the ultimate guide to digital marketing
TRANSCRIPT
The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing
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How do you find paying customers for your business??
Growth doesn’t just happen. Most of us will never luck our way
into creating a viral post that brings in 100,000 new subscribers.
And a $100,000 marketing budget won’t do you any good if you
waste it trying 1,000 different “tactics” that don’t work.
Growth comes from deliberately creating a consistent flow of
traffic to your website. After all:
• More traffic creates more readers
• More readers means more subscribers
• More subscribers is the key to more sales
More sales opens up all kinds of doors in your business. You can
hire a team to free up your time. You can develop new products
and services. You can invest in better software or technology.
And of course, on a personal level, more sales means more
money for your family. It means more freedom for traveling.
It might even mean being able to try new things like hiring a
personal trainer or chef. (Those last two have been life-changing
for me.)
All of this is possible using free or low-cost digital marketing
strategies.
What is digital marketing?Digital marketing is anything you do online to:
1. Grab attention
2. Drive people to your website
3. Convince those people to join your email list, buy your
product, or download your app
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Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is measurable.
Which means you can identify what’s working, do more of it, and
stop wasting time on failed campaigns.
In boardrooms across the country, executives still look at their
marketing budgets and ask:
• How many people actually watched our TV commercial?
• Did anyone buy because of the billboard?
• Did we really build “brand capital” that year we sponsored
the baseball team?
• How’s the response to the headline on our newspaper ad?
But more than that, it’s insanely expensive. A single billboard
in Atlanta, Georgia costs $3,000 a month. (Actually it costs
$30,000 a month because you can’t just get a single billboard.
The broker requires you sign up for at least 10.) And once you
buy, you can’t make any changes to your ads without overhauling
the entire campaign.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, is measurable, inexpensive,
and easy to test and pivot.
Common mistakes people make with digital marketingDigital marketing begins with traffic. And when it comes to
driving traffic to your website, there are two common mistakes:
1. We don’t try any traffic strategies: We think our material
should “sell itself.” It’s great, so people will just naturally
find it…right!? We write posts that should go viral,
that should inspire people to share, that should lead to
people flooding our site and paying for our services. But
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the truth is, it just doesn’t work like that. We need to be
active about promoting our material by getting it in front
of our ideal audience. I’ll show you how in this guide.
2. We try every traffic strategy: It’s easy to get sucked into
the digital marketing vortex — SEO, PPC, Twitter, Snapchat,
Affiliates — you name it, there’s some “guru” out there
telling you it’s the ONLY way to make money. “Get on
board or you’ll be left behind!” The result is that we spend
our time (and sometimes our money) haphazardly chasing
the “next big thing” in digital marketing. This guide is
designed to help you avoid what I call “marketing tactical
hell.”
Neither plan ever works. But focusing on a few key strategies
can take a small blog that nobody reads and turn it into a
multimillion-dollar business. I know because that’s what I did, and
that’s why I created this guide.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to be strategic about digital
marketing. You’ll discover how to start with the fundamentals,
and scale up as you grow.
We’ll talk about 5 strategies that work:
• Email Marketing, the Lifeblood of Your Business (Part 3)
• Harness the Traffic-Building Power of Remarkable Content
Marketing (Part 4)
• Social Media that Sells (Part 5)
• Build a Customer Machine with Pay Per Click Advertising
(Part 6)
• Creating & Leveraging Relationships that Boost Your Traffic
Quickly (Part 7)
But first, we’ll create a plan to get you started — whether your
business is currently making $0/year or $1mm/year.
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In this no-nonsense guide, you’ll discover:
• Who are the digital marketing experts I’ve studied (and
you should, too)
• What are the exact digital marketing strategies I’ve used to
grow my blog to a million readers per month
• Why you can’t ignore these tools — even if you write
amazing material, if nobody knows about it, it’s worthless
(I know because for years nobody read my material)
• When to use each of these digital marketing strategies
(hint: some of them may not be for you right now, and
that’s good!)
• How to start using them today for free or with minimal
investment
This stuff works — and I’m living proofOver the last 12 years, I’ve used digital marketing to grow my
first company (I Will Teach You To Be Rich) to over 1 million
readers per month. In January 2016, I launched a new brand
called GrowthLab. Since then, GrowthLab has generated millions
of dollars in sales, been read by hundreds of thousands of
people, and been featured on Tim Ferriss’s blog.
But in the beginning, I had no clue what I was doing.
A few years ago, I Will Teach You To Be Rich was just a tiny blog
nobody read. Want proof? Just dig into some of my earliest
posts. I went months and months without a single comment. But
through the years, I kept writing.
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I kept improving my craft. And, most importantly, I figured out
what people actually wanted to read. Over time, I got more eyes
on the page, more comments and more shares.
Today, millions of people visit my blog every month. Yep, that
dinky little blog — that nobody read — turned into a site with
more than 1,000,000 readers every 30 days.
I started out by using the strategies of email and content
marketing (parts 3 and 4 of this guide) and as I grew, I hired
a team to teach me the more advanced digital marketing
strategies you’ll learn later in this guide.
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Who am I?Hi, I’m Ramit Sethi, New
York Times bestselling
author, and founder and
CEO of GrowthLab and I
Will Teach You To Be Rich.
I’ve helped millions of
readers get ahead in life
using psychology, tough
love, and tested, step-by-
step systems that work in
the real world.
When I started, I had no idea what I was doing — and nobody
read what I wrote. But as I grew, amazing opportunities opened
up. Things like speaking in front of thousands of people and
being on national TV.
Being in business for over a decade (and growing year after year
after year) has also led to some awesome media opportunities
and publicity, including a 6-page spread in Fortune magazine
and being featured across from Warren Buffett in Forbes Top 20
Wealth Wizards.
My 6-page Feature in Fortune (left) and me next to Warren Buffett in Forbes (right)
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I’m not telling you this to brag. But there’s a lot of horrible
information out there about digital marketing.
Some of it is even dangerous. The unproven, short-term trends
touted by some “marketing ninjas” not only damage your
business now (think of all the lost time and money), but can do
irreparable damage to your brand in the long term.
