Well, I know from a marketing standpoint, it’s pretty accepted logic that while you would think giving people lots of choices would actually make their decision easier, it really creates friction that you’re sometimes better off saying, “You want A or B?” And that’s about it.

Roger Dooley: Yeah, well, Barry Schwartz wrote an entire book called The Paradox of Choice that kind of zoomed in on that issue that in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases, the more choice you have, the less likely you are to actually make a decision. And it varies, but there’s ways of dealing with that too. One is to just limit the number of choices. If you only need three plans, don’t offer people seven plans, because that may kick them into sort of an analytical mode where they end up making no decision at all. Guiding them to the most popular of the three plans is a great way to show, “Okay, there’s good, better, and best. Almost everybody chooses better.” At that point, that’s a really easy decision for most people to make. But if you’ve got a seven plans and it’s some have different features and they’re overlapping and that’s where it gets confusing.

Roger Dooley: So, but now Amazon has unlimited choice. If you pick any product, they probably carry just about every version of that product that’s available on the planet. But the way they help their customers is by providing a whole series of screens and filters and queues. So first of all, they will rank the products and the way they think that best fits your search. They will show you, “This one is a best seller.” They will show you, “This one is best rated.” They’ll show you that it’s got four and a half stars from 2000 reviews. And all of these things are cues to let you, hopefully, narrow down your choice really quickly and distinguish between two very similar looking choices. So they do just fine because for them, offering a lot of choice means that … you hear about a product, the first thing you do is check Amazon because you figure odds are they’ll have it, but then instead of just presenting you with a big massive products that you have to sort through, they provide you all kinds of tools to choose the right one.

John Jantsch: Now we’ve talked mostly about business, but you kind of wander into how friction shows up just in our lives, in our habits and things. I know that anytime I’m trying to lose a little weight, if I have healthy food sitting around, I will … and it’s easy for me to get, I will do a lot better job than if I have to actually work to get that food. So how does it play? How does friction play out in our habits?

Roger Dooley: Well, it is a very powerful force. I’ve read several books on this topic. My friend Art Markman from here at University of Texas, Austin is a pretty slim guy these days, but he had had a weight problem some years back and he found that his downfall was Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Those little pint containers that theoretically if you read the label, there’s, I don’t know, like four servings in there, three or four servings. But if you’ve ever actually just pulled one out of the freezer and started eating with a spoon, you find it’s really easy to polish it off in one sitting. You get down halfway and, actually you’re more than halfway at that point, and it seems like a small amount to put back in the fridge, right? So you just keep going and before you know it, it’s gone and you’ve added who knows how many calories into your daily diet.

Roger Dooley: His simple realization was if he did not have that in the house, he would probably not drive to the store to get it. So if he made that decision when he had the willpower for the future, saying, “Okay, I’m in the store. I’m not going to buy that because I know it’s bad for me and I know I’ll eat the whole darn thing.” Then he would not put up with a considerable friction of getting in his car and driving to the store to get it.

Roger Dooley: But going beyond that other habit change experts like James Clear and that BJ Fogg all talk about even just creating moderate friction. Okay, if you have potato chips in the house, don’t leave them out on the counter. Put them on a high shelf in the cupboard, put them in the garage maybe. And yeah, anything that makes it more difficult, even the smallest interventions can make a difference.

Roger Dooley: Some Yale researchers did a study for Google where Google provides free food, which is a nice benefit of working there. But people tend to over consume. And particularly things like sweets, candy, M&Ms, I mean they are something that your brain will taste, say, “Hey that’s pretty good, I want more of that,” and people will keep eating them. They found that just putting the M&Ms in an opaque container and moving a little bit farther away from the front of the shelf allowed them to cut a couple of million calories out of one office’s budget every month, which is pretty phenomenal. And very similar experiments in a cafeteria lines where putting the healthy stuff in front and the non-healthy stuff a little bit farther away. All of these things had measurable effects. And obviously the more friction that you had, the more profound the effect. In one case, in that cafeteria line, instead of just moving it to the back, they created a separate line for ice cream and soft drinks, stuff that you were not supposed to eat. And they found that in that case, it dropped consumption about 90% because most people did not want to put up with the hassle of going to another line, selecting their items, and paying for it separately. So it’s just however much friction you can add without creating a perhaps the rebellion.