If you want to avoid jumping from one “shiny object” to the next,
you need to be able to trust the person giving you advice.
In this guide, You’ll discover what it took to grow from nothing
to an 8-figure business with only digital marketing. And how
you can apply those principles to do the same thing for your
company. What you won’t find is any super-secret push-button
“magic bullets.”
Instead, I’ll show you real strategies that work. You’ll see what
you should be doing right now (no matter where you are in your
business) and what can wait until you grow (for example, I didn’t
start experimenting with paid advertising until I’d had a business
for many years).
As an added bonus, I also brought in a few of my expert friends,
bloggers, and other writers. They’re revealing their secrets for
creating huge audiences and mobs of passionate fans.
Now, will you get a million readers overnight?
Let’s be realistic: no. But can you get hundreds or even
thousands of readers and build from there? Absolutely.
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But first, a word of warningA lot of people will tell you, “You need to get affiliates. You need
to do PPC. You need to get on social media.” You need to do all
this stuff.
Jumping from one technique to the next puts you in what I call
“Marketing Tactical Hell.” That’s when you waste your time on
pointless tactical maneuvers that never move the needle in your
business.
Not a fun place to be
It’s important to remember that there are different stages in your
business. In each one of those stages, you can focus on different
strategies and tactics.
But you don’t need to overcomplicate things in the beginning.
I mean, let’s say you want to start going to the gym. On your first
day in the gym, you’re going to stretch, walk on the treadmill,
and get an idea of the gym’s layout.
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You’re not going to go over to the bench press and lift 225lbs.
That wouldn’t be a great way to start working out. Even if you
could lift the bar, you’d burn yourself out, get frustrated, or just
kill yourself because you don’t know how to hold the bar and
you’d drop it on your throat.
Whereas, if you’d been training for a while — let’s say you were
an Olympic athlete — you already know how to stretch, and you
know the layout of the gym.
Your workout is going to look very different than someone who
is just beginning.
Growing your business works the same way.
You’ll try different things at different stages of your business,
moving from beginner to more advanced later on. But you can’t
do it all up front.
This guide is your first step. We’ll walk you through the digital
marketing strategies you need to focus on up front (making a
plan, email marketing, and remarkable content). Master these
and you’ll already be ahead of 92% of your competition.
Then, for more advanced readers, we’ll cover next-level strategies
like social media, pay-per-click advertising, and affiliate
marketing.
Here’s what we’re covering in this free guide:
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Part 2: Your 5-Step Digital Marketing Plan
I’ve seen thousands of sites randomly “try out” digital marketing
strategies one after another, hoping for the magic traffic and
sales secret to riches. In part 2, I’ll show you why this is the
WORST thing you can do. What step do 99% of bloggers skip?
Creating a plan. But this is the ONLY way to skip the trial and
error and do what works from day one — I’ll show you which
specific digital marketing tactics to focus on first and what to
ignore for lasting growth.
Take me to part 2
Part 3: Email Marketing, the Lifeblood of Your BusinessMaybe you’ve heard this before: “The money is in the list.” Your
most valuable asset in business is a crowd of people who like
you and have given you permission to email them about your
product.
After 12 years of running an online business and generating
millions in sales, I can tell you this is 100% true. I’ll show you how
to build your list and what to send your subscribers so they look
forward to hearing from you (and ultimately become buyers).
Take me to part 3
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Part 4: Harness The Traffic-Building Power of Remarkable Content Marketing
How do people like Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel, Brian Clark, or other
big-name bloggers regularly produce high-caliber material
readers can’t get enough of? Their amazing content turned them
into respected experts, helped them build loyal fan bases, and
opened up huge opportunities in their business and personal
lives. The real question is: Can you do the same? Yes, you can. I’ll
show you how.
Take me to part 4
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Part 5: Social Media That Sells
Too much social media advice (even from the so-called
“experts”) consists of vague and useless soundbites like “Join
the conversation!” and “Engage!” In this advanced section of the
guide, I’ll show you how to get real results from social.
Real results, aka profits — not just likes, retweets, and followers.
Because last time I checked, you can’t pay your bills with
Facebook likes.
Take me to part 5
Part 6: Build a Customer Machine with Pay Per Click Advertising
PPC, or “pay per click,” means paid advertising. You’ve seen
these types of ads on Google, Facebook, and Twitter. PPC is
great for more advanced businesses because when you get it
working, it’s very scalable and provides a predictable ROI. It is a
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powerful tool for growing your business. But the downside is that
you need to know your numbers — or risk running ads that cost
more than they’re worth (bye, bye money and time). I’ll show
you how to get started without using your money to guess what
works.
Take me to part 6
Part 7: Creating & Leveraging Relationships That Boost Your Traffic QuicklyOne of the quickest ways to build authority is by getting other
people to share your material. You can use other people’s lists
to gain credibility, build your email list, and get more sales. But
spamming top-name bloggers with your affiliate marketing
proposal is the wrong way to do it. In Part 7, I’ll show you how
to build relationships with journalists, bloggers, and podcasters.
Those connections will grow your fan base, build your reputation,
and position you as an authority faster than you would have ever
thought possible.
Take me to part 7
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PART 2
Your 5-Step Digital Marketing Plan
Most people don’t plan at all. They just come up with a marketing
idea, pursue it blindly, and hope for the best. What happens is,
they inevitably run into roadblocks and when they do, they’ve
already spent so much time and money that they’re hesitant to
change anything — and that’s where they get into big trouble.
Before moving forward with any of the strategies in this guide,
decide WHY you’re marketing and WHO you’re marketing to.
(WARNING:) DO NOT skip these first two steps. I call this “The
Shrug Effect.” When you say “know your market” everyone nods
and shrugs — “Yeah yeah, Ramit, I got it” — but nobody actually
does it.
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Step 1: Know who your customer isA huge mistake is “trying out” digital marketing (running “just a
few” Facebook ads, writing blog posts, or creating social media
profiles) without first being crystal clear on WHO you’re trying to
reach. In my flagship course on starting an online business, Zero
to Launch, I talk about the Immersion Strategy, which is a way
to understand your customer better than they know themselves
through deep research.
It’s easier to set up a bunch of websites and landing pages and
Google Analytics than to actually understand people. But when
you do the work up front, everything becomes easier:
• You know exactly what to publish on your blog every time
you sit down to write
• You instinctively understand the perfect audience of
buyers for your ads
• You naturally start to form relationships with bigger
businesses, creating profitable partnerships almost
effortlessly
Knowing your customers better than they know themselves: Immersion Strategy 101
1. Be playful and approach research with “a child’s mind.”
What I mean by that is, be open to whatever you may find
— gather notes on things like interesting phrases you find
or surprising admissions from your market.
2. Use a variety of sources when researching your market —
Google searches, articles, Amazon reviews, Q&A sites like
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Quora and Reddit, and 1-on-1 conversations with people.
3. Keep a running list of every time someone in your market
mentions something about the following: a pain point,
a fear, a hope, a dream, an obstacle. These are the deep
emotional words and phrases that give you a clear picture
of your market.
Make sure your market will pay. Take Immersion a step further
with this exclusive video from Zero to Launch. In it, I dive deep
into the strategies, systems, and secrets you can use to check if
your idea will make you money.
We’ll talk about:
• How to find a market that will beg for your product or
service (and why your market can’t be “everyone”)
• The 3-step validation method you can use today to see
if anyone cares about your idea — and what to do if they
don’t
• How to get OTHER people excited about what you have
to offer. I’m talking about people like customers, bloggers,
and market influencers — people who will help you SELL
your idea
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Step 2: Know where your customers are & what they REALLY wantWhen I was an undergrad at Stanford, I decided to teach my
friends about personal finance.
I printed up all these agendas (double-sided, to save money),
reserved spots, even got a bunch of my friends to say they would
come.
Nobody came.
It took me years to figure out why. Do you know?
First, I talked about financial literacy. Big mistake. People want
more money, freedom, options. Nobody wants to be “financially
literate.” It’s naggy!
Second, I focused on a group of people (college kids) who
NOTORIOUSLY hate being nagged about money. It’s irrelevant,
since they’re not earning it yet!
But like a delusional entrepreneur, I told myself that people
“should” listen. Once you use the word “should,” you’ve already
lost.
It didn’t matter how technically accurate my talk was. It didn’t
matter what my friends logically stood to gain. I chose the wrong
audience, and that was it.
It’s like you telling your friend she “should” break up with her
horrible, no-job-having boyfriend. Yeah, she should…but she’s not
going to. Not until she’s ready.
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Same thing with digital marketing. You’ll see a bunch of people
giving you tactical tips like “14 Ways to Make Money with PPC,”
but one of the most important lessons you can actually learn is…
…GO TO THE BUYERS.
There are tons of looky-loos, especially online — which means it’s
easy to waste your time and resources marketing to people that
will never buy.
If you take away one thing about running a profitable online
business from this guide, make it this: You have to find people
who will pay.
When you learn how to find the buyers, you’ll get these kinds of
results:
This is not random. A huge part of your success in starting an
online business comes from consciously choosing who you’re
attracting and who you’re repelling.
What if you could find the people who already “get it?” People
who are all-in, paying attention, and dying for you to share your
special something?
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Let me show you how in this video:
Step 3: Set one goalWhen it comes to digital marketing, people tend to jump from
one shiny object to the next — Twitter! Facebook ads! Blogging
daily! All of these can make money, but only when done with
intention. Most people never focus on a strategy long enough
to see any results. In fact, they often don’t even know the result
they are looking for! (For example “Twitter followers” is not a
result unless you’ve found a landlord that takes that as payment.)
The way to grow is to focus on the ONE result you want from
your marketing plan. Do you want:
• To grow your email list?
• Make more sales?
• Snag a high-profile speaking gig?
• Get featured in the New York Times?
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Once you laser in on ONE goal, what you need to do to get there
becomes much easier to figure out. Then, when you reach one
goal, you can apply what you learned (planning, timing, and
focus) to checking off the next from your list.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with my longtime friend
Noah Kagan.
Noah is a master at helping people (and himself) get laser-
focused on their goals. Pay special attention at 3:53 where he
talks about the strategy that has made him the most successful,
financially and otherwise.
Now, I want to challenge you to do what Noah said.
Pick the biggest goal that you want to accomplish with your
digital marketing. Maybe it’s to get 10,000 people on your list,
make $25,000 in revenue, or get featured in a major publication
like Forbes or the New York Times.
Whatever that goal is for you, declare it. And then mark your
calendar for one year from today.
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I work with a lot of people who want to start an online business.
It’s a very exciting time for them — but it’s also challenging to
know what to focus on, who to listen to, and what bright and
shiny objects are worth their time.
So I ask them, “What’s your number one goal?” If they say, “I
want to get 5,000 people on my list in one year,” then we have
something very concrete to work with.
When they come to the group and say, “I was doing such and
such on Twitter the other day,” the group will immediately call
them out and say, “Is Twitter going to help you get to 5,000
people on your email list?”
In 95% of the cases, the answer is no. Twitter might be more fun
than doing what it takes to get 5,000 email subscribers, but it’s
not going to be a real win for the business.
Having that kind of focus is what has enabled me to grow my
business from nothing 12 years ago to now being a million-dollar
business with 30,000 students all over the world.
Limiting your options may seem scary, but if you do it, your
chances of accomplishing your goal increase exponentially.
Step 4: Where you are comes before where you want to beWhen you open the Maps app on your phone, what’s the first
thing that happens? Before the route is laid out, before you even
plug in your destination, the app pinpoints your current location.
It’s impossible to map out your path before you know where
you’re starting.
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At GrowthLab, we approach online business as a SYSTEM.
That’s why we’re not digging right into marketing tactics and
instead looking at high-level strategy. We figure out where we
are. Map out the route. And then execute.
To start, I highly recommend you focus on email marketing (Part
3) and content marketing (Part 4). Then, once you are more
advanced, move on to the other parts of this guide.