John Jantsch: I’m chatting with Roger Dooley, author of Friction: The Untapped Forced That Can be Your Most Powerful Advantage. So Roger, tell people where they can find out more about your work and the book itself.

Roger Dooley: Probably the best jumping off point is rogerdooley.com I link to all of my stuff there, my blogs at Neuromarketing and Forbes, and have links to the books, of course. And on social media, I am on all of the channels, but I’m most easy to find on Twitter where I am @RogerDooley.

John Jantsch: Well, thanks for joining us, Roger, and hopefully we’ll see you someday out there on the road in a frictionless world.

Roger Dooley: Ah, if only that would happen, that’d be great. John, thanks so much for having me.



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How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue

How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Roger Dooley
Podcast Transcript

Roger DooleyToday on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I chat with author and keynote speaker Roger Dooley.

He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. He’s been a serial entrepreneur since he left a senior strategy position at a Fortune 1000 company to enter the then-nascent home computer market.

He writes the popular blog Neuromarketing as well as a column at Forbes.com. He is also the author of the upcoming book Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage (McGraw Hill, May 17, 2019).

On today’s episode, we discuss why friction can cause problems for a business, and how smart leaders can identify and eliminate friction as a way to distinguish themselves from their competition.

Questions I ask Roger Dooley:

  • How can you reduce friction when you don’t know it’s there?
  • Where can businesses start when they want to address user experience issues in their business?
  • How do you reduce friction in a business with a culture that’s resistant to change?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • How a smaller company can get an advantage over the big guys by reducing friction.
  • What organizational drag is and the effect it can have on your business.
  • How you can use friction for good when looking to change negative personal habits.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Roger Dooley:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush.

SEMrush is our go-to SEO tool for everything from tracking position and ranking to doing audits to getting new ideas for generating organic traffic. They have all the important tools you need for paid traffic, social media, PR, and SEO. Check it out at SEMrush.com/partner/ducttapemarketing.



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Airbnb’s new video strategy lets experience and branding drive profits

Airbnb is turning its eye towards developing original shows in an effort to create lasting relationships with travelers, Reuters reported last week. It seems like every company is getting into the media game these days, with the scope of projects limited only by their resources. But, by going...

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How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget

seo

There’s a formula to SEO and as long as you follow it, you’ll get rankings.

So, what’s this formula?

Well, you write amazing content, optimize your code, create a great user experience, and you mix in some backlinks.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, the formula isn’t too complicated, but it does require hard work and patience.

Now what makes SEO challenging isn’t the formula, or the time, or the patience. It has more to do with how you beat people who have more money than you because, in theory, they can do more of everything, which should cause them to outrank you.

But you know what? I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I love SEO because it’s the one channel where you can beat big companies even if you can’t outspend them.

How? Well, let’s go over that.

Let’s first start with the two mental shifts you’ll have to make.

Mental shift #1: Speed is everything

What most people won’t tell you is big companies need to spend more to get the same results that you can for pennies on the dollar. They have way too many employees and layers in their organization to move fast and nimble.

In other words, everything moves slowly.

So, what do they do? They spend money in hopes that it makes them move faster. But the reality is, spending more doesn’t necessarily get them faster results.

If you want to beat them, the first thing you’ll have to do is focus on execution. If you can’t move fast, you won’t win.

This is your biggest advantage.

The reason I have gotten to where I am today is due to my execution speed. And now that we keep growing in size, things are moving slower.

For example, because my business has continually been growing, we now prioritize based on what makes us the most revenue and I bet you SEO isn’t as high on that priority list as it used to be. Not just for me, but for all companies my size and bigger.

You have to remember, we have multiple offices, hundreds of employees… we have to focus on what pays the bills.