Every day, people come to me frantic and frazzled by all the
details of their businesses. No wonder they’re overwhelmed! In
this video, I’m sharing the secret to successfully operating your
business — and your life — without getting overwhelmed.
Throughout this guide, I will be mainly sharing free ways to
market your site. However, some of the more advanced strategies
like Pay Per Click advertising cost money. It’s important when
deciding which strategies to focus on to understand how (or if)
you’ll make that money back.
That’s why I encourage you to focus on the fundamentals first.
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Get a good idea of your market, your audience, and your
numbers. Then, as you grow, you can invest back into your
business.
Step 5: Work BackwardsOnce you know your market, know your goal, and know what to
focus on, it’s just a matter of simple math to create your plan.
Noah Kagan (scroll up for an introduction to Noah) calls this
“quant-based marketing.”
Let’s say the following two facts are true:
1. Your goal is 1,000 new email subscribers in one year
Currently you are getting an average of 10 new subscribers
per week
2. At the current rate, you’ll get 520 subscribers if you
continue doing what you’re doing now. (10 subscribers/
week x 52 weeks per year).
ACRONYM TO KNOW
ROI: Return on InvestmentEvery dollar that goes out of your business (including
for digital marketing) should result in more than a dollar
coming in. That’s a positive ROI. If you spend more on
an activity than you make, that’s a negative ROI and you
should stop doing it. It’s that simple. You need to know if
a promotion is making or losing money so you can adjust
accordingly.
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So to reach your goal, you need to essentially double your
current subscriber rate.
To do that you have 2 options:
1. Double your conversions (meaning twice as many of the
people that visit your site opt in to your list)
2. Double your traffic (meaning more total people land on
your site each week)
Do you see how now you have a solid start to work from?
If you look at your numbers and decide that you want to double
your conversion, you can ignore all the other shiny tactics and
just work on getting more opt-ins.
If you decide to focus on traffic, you can use the digital
marketing strategies that I detail in rest of this guide.
If more subscribers is your goal, I have an in-depth guide to
getting more email subscribers. Get the exact list-building
strategies I’ve used to grow my list to over 500,000. You can get
it here:
Get the exact strategies
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PART 3
Email Marketing, the Lifeblood of Your Business
My friend John Lee Dumas runs the top-ranked business podcast
Entrepreneur on Fire. He asks this famous question to all his
guests:
“Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new
world, identical to earth, but you knew no one.
You still have all the experience and knowledge you
currently have. Your food and shelter are taken care of, but
all you have is a laptop and $500.
What would you do in the next 7 days?”
To me, the answer couldn’t be any clearer.
“Start building an email list.”
Maybe you’ve heard this before: “The money is in the list.”
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After 12 years of running an online business and generating
millions in sales, I can tell you this is 100% true.
Here are 3 reasons why all your digital marketing efforts (at least
at first) should be focused on building an email list:
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Email should always be a benefit to your reader, not just to youToo many marketers preach how to suck every penny out of
your email list. Upsells, downsells, cross sells, “trip-wires” … the
list goes on and on. Here at GrowthLab, we have a different
approach.
We want our subscribers to be excited to open our emails. Every
single email we send out has to be valuable — whether the
reader is ready to buy or not.
I have students that were on my email list for 5 YEARS before
they bought anything. And we were here when they were ready.
How do we do it? How do we keep someone engaged for half a
decade?
I’ve made a commitment to give away 98% of my material for
free…and to make that free material better than anyone else’s
paid stuff.
For example, I often offer free email courses to my list. The
most popular was our 20X Your Potential Challenge, a course I
co-designed with a former Navy SEAL on how to build mental
toughness and overcome self-doubt.
Thousands of students have participated, sharing their
experience with #ICanDo20X on Twitter.
My good friend David Kadavy at Design for Hackers grows his list
dramatically each summer with his free mini-course Summer of
Design. For 40 days, he teaches the theories behind design, so
you can understand how design works.
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When people are excited to open and read your emails, they’ll be
more excited to buy from you later.
Anybody can buy a domain name, publish a few blog posts,
and post on Twitter or Facebook. But if you want to build a real
online business, with real revenue — one that pays you to share
your passions with the world — you have to know how to build
an audience. Not just passive social followers who “liked” you
when they were bored one day, but engaged email subscribers
who can’t wait to hear from you.
That means keeping those subscribers engaged, and converting
them into paying customers.
This is by far the most challenging part of starting an online
business.
I created a guide on how to turn traffic into customers. In this
guide, you’ll learn:
ACRONYM TO KNOW
CTR: Click Through RateYour click-through rate is how many people click a link
in your email. Whether you send them to a sales page, a
post to comment, a survey, or a bonus to download, click-
through rate measures how people are interacting with your
email. A high CTR means that people are interested in what
you’re giving them. A low CTR means your readers may be
skimming or ignoring your content.
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• A technique to crush writer’s block and consistently create
high-quality content that people want to share
• How to quickly grow your email list…even from scratch
• A guest posting strategy that virtually guarantees tons of
traffic back to your site
You can get instant access to the guide here:
Get instant access to the guide
Page 31The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing -
PART 4
Harness The Traffic-Building Power of
Remarkable Content Marketing
You know it when you see it.
From the opening words to the very last sentence, you can’t stop
reading it. It effortlessly pulls you down the page. It intrigues
you. It tells a great story. It makes you feel good.
When you’ve devoured the final word, you bookmark it and
share it with your friends. Turns out, you’re not the only one who
loved it either. At the bottom of the post, you see hundreds of
comments. Thousands of social shares.
All from people praising the writer. All from readers begging for
more.
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Welcome to the world of remarkable content.
You’ve seen awesome writing like this, right? Work that creates
reputations and builds businesses.
Maybe you read people like Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel, Brian Clark, or
one of the other big-name bloggers who regularly produce high-
caliber material you can’t get enough of.
Their amazing content turned them into respected experts,
helped them build a loyal fan base, and opened up huge
opportunities in their business and personal lives. And it all
started with great content.
Neil Patel Remarkable Content Master
In 2015, my friend Neil Patel published a comprehensive Step-by-
Step Guide to Search Engine Optimization. It has video lessons,
definitions, infographics, easy get-started tactics, advanced
strategies, and more. Most $500+ SEO courses don’t share this
much. The result? It’s been shared on social over 2,000 times and
has over 200 comments that continue to add up almost a year
later. This is the power of remarkable content.
At GrowthLab and IWT, remarkable content has been the
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cornerstone of our success.
Before email. Before social. And long before I spent a single
penny on ads, I produced great content.
To this day, content is what keeps my readers coming back and
new readers coming in. Content like my Ultimate Guides. I give
more away in my Ultimate Guides than most bloggers offer in
their paid courses.
Publishing remarkable content isn’t some weird strategy that
only worked for big bloggers like Neil Patel and me. Thousands
of my students have grown their traffic with content marketing.
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SUCCESS STORY
Joyce AkikoThe self-taught coder who
got over 25,000 views on
Lifehacker
Joyce spent years learning how to be a freelance programmer.
One day, she decided to share what she’d learned along the way
in a single, detailed blog post. Because she spent time — upfront
— making the content truly remarkable, her post resonated with
tens of thousands of people. In fact, it was so good, one of the
writers at Lifehacker decided to feature her work. That one
feature alone got more than 25,000 views and brought hundreds
of new subscribers to her list.
SUCCESS STORY
Selena SooThe publicity coach who made
$30,000 from one guest post
Another one of my graduates, Selena, created one viral guest
post. Because of how personal and detailed the post was, it
received 250 comments, over 1000 shares, and she attracted
over 2000 new subscribers to her mailing list.
The end result: she earned more than $30,000 from that ONE
guest post.
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So how do you do this in your business?
Every piece of remarkable content mentioned above has the
same 7 critical features.
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So how do you know if content is remarkable?Great content should have comments like these, from a post I
wrote on getting a meeting with anyone.
Readers are excited to interact with content that they love. They
comment on, reply to, and share your content.
ACRONYM TO KNOW
KPI: Key Performance IndicatorHere at GrowthLab, we use Google Analytics. But no
matter what analytics software you use, there are a few key
performance indicators, or key pieces of data you should
look at regularly. These KPIs give an overall indication of the
effectiveness of your digital marketing. For blog posts, one
KPI to track is the “bounce rate.” The bounce rate tracks
how many people leave your site after visiting just one
page. If your reader is engaged, they will click other areas of
your site, so a low bounce rate is a good sign of remarkable
content.
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You can start using content to drive traffic right now (and
it doesn’t cost anything to use content marketing). I break
down how to make time and write, edit, and promote your
own remarkable content in my Ultimate Guide to Remarkable
Content. You can download the entire guide below.
Download the guide
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PART 5
Social Media That Sells
Years ago, I actually hired a firm to help with social media.
They posted those stupid inspirational quote board pictures,
saying things like “If you dream it, you can do it.” Or:
When I logged on and saw that picture, I almost threw my laptop
out of my window. Can you imagine me ever saying anything like
that? After I explained that I would rather tie my own neck to an
elephant’s tail and let myself get dragged for miles along a rocky
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desert, they continued posting sayings more appropriate for a
life coach convention. I fired them.
That’s the problem with most social media “experts” out there
today. They give vague and useless soundbites like “Join the
conversation!” and “Engage!”
But social media marketing is like any digital marketing strategy
— you need to have return on investment. And trust me, there’s
no ROI on generic, off-brand, inspirational phrases.
Marketers expect social media to be a “magic bullet” that will
drive thousands of visitors overnight. There’s a reason that social
media marketing is behind strategy, email, and content in this
guide — social media should not be the first strategy you focus
on.
There’s a few reasons for this:
1. You don’t own your social media followers. If Twitter goes
out of business or Facebook changes its policies (which it
has, several times, to the detriment of many businesses),
you’re in trouble.
2. Think of how you use social— you are looking for “quick
hits.” You scroll quickly, click quickly, and leave quickly. It’s
difficult to make lasting or long-term impressions.
3. Social can get out of hand quickly…Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, Vine, LinkedIn, Pinterest…
the list is continually growing and there’s always someone
out there trying to convince you that you “must” be on the
newest platform.
In fact, for years, I didn’t do any social media marketing at all.
But, as I learned from my friend Laura Roeder, once you have
the foundation, social can be a powerful force multiplier in your
business.
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Laura Roeder A Different Approach to Social
After the life-coachy social “expert” from above, I was ready to
abandon social all together. Then Laura Roeder showed me a
new way to look at social media marketing. Social is simply
another way to “go where the fish are” (see Part 2 of this guide
for more on this concept). You are bringing your message to
where your customers are already spending time — Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, etc. So I started using my already-written
content and the strategies below. Now GrowthLab consistently
gets new leads from multiple social media channels.
Content Marketing + Social Media Marketing = Unstoppable Traffic Machine
Strategy #1: Put your best content on autopilot
You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) spend hours posting on social
media. You can take the remarkable content you created in Part
4 and schedule it to automatically post on multiple channels.
Many tools out there will do this for you. The two that we use at
GrowthLab are Buffer and Edgar.
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Free Option: Buffer
Go to Buffer.com
Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout
the day on multiple social media channels.
Advantages
• Buffer is free to start and easy to set up.
• You simply link your social media channels, add a post, and
it’s done.
• You can also add a Chrome extension to quickly share and
schedule interesting articles you find.
Disadvantages
• You still have to schedule posts one at a time.
• While it saves time over adding each link in to each social
media account, it still is a time-consuming task.
• When we were using Buffer exclusively, it took hours every
week to load the posts for the week.
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• You’ll have to watch to make sure the time you spend is
giving you positive ROI.
Paid Option: Edgar
Go to MeetEdgar.com
Edgar draws from a library of posts you create, then schedules
them at times you choose or times that your audience is
engaged. You may have months or years of great content
that your new followers would normally never see — now your
followers always get great content, and you don’t have to
constantly come up with original posts.
Advantages
• Edgar is a huge time saver.
• You only have to load each post once and then it’s saved
forever.
• You can also create “types” of content like blog posts,
outside links, funny jokes, that will rotate on a schedule.