So how do we compensate? We spend more money in hopes that it fixes it. Just like how I write less content these days, and I spend money on things like Ubersuggest and Backlinks in hopes that it helps.

But that won’t fix everything.

The point is, if you can move fast, it will give you a huge advantage.

Mental shift #2: Scrappiness beats money

Alright, let’s recap the formula to SEO…

Content + SEO friendly code + user experience + backlinks = rankings.

I know Google has over 200 ranking factors, but the formula above encompasses the majority of it.

Now you are probably thinking that if you want to write content or build links you have to spend money, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

With my previous marketing blog, Quick Sprout, I grew it by partnering with other writers.

I wasn’t as well known in the marketing world back then, but I hit up people like Brian Dean and co-authored guides like this one on link building with him.

That guide is over 20,000 words. And Brian did the majority of the work and for free.

I also did something similar with Ritika Puri and we created a guide on marketing psychology.

And every time I partnered with other writers and marketers to create these in-depth guides my traffic skyrocketed.

The first time I published one, my traffic went up by 117% in 2 months.

quicksprout traffic

Now, that’s something that you can still do to this day to see great results.

Another way you can boost your SEO traffic is to get people to contribute content to your site for free.

I did this with the KISSmetrics blog before I acquired it. During its peak, it generated 1,260,681 unique visitors a month.

kissmetrics traffic

We grew the KISSmetrics traffic through one simple approach… we hit up tons of writers in our space and asked them to contribute articles.

At first, we had to pay a few because the blog wasn’t known and we barely had any visitors. But once we paid a handful of well-known writers who were guest contributors on competing sites, we now had a great foundation.

We still didn’t have much traffic, but having those writers publish content was enough to convince other writers to submit content for free.

It’s a simple approach that still works to this day.

There are many ways you can be scrappy, you just have to think outside the box. Don’t think you need tons of money to solve your marketing problems. Being scrappy in most cases is more effective.

Now that we’ve covered the two mental shifts you need to make, let’s focus on the 4 quick wins that will yield the biggest results in the least amount of time.

Yes, many of these “quick wins” are well known, but less than 1% of SEOs focus on them. I know this because I have an ad agency that works with large Fortune 100 companies… and it doesn’t stop there, most companies no matter what size they are, don’t focus on these quick wins.

Quick win #1: Land and expand

They say the more content you create the more traffic you will get.

Do you want to know what the big issue with this strategy is?

Writing more content doesn’t guarantee more traffic.

Content marketing has changed. Writing no longer guarantees you more traffic because there are over 1 billion blogs.

With people cranking out so much content on a daily basis, Google now has the choice of what content to rank and what not to rank.

Similar to me, your top 10 pages are going to make up a lot of your traffic… and probably more than me.

The top 10 pages on my site make up 29.23% of my traffic. That’s crazy considering I have 5,171 blog posts.

With your site, your top 10 pages will probably make up over 40% of your traffic as you probably don’t have as much content as me.

So instead of spending the majority of your time writing new content, why not get more traffic out of the content you have.

I call this the land and expand method. In other words, you already have pages that are getting search traffic and rank on Google, might as well adjust them so you can 2 or 3 times more search traffic to those pages.

Best of all, this method gets results within 1 month for most sites and within 2 months if your site doesn’t have as much authority.

If you want to leverage this technique, follow “step 2” in this article where I break down how to land and expand step by step.

Quick win #2: Optimize for revenue, not traffic

Your goal is to increase your search traffic, right?

Well, if you are reading this blog it is. 😉

But as you get more search traffic, what’s happened to your revenue?

Actually, let’s rephrase the question… as my traffic climbed, can you guess what happened to my revenue?

search traffic neil patel

That traffic according to SEMrush is worth $1.2 million.

traffic cost

But here is the thing: as my search traffic grew by 123%, my revenue only grew by 12.5%… not a good deal.

Yes, you want to optimize your site for Google so you can rank higher. But what’s the point if it doesn’t increase your revenue?