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Disadvantages
• At $49 per month for the starter package, you’ll have to
evaluate if you’ll be able to get ROI on the tool.
• We’ve found the time saved alone was worth the
investment for our team.
Strategy #2: Turn your “thank you” page into a viral loop machine
Have you ever signed up for an email list through a website, hit
the opt-in button, and been redirected to another page? We call
those “thank you” pages.
Most people overlook this critical piece and leave a generic
confirmation message on there. But you can turn your page into
an engine that drives your viral loop across the web.
First, let me explain how we did it with a free 5-day course.
As usual, we sent everyone to a “thank you” page after they
entered their email and signed up.
On the page, we embedded a tweet and Facebook post. And we
asked readers to share or retweet.
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Here’s what it looked like:
So on your “thank you” page, embed the tweet (and screenshot
the FB post) and write a line or two asking them to share it.
The copy doesn’t need to be fancy. You can follow our example
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above and write, “Retweet on Twitter… Hit the retweet button, or
click here to retweet.”
Or, “Share on Facebook…Click the share button above, or click
here to share.”
Strategy #3: Get your biggest fans to spread the word
You’ve got the foundation down. Next you want to get your fans
to help you out. Send your email list a message announcing your
sticky idea. Here’s an example of what we sent out:
Of course, your email list will be the #1 source of sign-ups.
But when you mention the free course, since it’s a sticky idea,
something else happens. Your readers will want to spread the
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word to people who are interested in the same thing.
When they see the social sharing buttons on the thank you page,
they’ll think, “I don’t want my friends to miss this!”
And with the option to share right there, they’re more likely to
take action.
You can see the results for yourself: 474 retweets and 124 shares
on Facebook.
For a company that didn’t focus on social media until recently,
that’s a lot. It also got tons of engagement and built a lot of
buzz.
The friends of your biggest fans who see these retweets and
shares will go directly to your landing page for the webinar or
mini-course. And a good number of them will sign up, which
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means fresh names for your email list.
At GrowthLab, we set benchmarks for campaigns like this. On
two recent ones, as I mentioned, we crushed our opt-in goals by
49% and 57%, just by using those exact steps.
You can do the same to boost your opt-ins.
How do you decide which content to promote on social?No two pieces of remarkable content are the same. But there
are a few key components that every extremely successful piece
must have.
I show you exactly how to create content ideas for social or
ACRONYM TO KNOW
CTA: Call To ActionEvery post, no matter what the medium (Facebook,
Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Email — all of them) should
have a call to action. This a prompt for your reader to DO
something. Examples of actions are commenting, sharing,
and opting-in. The CTA gets your reader involved and
engaged with your content. If there is no call to action, they
will read your content, move on with their lives, and forget
all about you. By making them take action, you take the
first step in building a relationship, which is the center of
effective digital marketing.
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evaluate the content you already have in a free resource, The
Anatomy of a Viral Blog Post.
Click here for instant access
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PART 6
Build a Customer Machine with Pay Per Click
Advertising
You wouldn’t believe how many people I know who run
companies doing hundreds of thousands or even millions of
dollars in revenue with pay per click advertising.
And they brag about getting customers at $0.25 a click. They say
to me, “It’s so good, Ramit. I have a scalable engine.”
What they’re talking about is going to Facebook or Google,
spending $1, and making $2. That’s the dream. That’s when paid
advertising really works.
“Pay per click advertising” is also called paid acquisition, PPC,
or pay-per-click. It all means the same thing — the ads you
see people running on Facebook and Google. There are other
channels for pay per click, but the big ones are Facebook Ads
and Google AdWords.
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Timing is everything
Paid acquisition strategies (like PPC) can work. But the key for
you as a business owner is knowing which of these strategies to
apply, and when.
For example, if you start off from day one spending $5,000 a
month on PPC, you’re dead. You don’t know your numbers yet.
You’re just throwing away money and burning it.
We spent years and years doing guest posts before we even
thought about PPC. Follow our lead and remember: Timing is
everything. Don’t be in a rush.
Now, some businesses have cracked the code and done it
beautifully.
But it’s difficult. It takes a lot of sophistication to know if it’s
actually working.
I have friends who spend $5,000 to $25,000 a month on paid
ads. And many of them don’t even know if they are making a
profit.
How’s that possible? Because they spend $25,000 and then they
make $40,000 — but they’re not sure if it’s from people who
came through paid ads or from something else. They don’t have
the tracking in place.
For successful pay per click advertising, you need to know your
numbers. It comes down to one key number, your CPA.
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Let’s break down how we figure out our CPA and use that
information to find out if we’re getting a return on investment for
a sample Facebook ad.
ACRONYM TO KNOW
CPA: Cost Per AcquisitionThe cost per acquisition is simply, how much money does it
cost to get one paying customer? It’s easy to get distracted
by other data points (likes, shares, clicks, conversions),
but the ONLY way to calculate your return on investment
is to know how much money you are spending for each
customer. So for example, if you sell a $10 ebook using
advertising, your CPA needs to be less than $10. That means
if you spend $100 on ads, you need at least 10 paying
customers (not just email subscribers) from the promotion
for it to break even.
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Start with simple Facebook Ads (NOT Google AdWords). Here’s why.Facebook allows you to advertise to a very specific type of
person — the kind most likely to buy from you. You can filter who
sees your ad by criteria like:
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests (what pages they like or follow)
• Education level (including fields of study, schools they’ve
attended, or graduation year)
• Behaviors like recent websites they’ve visited or if they use
mobile
• And connections like “friends of people who follow me”
When you’re ready to advertise on Facebook, you can use the
information you gathered in the Immersion Phase (Find the
Immersion Strategy in Part 2) to get very specific about who you
target.
If you wanted, you could target females in your town under 35
who follow Ramit Sethi’s IWT to build an email list of potential
brides.
The point is, when you get super-specific with who you reach,
you avoid spending money showing your ad to people that will
never buy from you.
(See how doing the work to understand your customer makes
advanced marketing strategies — like paid media — easier to
execute, and more profitable for your business? That’s why we
encourage taking the steps in order.)