You need to look at the pages on your site that are responsible for revenue generation activities and first optimize those so they rank higher on Google. You can do this by setting up goal tracking within Google Analytics.

Once you set up goal tracking, you’ll now know what pages to focus your attention on so that those extra visitors you in bring will turn into revenue. You can then take that extra revenue and reinvest it in your marketing initiatives.

Quick win #3: Optimize for clicks, not rankings

Question for you…

If everyone did a Google search and clicked on the second results instead of the first result, what do you think will happen?

Well, it would tell Google that people prefer the second listing and it would move that ranking to the number 1 spot.

To prove this theory, Rand Fishkin told all of his Twitter followers to search for the phrase “best grilled steak” and click on the 4th listing instead of the 1st.

best grilled steak

And within 70 minutes the 4th listing jumped up to the top spot.

steak rankings

It was so effective that the listing Rand Fishkin told everyone to clicked on skyrocketed to the top of Google for the phrase “grilled steak”.

google rankings

If you want to boost your rankings, it isn’t just about the content you are creating or the links you are building. If people don’t want to click on your listing, you’ll find that your rankings will continually tank.

And if people click on yours more than the competitors, than your rankings will skyrocket even if you don’t build as many links.

So how do you increase your click-through-rate?

Well you don’t want to tell your friends to click on your listing as that is a temporary effect and your rankings will only climb for a short period of time. You want to optimize your title tag and meta description to encourage people to click on your listings over the competition.

This will cause your rankings to climb slower, but they will stick once you reach the top.

I won’t bore you with the details in this article on optimizing click-through-rates as I have already blogged on it… just head over to this post and follow hack number 1. 😉

Quick win #4: Update your old content

Have you noticed over time that your rankings fluctuate? No matter how good you are at SEO and no matter how much money you have, there is no guarantee you’ll be at the top spot.

Do you want to know why your rankings drop?

Most people assume that it’s a penalty. But Google is very friendly (believe it or not), and their goal isn’t to penalize sites. Their goal is to rank the best sites at the top.

You know… the sites that users love the most.

Just think of it this way, if Google hypothetically penalized BMW for building backlinks and removed them from the index, what do you think would happen when people search for “BMW”?

People would be pissed that BMW isn’t showing up.

And they wouldn’t be pissed at BMW, they would be pissed at Google and they may not use Google again.

Google’s goal isn’t to penalize your site or be mean to you or tank your rankings. Their goal is simple… always put the site that is best for the end user at the top.

When your rankings tank, it’s typically because someone else created a page that provides a better experience for the term you were ranking for.

The way you fix this, maintain your rankings, and even climb higher is to continually update your old content.

If you have content that is old, outdated, or if your rankings drop, read this. It breaks down what to do step by step, and it will help you outrank your competition because I bet they aren’t updating their old content.

This is so effective I currently have 3 full-time people updating my old content.

You don’t have to get as crazy as me, but you should update your old content.

Conclusion

Money isn’t stopping you from beating your competition. The only thing standing in your way is you.

That’s ok though. We can fix that.

With a few mindset shifts and some quick wins, things are about to change.

I’ve never let my competition get in my way. I don’t care if they have more money than me or that they have been at this longer.

If I started my journey cleaning restrooms and picking up trash and eventually got here… you can too.

There is nothing really stopping you from winning.

So what do you think, are you ready to beat your competition?

The post How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget appeared first on Neil Patel.



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8 Ways to Weave Simple Visuals into Your Kick-Ass Words

It happened somewhere around third grade, when you were about nine years old. Do you remember? Before that age, we...

The post 8 Ways to Weave Simple Visuals into Your Kick-Ass Words appeared first on Copyblogger.



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What to Pay Attention to in Google Search Console

What to Pay Attention to in Google Search Console written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Are you using Google Search Console for your business? If not, now is the time to verify your domain so that you can dive into the mountains of useful data available to you through Console’s reports.