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Derek Halpern Doing PPC Right
My friend Derek Halpern uses Facebook ads to promote his
remarkable content. In this ad, he collects email addresses in
return for a free mini-series on how to build profitable online
courses. People that want a free mini-series on this topic are the
perfect market of potential buyers for his premium material.
Do you need a fancy website before you drive traffic to your site?
Absolutely not.
It’s a huge mistake to delay driving traffic to your website for
reasons like design, colors, or font choices.
You can convert traffic to buyers with only the remarkable
content you created in Part 4 and a simple website.
I recorded a 9-minute video that shows you the 5 components
you need for a website that sells.
Watch video now
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PART 7
Creating & Leveraging Relationships That Boost
Your Traffic Quickly
What happens when the big boys play together, when you see
a guest post on a major media site? When you see an article on
Lifehacker? When you see the New York Times citing an author
or even letting an author write his own post on their blog?
These things don’t happen the same way that ordinary guest
posts happen. There’s one distinguishing factor, and that is
relationships.
There are a ton of sites out there about “affiliate marketing.” And
to be honest, a lot of them promote tactics that may work in the
short term, but cannot create a sustainable marketing strategy.
In this guide, I’m not going to talk about ClickBank or where to
find people who will pitch your products to your list without
knowing you. Just like anything, there is no “magic push button”
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business strategy, despite what the rest of the internet will tell
you.
The truth is, for the people that are doing affiliate marketing
right, it’s all about relationships. You may not have those today,
but I’ll show you how to have them tomorrow. This section is all
about what happens at the highest levels — and it starts with
content and building your email list (are you sensing a theme in
this guide?). Personally when I started off, I would have killed to
have known how it happens because it was all dark magic to me.
How big partnerships happen online
I want to take you behind the scenes and share what happens
when big partnerships go down.
Tim Ferriss Using the “Surround Sound Effect”
My good friend Tim Ferriss launched the wildly successful
“Four Hour Work Week” with no money and no connections
by creating what he calls the surround sound effect. The more
people hear about your product or site from different sources,
the more they’ll start to take it seriously as something they need
to check out. Incidentally, two of my most popular guest posts
ever were on Tim’s site: The psychology of automating your
finances and more recently, The real-world blueprint for a $5
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million week. (Note how comprehensive these posts were. If I
hadn’t focused on content first, these would not have brought
the success they did.)
Check out this video for how this is done.
Next, I’ll show you how to start the process and meet people
who you’d like to have partnerships with.
How to use email to meet powerful new partnersThis is trickier than you might think. We know people who’ve
tried to schedule a call with a busy person, and after repeated
back-and-forth scheduling emails, the busy person simply gave
up and said, “Sorry, I just don’t have time.”
Your goal is to minimize the back and forth and make it easy for
the busy person to find time to talk to you.
Here are a five important things to keep in mind when you write
the email:
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1. You (the lower-status person who wants to talk to the busy person) should initiate the call, but provide your phone number in case they want to speak to you right now
By the way, don’t get offended by my use of the phrase “lower-
status.” Let’s be candid: If you want something from someone
else, in this situation, you are lower-status.
Whether it’s less famous, less wealthy, less successful, less
important, or less busy, that’s just the way it is. Remember, YOU
want something from THEM. It’s important to recognize this and
work around the busy person’s schedule. That means:
2. Don’t make them think
You can’t ask them to work around your schedule, but at the
same time you want to make it easy for them to say, “yes.” Don’t
make them come up with a bunch of times that work. Instead,
offer them a couple of different options for times that would
work for the call. That respects their schedule, and leaves the
final decision in their hands, but doesn’t require a lot of thought.
3. Send your email when they’re most likely to read it
You wouldn’t believe how many people email complex questions
to a busy person on a Friday afternoon.
Why? Why would you send something requiring lots of work to
someone on their way out for a weekend?
The answer: “Oh…I didn’t think about that.”
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If you don’t think about the busy person, you lose.
To maximize your chance of getting a response, email a busy
person when they’re most likely to read and process it.
In other words:
• Do NOT email a busy person on Monday morning
• Do NOT email a busy person on their birthday (unless it’s a
simple happy birthday message)
Instead, think when they’re most receptive. Maybe at lunch?
Maybe Sunday night when they’re prepping for their week?
4. Make it impossible to skip with great formatting
Bad formatting can scuttle even the most helpful, interesting
email.
Use paragraph breaks and bullet points liberally to make your
email easy to read.
Also, send it in plain text rather than HTML so it can be easily
read on a mobile device. For VIP emails, I like to send myself a
test to make sure it’s readable and any URLs are clickable.
5. Use correct grammar and spelling
Lazy typos signal laziness. Use proper punctuation and
capitalization.
Don’t use lower case “i”s or texting abbreviations. An email
should be more polished than a text message.
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Always proofread your email. Let the reader focus on your well-
crafted message, not the fact that you still do not know the
difference between “its” and “it’s.”
You wouldn’t think I’d need to say this, but I do.
If you keep those 5 things in mind, you’ve got a great shot at
getting a positive response, but let me give you an example of
these principles in action.
Let’s say a college student (low status) needs to email a CEO
(high status). A great email would look like this:
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With a couple of tweaks, this email can be used to email any
busy person in any situation.
How to use these partnerships to build your list, promote your events, or sell your coursesThere are advanced (and expensive) software platforms that you
can use to track affiliates, but you don’t need these at first. These
are 3 strategies you can use today
Simple Strategy #1: Guest post to build your list
I love talking about guest posting because I’ve written guest
posts on sites like Lifehacker, Four Hour Workweek, even The
New York Times. All of them have been instrumental in helping
me grow my business. So the strategy I’m sharing works and
continues to work.
And I really want to share it with you because almost everybody
does this the wrong way!
Watch this quick video for 3 strategies for effective guest posts.
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Simple Strategy #2: “Dollar-per-lead” campaign
One way we entice affiliates to help us build our list is by offering
a dollar for every confirmed lead they send us.
Here’s how to do it:
1. At first, start off with just a few affiliates. You can do
this using social (we used Instagram affiliates) or a more
traditional email campaign.