Because there is a lot of valuable data to sort through, it can be difficult to know where to start if you’re new to the platform. Don’t worry, I’m here to walk you through all the most important reports, filters, and numbers to pay attention to.

Search Analytics Report

You should get things started with the Search Analytics Report. This will give you valuable information about how your site performs in Google searches. You can slice and dice this data in a number of different ways, but these are the most important elements to consider.

Impressions

Impressions measures how many times your site came up in a search result. Now, there are no qualifiers on this number—Google will count any appearance as an impression, even if your site was on the tenth page of SERPs and likely wasn’t actually seen by the searcher.

Still, this number can give you a general sense of how broad an audience your site is reaching, and it can help you set realistic goals as you try to get noticed by more people.

Clicks

Clicks represent the number of times someone clicked on your website from the Google SERPs. This number can be a bit of a misnomer because Google doesn’t tell you about all of your clicks—they’re vague about why this is, but cite some privacy concerns. However, like with impressions, clicks can give you a general sense of interest in your website coming through search results.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. This number can help give you a sense of how relevant your pages are for certain search terms. A high CTR means that the title and description for your page are grabbing the attention of searchers. But don’t stress if you have a low CTR; because some impressions are for searches where you were on page 10 of results, this number is not always indicative of a poorly optimized meta description.

Position

Position is all about where your page ranks in search results. Each page of Google’s organic results has 10 links, so if your position number is 10 or lower, that means your website is displaying on the first page of search results.

Search Query Report

The Search Analytics Report can help you understand how your site stacks up against competitors on results pages. The Search Query Report, on the other hand, helps you see how people are finding your site in the first place.

This report is valuable because it tells you the real-world terms, questions, and phrases that your pages are ranking for. Sometimes there are some real surprises in here, and knowing what customers are actually keying into Google can help you refine your SEO and even tweak your products and services to better address their real needs.

Go Landing Page by Landing Page

One of the major benefits of Google Search Console is that it allows you to break all of this data out by individual landing pages. You can see what search terms are ranking for each individual page, which is hugely valuable.

If you have a low CTR for a given page, it might mean a few things. Either your title and meta description aren’t compelling, your SEO is off and you’re ranking for a term that doesn’t really make sense for the query, or the term is general (and therefore competitive) and you need to find a better way to stand out.

On the flip side, a high CTR can tell you that you’ve struck gold. Maybe this isn’t a term you thought would speak to customers, but something about it is obviously resonating and getting results. Once you see the term that the landing page is ranking for, what else can you do to make the content on that page even more relevant to that search term? And are there ways to tailor other pages on your website to speak more directly to the intent behind this term?

Find and Fix Errors

The mobile usability and crawl reports on Google Search Console are also helpful for identifying issues with your website and making it more user-friendly.

Mobile usability allows you to see which pages on your site don’t perform well on mobile. Maybe elements are jumbled or the type is too small; whatever the case, the site is not well suited to smaller devices. Once you know that, you can make a fix (which is important, because the majority of searches today start on mobile devices).

The crawl report allows you to understand what Google sees when it crawls your website. Google crawls websites to learn what the site is about, and the information that they find on their crawl affects how you rank in their results. If your site is difficult to crawl, you could be falling behind on rankings even if your website content looks great to the human eye. Use this report to make your site as appealing as possible to the Google computers that are indexing websites to give your site the best shot at ranking well.

Google Search Console is one of the most powerful tools available to small business owners. Unfortunately, some are unaware of its benefits or are intimidated by the wealth of data it provides. However, when you know which reports to run and which numbers to look out for, it can completely transform your approach to SEO and marketing.



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Google Display & Video 360 to default to ads.txt inventory, support app-ads.txt

The ads.txt standard will be the default setting for campaigns in Display & Video 360 as of August. The post Google Display & Video 360 to default to ads.txt inventory, support app-ads.txt appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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We must demand a higher standard of quality for online advertising

As an industry, we need to create baseline criteria to combat fraud and support an ad-supported internet. The post We must demand a higher standard of quality for online advertising appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing

The post Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.



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