2. Based on your numbers (which we went over in Part
6), offer your partners and affiliates a bonus for each
confirmed lead they refer. We offered a dollar per lead
during this promotion.
3. Set up a unique landing page for simple tracking — this
way you can easily see where the leads came from.
4. On the landing page you’ll want to offer a lead magnet or
“carrot” to entice the referrals to opt-in. (Here’s how to
come up with a good carrot).
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Simple Strategy #3: Coupon code for courses and events
An easy way to ask your friends and partners to promote a
course is by offering them “swipe emails” to send to their list
with a coupon code. You write an email selling your product,
service, or event, and then they can edit for their own voice and
list. It’s best when they add their own personality, because let’s
face it, we’ve all received generic emails that we know the sender
didn’t write himself. At the end of the email, offer a coupon code
ACRONYM TO KNOW
LTV: Life Time ValueThe lifetime value is how much a customer is worth to
you over time. Here at GrowthLab, our customers have a
high lifetime value because they often purchase multiple
products as their business grows. We already talked about
cost per acquisition with a $10 ebook in Part 6. Let’s say
your CPA for the ebook is $10. If that’s all you offer, then
you are breaking even on the promotion and it’s a waste of
time. But, if your customers upgrade to a $99 video course
after purchasing the ebook, a CPA of $10 or more is great!
Your customers have a LTV, or lifetime value of $109 dollars,
meaning you’re getting 1000% ROI. Once you know your
LTV, you know how much of a cut you can profitably offer
affiliates to sell your products. The higher your LTV, the
better deal you can offer affiliates, and the more the traffic
in the market tilts in your favor.
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for a discount at checkout. That way, you can track where the
buyer came from and you can offer an affiliate bonus without
expensive software.
FIELD REPORT
Tripling your email list in less than a year
One of my Zero to Launch students, Felicia Spahr, tripled her list
by focusing on guest posting. She wrote a 3-Step guide for how
to write a perfect guest post.
Step 1: Write for their audience, not yours
You know what your audience wants and loves to read. But
the site where you’re guest posting has a different audience.
Look at the site’s homepage, most popular posts, and read the
comments to find out what that is.
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Step 2: Instantly attract readers to your website
To grab people’s attention, in your bio, you want to direct these
readers to a special gift just for them. Everyone likes free things,
so you’re giving them a compelling reason to click and visit your
website.
Step 3: Get readers to give you their email addresses
You’ve given readers a link to a free gift. But where does that
link go to? You want to create a dedicated landing page solely
for that offer. This takes less than an hour (I recommend using a
program like LeadPages), and the reward is huge.
Simple Landing Page Checklist:
• Write a headline that greets your readers, like “Welcome
GrowthLab Readers!”
• Describe in precise detail what your offer is: is it a PDF?
Video? Audio recording? eBook?
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• In about 3 bullets, tell the reader exactly how your offer is
going to benefit them. What is it going to help them do?
Make sure this is crystal clear so it’s a no-brainer for people
to sign up
• Include an opt-in form, where people enter their names
and emails
For Felicia’s full guest-posting report, including examples of her most effective posts, click below
Why would anyone publish or promote my stuff?Why do we hesitate to buy someone a drink at a bar, delay
sending in our job application, or avoid asking for help?
It’s a simple answer. We’re afraid.
We’re afraid of “bothering” someone. We’re afraid of rejection.
And, we’re afraid of what happens after they say “yes.”
It’s the same way with affiliate marketing. We’re afraid to reach
out and start forming these partnerships.
The truth is, if you’ve followed this guide so far, what you have to
offer will be extremely valuable to them and their audience.
But, I’m not going to sugar-coat it, these bloggers have hundreds
of people asking them for stuff every single day. So how do
you cut through the clutter and get them to say YES — without
Get the full guest-posting report
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seeming scammy, sleazy, or self-promotional?
I recorded a special video that shows you how to make an
irresistible pitch (without the fear).
Click here to watch the video
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PART 8
What’s next?
Whether you’re just getting started, or you already have a
successful online business, you’ve learned some of the key
systems and strategies of digital marketing and driving traffic to
your site.
And you’ve seen how to implement these in days or weeks,
instead of the years and years it took me (I didn’t use a few of
the strategies in this guide until I hired a team to show me how).
What we’ve covered:
• Too much vs. too little: how to be strategic about digital
marketing (Part 1)
• How to deeply understand your market so you know
more about their fears, hopes, and dreams than they do
themselves (Part 2)
• The counterintuitive way that free mini-courses lead to
sales of paid courses (Part 3)
• 7 critical features that every piece of content should have if
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you want people to share it (Part 4)
• How successful businesses really use content as a free
promotional strategy (Part 4)
• One key indicator of remarkable content and how to spot it
(Part 4)
• The reason I fired a social media agency on the spot (Part
5)
• Free and paid options for saving time on social media
marketing (Part 5)
• How to create a “viral loop” that makes social sharing
automatic and natural (Part 5)
• Timing: the secret sauce of pay-per-click. Miss this and
watch your money disappear (Part 6)
• Why I recommend Facebook ads over Google AdWords
(Part 6)
• How big partnerships REALLY happen in affiliate marketing
(Part 7)
• A word-for-word email script for reaching out to potential
partners (Part 7)
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We also heard from experts in digital marketing:
And we deciphered some common digital marketing acronyms.
Here’s the ones you should know before you spend any money
on marketing:
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What’s next?Now that you know the basics, I recommend two resources to
continue mastering digital marketing and growing your business.
#1: General Assembly’s FREE “Digital Marketing 101” CourseIn this free email course, you’ll get fundamentals of digital
marketing delivered straight to your inbox. Every other day,
you’ll receive a new lesson — from brand strategy to marketing
analytics to campaign management. Just like GrowthLab
produces free material that’s better than other people’s paid
stuff, General Assembly went above and beyond with this free
course.
Click here to sign up, absolutely free.
#2: My “How I Doubled My Revenue” videoI give away tons of free material about these topics. I even have
a full course that takes you step-by-step from “no idea” to a
successful online business. The course is closed now, but if you
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